Historians throughout time have erased LGBTQ people from the history books, including from stories of the Wild West. But one historian has revealed that this era of settlers, cowboys, outlaws, and Native Americans also contained “hundreds” of people who lived as the opposite gender.
Peter Boag, author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, said he discovered “hundreds of individuals living their lives as the opposite gender” from the early 1800s to the early 1900s.
Boag said that many of these people were individuals who were assigned a female gender at birth, but dressed and lived as men in order to either escape criminal charges they had gotten as women or to have the same social rights as men.
At the time, women were treated like the property of their husbands or birth families. Women were forbidden from working and voting, they were subject to exploitation and sexual violence, and they weren’t allowed to own property or their own businesses.
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So, to avoid this mistreatment and abuse, some dressed and presented themselves as men. However, Boag recently told Q Voice News that not all of these people were transgender. While some personally identified as the gender they were assigned at birth, others identified as the gender they presented to the world.
Some of these individuals’ gender identities were only discovered after their deaths, Atlas Obscura noted. Take Sammy Williams, for instance. He presented as a male lumberjack in his home state of Montana. After dying at age 80, people discovered his trans identity.
“My theory is that people who were transgender in the East could read these stories that gave a kind of validation to their lives,” Boag told the aforementioned website. “They saw the West as a place where they could live and get jobs and carry on a life that they couldn’t have in the more congested East.”
Charley Parkhurst is another famous trans Wild West figure. He became a renowned stagecoach driver in the dangerous Californian frontier during the late 1830s. He was outed as a person assigned female at birth after he died of pneumonia at age 67. His gravestone also said he casted a vote in the 1868 election — an impressive feat considering that women didn’t get the right to vote in the U.S. until 1920.
On the other end of the trans spectrum, a Mexican individual known as Mrs. Nash — who lived in Montana, married three different military men, and was known as one hell of a tamale cook — had their trans identity also revealed after his death.
Harry Allen was another such individual who had a female sex worker companion who he claimed as his wife. Allen was thrown in jail throughout his life for “vagrancy,” a charge often used against gender non-conforming individuals.
“I did not like to be a girl; did not feel like a girl, and never did look like a girl,” Allen told The Seattle Sunday Times in a 1908 interview. “So it seemed impossible to make myself a girl and, sick at heart over the thought that I would be an outcast of the feminine gender, I conceived the idea of making myself a man.”
Jeanne Bonnet was another individual who dressed and lived as a man in San Francisco during the 1870s.
Queer historian Michael Lyons has also noted that the queer Wild West had same-sex domestic arrangements known as “bachelor weddings” where one man worked and the other handled domestic and farming tasks.
Lyons also noted that Native American tribes had revered “two-spirits,” tribal religious leaders and teachers believed to have the spirits of both a man and a woman within them. Two-spirits lived across America at the time, but they weren’t seen as trans women and men. Rather, they fell somewhere along the transgender spectrum.
scotty
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