Women of the American West
I
n 1854, a card sharp from the east of the United
States, going by the name Dumont – possibly from
New Orleans – arrived in the gold-mining town of
Nevada, California. Having found success as a pro-
fessional gambler in San Francisco, this entrepreneur
of the American West opened a gambling parlour in
this new location that, by all accounts, was highly
profitable. But the settlement dwindled and Dumont
moved on, spending time in Utah, Idaho and Arizona, testing
the waters of brothel management in various spots during the
1860s. In 1872, in Nevada, Dumont was double-crossed by
a partner, losing everything. So this inveterate gambler came
to the table again, latterly in the gold-mining town of Bodie,
California. In 1879, after a disastrous loss, the game was up. On
8 September, Dumont’s body was found outside town, having
apparently taken a morphine overdose.
What makes this tale of frontier life unusual is that the pro-
tagonist was a woman: Eleanor Dumont, later known as ‘Mad-
ame Moustache’ and probably born Simone Jules around 1829.
The adage “Go west, young man”, reputedly popularised by
New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley, conjures a vivid im-
pr e s s ion of t he 19 t h- c e nt u r y A me r ic a n f r ont ie r a s a pl a c e of m a s -
culine action and opportunity. As portrayed in cowboy movies
- think John Wayne, Clint Eastwood – this world of tough-
talking, gun-toting macho swagger has often been seen as the
e xclu sive doma in of men. But, a s rec ent re sea rch (a nd Du mont’s
story) has shown, this was also a place of women’s agency, social
latitudes and the stretching of established gender boundaries. As
such, the history of ‘how the West was won’ (or lost) was much
more variegated than the vision presented in traditional histori-
cal readings and countless Hollywood westerns.
As a place of new starts, economic possibility and social free-
dom, in the 19th-century the American West represented a
realm very different from the east. Travellers on the overland
trails in the middle of that century were faced with unfamiliar
and challenging terrain. Vast expanses of prairie, the soaring
peaks of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, and the forbidding
deserts of the far west separated Independence, Missouri (from
where many wagon trains departed) from the shores of the spar-
kling Pacific. Matching this exceptional topography was an
equally monumental imagined landscape of manifest destiny,
national dreams and personal aspirations in the making.
Expanding empire
Over the first half of the 19th century, the US claimed vast
swathes of territory through the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the
annexation of Texas (1845), the Oregon Treaty (1846), and the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). When Jefferson assumed
the presidency in 1801, the US counted 864,000 square miles
of territory. By 1862, when the Pacific Railway Act was signed,
paving the way for a true transcontinental railway line, and
President Abraham Lincoln was grappling with thorny issues GE
TT
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MA
GE
S
Boom town boulevard
The muddy main street of Helena,
Montana in 1870. In such towns that
sprang up after the discovery of gold,
women were rare commodities, and
services such as boarding, laundry
and prostitution were prized
