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The Mercer Girls: When New England Girls Went West to Find Husbands

On Jan. 26, 1864, a young man from the Pacific Northwest gave a talk to unmarried girls in Lowell, Mass., about a land of opportunity. Seattle, said Asa Mercer, desperately needed teachers, and he urged the young women to return with him to the Pacific Northwest. A dozen took him up on his offer and became known as Mercer Girls, remembered less for teaching the untutored than for marrying the unwed.

Mercer’s cargo of wives-to-be succeeded so well he decided to bring back a second, much larger tranche of marriageable women. That venture didn’t work out so well. Still, the two shiploads of New England maidens became a civilizing influence on the rough logging town so recently carved from the wilderness. Mercer himself got a wife out of it.

Asa Mercer

The story of the Mercer Girls eventually made it on to the small screen in 1968 as Here Come the Brides. The TV comedy starred Joan Blondell and launched Bobby Sherman and David Soul to pop stardom. The original story of the Mercer girls had its own share of comic elements.

The Mercer Girls

Asa Mercer’s older brother Thomas had left Illinois in a wagon train with his family, arriving in Puget Sound in 1853. He prospered and gained local prominence as a judge. The community began to thrive and attract other young men to work in the burgeoning fishing and lumber industries.

But the supply of marriageable young women did not keep up. By the late 1850s, Seattle had about 200 mostly male residents — nine males, in fact, for every female. It also had no school of any kind.

Charles Prosch, publisher of the Puget Sound Herald, ran an editorial on Aug. 26, 1859 appealing to women. “Here is the market to bring your charms to, girls,” he wrote. “Don’t be backward, but come right along — all who want good husbands and comfortable homes in the most beautiful country and the finest climate in the world.”

A lumber camp around 1910, Bellingham, Wash.

In 1861, Judge Mercer’s brother Asa arrived, a newly minted graduate of Franklin College in Indiana. He was also the only college graduate in the vicinity. So he was named president of the Territorial University—once he’d cleared the stumps from the land set aside for the school.

Asa quickly joined the campaign to attract the fairer sex, which aligned with his own interests as a bachelor. Washington’s territorial governor, William Pickering, then appointed young Mercer “commissioner of immigration.” And so the young man headed east.

Washington Territory Gov. William Pickering

Mercer Girls

Asa Mercer knew that New England educated its young people. In January 1864, he stopped in Lowell, Mass., where he’d heard of a large surplus of marriageable, unemployed females. Lowell had 40,000 people dependent on the cotton mills, but the Civil War had starved them of cotton. The war had also taken many eligible young men – at least the ones who hadn’t gone west in search of gold, timber or fish.

In Lowell, Mercer spoke at the Unitarian Church. Flora A. P. Engle, who later became a Mercer Girl, remembered his pitch. He painted visions of a land of plenty on the shores of an American Mediterranean. Puget Sound offered magnificent scenery and delightful charm, he said. It had a salubrious climate and an atmosphere so charged with pure ozone that disease was rare and death was kept away.’ (Two Mercer Girls died within five years of their arrival.)

Flora’s two older sisters, Josie and Georgia, decided to go. So did their father, Daniel Pearson, who suffered ill health and believed Mercer about the salubrious climate. Flora would join them later.

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast by Albert Bierstadt, 1870. Courtesy Seattle Art Museum.

Along with the Pearson girls and their father, six other Lowell women boarded a train for New York. There, three young women from Pepperell, Mass., joined them, along with a fourth from Boston.

The women had to pay for the trip themselves, somewhere around $200. But Mercer had described lucrative job opportunities for anyone who could teach school. He didn’t mention the marital possibilities. He didn’t need to.

They sailed from New York Harbor in March of 1864, crossed the Isthmus of Panama and then took a bark to Port Gamble. From there they boarded the sloop Kidder, arriving in Seattle on May 16, 1864 at 11 pm. The few households that had women welcomed the newcomers. Within weeks they had teaching jobs. Within months all but one, Lizzie Ordway, had husbands.

