Maverick minds, kindred spirits

Women are often overlooked in the writing of history, and they appear only seldom in the great sagas that have been written about the conquest and settlement of the West. Most women on the frontier were confined to the home and farm, and companionship was limited to husbands, children and other women. But at least a few made a mark in their own lifetimes, only to disappear from the historical record.

That’s what prompted historian JoAnn Levy (“They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush”) to retell the tale of Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby, two remarkable women whose lives illustrate the range of experience that was available to women on the American frontier. In “Unsettling the West,” Levy shows how each in her own way is an early and especially vivid example of the powerful allure that California has exerted on men and women who seek to reinvent not only themselves but the world in which they live.

Farnham was already famous when she first arrived in California in 1849 -- she had served as the celebrated matron of the “Female Department” of New York’s Sing Sing prison, where she sought to employ “the power of Goodness and Love to subdue the most depraved and sinful,” as one newspaper put it. She disdained the customary tortures inflicted on the inmates in favor of reading aloud to them from “Oliver Twist” and advocated the use of phrenology as a tool of redemption and rehabilitation.

Widowed at 33, Farnham decided to head west with the same high hopes, utopian ideals and slightly cracked conceits that had energized her life in New York. Among the goals of her “benevolent expedition” to California, for instance, was the encouragement of immigration by marriageable young women, thereby supplying the men of the Gold Rush with the improving presence of women of good character. As the newspaper Alta California put it in 1849: “[B]achelors will unquestionably cherish the liveliest feelings of regard for the lady who so warmly exerted herself to bring a few spare-ribs to this market.”

She ended up in Santa Cruz, where she settled with her two children on 2,000 acres that her husband purchased before falling ill and leaving her to her own resources. As it turned out, those resources were not inconsiderable: “By day, she hammered and sawed, building her house,” explains Levy. “Evenings she fashioned sacks for the harvest, modest as it promised to be.” Still, although she did not lack the attention of suitors, Farnham longed for the companionship of the fellow strivers whom she had left behind in New York.

“What she needed most,” observes Levy, “was the friction of one good mind against another.”

The need was filled by Kirby, a young Englishwoman whose maiden name was Georgiana Bruce and who possessed her own solid credentials as an idealist and a reformer. Like such luminaries as Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, she had sojourned at the utopian Massachusetts colony Brook Farm. It was Fuller who arranged for her to take a job as one of Farnham’s assistants at Sing Sing, and it was Horace Greeley who lent her the money to follow Farnham to California. Fatefully, they reunited at Farnham’s Santa Cruz ranch, dubbed La Libertad, and forged a comradeship that lasted the rest of their lives.

As Levy shows in colorful and often charming detail, Farnham and Kirby shared a passion for abolitionism, women’s suffrage and spiritualism, among other causes and concerns. Living and working together at La Libertad, they rejoiced in the liberty it afforded them. Kirby celebrated the fact that they both were free to wear “turkish pants and tunic” on their long rides through the Santa Cruz countryside: “After six months freedom from petticoats,” she wrote to one of her (presumably corseted) friends back home, “you don’t know what you suffer.”

Exactly what bond ran between these two like-minded women is not made entirely clear in Levy’s account. Kirby ultimately left La Libertad, expressing her frustration that she had “grown old in fretting about Mrs. Farnham’s troubles and perplexities,” and both women married local men. Her marriage to a tanner, Richard Kirby, turned out happily, but Farnham’s second marriage was decidedly less so -- Kirby described her friend’s second husband, Richard Fitzpatrick, as “the greatest blackguard in the country who strikes and otherwise ill treats her,” and Farnham ultimately divorced him.

Indeed, Levy shows us that Farnham was capable of repeated acts of self-liberation and self-definition. To her earlier published writings, Farnham added “California, In-Doors and Out” in 1856, the first book about California to be written by a woman, and she succeeded in capitalizing on her literary reputation by going out on the lecture circuit. One San Francisco newspaper complained that Farnham, by daring to take her place at a lectern, was acting “out of woman’s sphere,” but the editor gamely published a letter from a reader who protested such mulishness.

“How stupid, how irrational, how utterly absurd,” wrote the correspondent, “the idea that sex is the criterion to determine the propriety or impropriety of the exercise of moral and intellectual power, in any legitimate sphere.”

Kirby, too, was a gifted writer. Levy, however, prefers her correspondence and journal-keeping to her published work and quotes these intimate sources to give us a vivid portrait of both women. Thus we learn that Kirby followed the well-publicized travels of her famous friend with special passion: “I hear that Mrs. F will not return to Cal,” she wrote. “I am at once led to ask: ‘What then am I to do? How can I live?’ ” When Farnham did return to California to lecture on spiritualism and motherhood, Kirby recorded that one local clergyman called her a “She Devil” and another leader in their church denounced her as “worse than the keeper of a brothel.”

Kirby, in her own way, was no less an activist and a visionary than Farnham, but Levy’s book gives her a readership she did not enjoy in her own lifetime. Sometimes she seems more acute than her more fanciful friend: “A hundred years hence,” she noted in her final journal entry in 1860, “it will be looked on with astonishment that a woman is prevented by public opinion from having a child unless she finds someone whom she wishes to accept as master for life.”

A few years after Farnham’s death, a fellow spiritualist purported to channel a message from the other side. “Friends,” the spirit declared, “you may not recognize in this form the one who ... revealed to you many of the aspirations of her spirit while it was trammeled with the bonds of the flesh.” Far more credible and convincing are the two flesh-and-blood women Levy has conjured up in these pages. *