Wilson Collection: Same-Sex Desire in the Old West

(Print from the article “Pioneer Mining in California” in The Century Magazine, May 1891)

Under construction.

Same-Sex Desire in the Old West

Sexual and gender nonconformity lay at the heart of the Old West. A mining camp description from 1852 says, “Dancing parties such as these [all-male miners' dances] were very common, especially in small camps.”[1]

A “Mrs. Nash” served ten years as laundress with Custer's Seventh Calvary.[2] When she died in 1878 her male sex was discovered. Her third soldier-husband killed himself over the resulting ridicule he faced from fellow soldiers.

And in California, in 1876, Jeanne Bonnet (a reputed “man hater”) was killed by a hail of bullets through her bedroom window.[3] She was in bed awaiting her bedmate Blanche Beunon who was busy undressing. Guilty fingers pointed to Beunon's jilted male lover.

References 1. Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 214 n. 7. 2. Ibid., 130. 3. Ibid., 35.