The Second Trip

Asa Mercer viewed the experiment as such a success that he tried again, only instead of a dozen women he pledged to bring 700.

The Civil War was winding down, and he figured he could get help from the federal government. He knew political leaders wanted to settle the West, and they had concerns about the economically depressed East. He also thought the government had idle ships and seamen on its hands.

A Civil War-era transport steamship on the Tennessee River

So Asa Mercer left for Washington, D.C., with his big plans. His first stop would be the White House, where he expected to see Abraham Lincoln, an old family friend. But when Mercer arrived in Washington on April 15, 1865, he got his first hint that his plans might go awry. The city was draped in crepe. Lincoln had just died.

So he went to Massachusetts to gain support from Gov. John Andrew, who introduced him to the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. Hale, alarmed by the surplus of women driving down the wages of men, advocated on his behalf.

Natural Distrust

Back to Washington he went, where Gen. Ulysses S. Grant liked what he heard and ordered a steamship, coaled and manned, to take 500 people from New York to Seattle. Mercer then traveled to New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, rounding up hundreds of war widows and educated single ladies.

The press caught on, and began to raise questions—and eyebrows. Then the federal government withdrew its support, and women began to back out.

“A natural distrust of the man’s intentions seemed to prevail,” wrote Roger Conant, a New York Times reporter.

Mercer fell into debt, but finally found a wealthy patron, Ben Holladay, to help out. Holladay bought an old military transport ship, the S.S. Continental, and agreed to pay for 75 women to travel to the Pacific Northwest.

But instead of 700 Mercer Girls, there were 13 couples, with and without children; 10 widows; 17 children; 36 single women; 14 single men; and one woman coming to join her husband.

“No more curious or suggestive exodus ever took place,” opined Harper’s Weekly.

Parboiled Beans

Flora Engle belonged to the group of 36 Mercer Girls, and she wrote an account of the voyage around Cape Horn aboard the Continental. The vessel had only been partially fumigated and the food was abysmal, she recalled. They were served fried salt beef and tea steeped in saltwater. For 17 straight days they ate parboiled beans.

Harper’s Weekly illustrations of the second Mercer Girls voyage.

“To add to our provocation, a mast, only, separated the common dining table from the captain’s, which was loaded with all sorts of delicacies for the delectability of the officers,” wrote Flora. “Mr. Mercer at first took his seat at the captain’s table, but afterwards, considering the righteous indignation of the passengers, concluded ‘discretion was the better part of valor’ and took his place with them at table.”

Flora did find a husband in Washington, marrying William Ballinger Engle in 1876.

Conant, a 32-year-old unmarried Times reporter, was assigned to cover the voyage. He thought highly of the Mercer Girls. They came, he wrote, from New England’s middle class, “respectable, well-meaning people.” Their conduct “would have called forth strong expressions of praise from their stern old Puritan ancestors.”

Asa Mercer, not so much.

Asa Mercer

Conant reported that the passengers found Mercer bossy. He tried to keep the Mercer Girls from playing cards and flirting with the ship’s officers. “He even tried to make them go to bed at ten o’clock,” wrote Conant.

In his book, Mercer’s Belles: The Journal of a Reporter, Conant reported that Mercer grew enamored of “a young maiden of good report and fair to look upon. “Without giving her “the slightest intimation of what he was about to do, not even so much as a tender look, or an evening’s courtship,” Asa invited her to his stateroom. Then he told her he loved her enough to marry her, and “opened his arms and smiled fondly upon her. The maiden laughed right in his face.”

Mercer tried again, with Anna Stephens of Baltimore. This time, the Mercer magic worked, and they married.

San Francisco

When the Continental arrived in San Francisco, police officers had to keep the men away from the Mercer Girls. One young man had agreed to pay Mercer $300 for a specific girl from back home, according to Dorothy Johnson in Some Went West.

