Title: Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History
Abstract: JLn the mid-nineteenth century, the New York Tribune's Horace Greeley exhorted young American men bereft of family and friends to go west to build their homes and make their fortunes. In 1859, the journalist traveled to the region to observe the fruits of his advice. He did not necessarily find there what he had hoped. On the Great Plains en route to the Rocky Mountains, for example, he learned hundreds of prospectors had recently gone bust at the Colorado gold diggings, deserted the region in droves, and consequently faced unemployment and other sufferings. Yet Greeley reported his encounter with only one such individual, a young clerk with whom he had supped at Station 9 of the Pike's Peak Express and, who having frozen his feet on the winter journey out, had had enough of gold-hunting, and was going home to his parents in Indiana. . The morning following Greeley's repast with the clerk, and only after they had departed in opposite directions, the New Yorker learned something astonishing about his new acquaintance: I was apprised by our conductor, exclaimed Greeley, that said clerk was a woman!1 This otherwise terse anecdote contains complex nineteenth-century ideas about sex and gender and their relationship to the American West as both place and process.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 12
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