San Francisco Harbor around 1850

“She hadn’t come, but another girl by the same name had, from another state,” wrote Johnson. “The young man introduced himself to her: ‘I’m the feller that sent three hundred dollars by Mercer to bring you out for my wife. I suppose you’re as willing to get married this afternoon as any other time, and I have to be home by sundown to milk the cows and feed the pigs’.”

She called him impertinent, said she paid her own fare and hadn’t come to get married but to work as a tailor.

Another man, a farmer, came to town to look over the newly arrived Mercer Girls. He chose a widow with three sons, proposed and married her three hours later.

Twenty of the Mercer Girls stayed in San Francisco.

Lizzie Ordway

Lizzie Ordway, 35 when she left Lowell, was the oldest Mercer Girl. She was a schoolteacher, not a mill girl, and she didn’t intend to marry. Lizzie came from a well-to-do family and had been educated at the Ipswich Academy. She spoke five languages and believed women should have the right to vote.

Lizzie Ordway

She went to the Pacific Northwest to “carry the educational standards of New England to the new community beyond the Rockies.” In that, she succeeded. With a reputation as the best teacher around, she turned around troubled schools throughout the Seattle area. She started Seattle’s first public school and won election as superintendent of the Kitsap County schools. Lizzie also founded Seattle’s Female Suffrage Society with Susan B. Anthony, who visited Seattle and shared a platform with Lizzie.

In 1891, she helped prepare the state’s educational exhibit at the Chicago World Exposition—a surprise to Eastern educators. When Lizzie died in 1897, the number of Kitsap County schools had grown from three to 20.

Mercer Girls’ Legacy

Like Lizzie, the Mercer Girls spread their civilizing influence throughout the Pacific Northwest. Unlike Lizzie, they contributed to the population growth by marrying and having families.

Fifteen years after the first Mercer Girls arrived, Seattle had evolved from a western logging town to a civilized metropolitan center, according to Paul Hagen in his paper, How the Civil War Civilized Seattle. The Mercer Girls, he wrote, “brought New England culture to Seattle, which served as a civilizing force.

As for Asa Mercer, he and Annie had three sons, two daughters and many grandchildren. They moved to Wyoming, where Asa published a newspaper called Northwestern Livestock Journal. He eventually wrote a book exposing the dirty tactics of the cattle cartels called Banditti of the Plains. The cattle barons suppressed the book, had his printing press destroyed and Mercer arrested and jailed. He died in 1917.

Images: Asa Shinn Mercer By unknown – Found at http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/portraits/id/102/rec/3, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=848418

With thanks to Some Went West by Dorothy M. Johnson. And How the Civil War Civilized Seattle, by Paul Hagen. The Story of the Mercer Expeditions by Flora A. P. Engle from The Washington Historical Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 4, 1915, pp. 225–237. JSTOR

This story last updated in 2022.

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When New Englanders Feared a French-Canadian Immigrant Conquest

When French-Canadians came to work in New England’s textile mills in the later 19^th century they sparked conspiracy theories of an immigrant conquest. Even the New York Times claimed that there were secret attempts to turn New England into New France.

Lowell Mill Girls

In its earliest years, women were the main component of New England’s textile workforce. In the 1840s, an increasing number of European immigrants came to operate the textile machinery. Then came the Civil War, a disaster for cotton textiles, New England’s largest 19^th century industry. New England’s mills were devastated by the Union blockade of Confederate ports during the war that hindered southern cotton from reaching northern shores.

Some New England mills closed their doors, while others slashed their hours. A contemporary observer described the result in the flagship mill town of Lowell, Mass.: nine corporations shut down and 10,000 workers thrown “penniless, into the streets.”

After the war, New England’s textile manufacturers found that their workforce had scattered and was not returning to the mills. To save the industry – and New England’s economy – the textile corporations scoured the rural areas of the region. They also searched Europe and Canada for laborers. Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec responded to this call en masse.

Newcomers

In the years between 1865 and 1900, hundreds of thousands of French-Canadians crossed the border in search of work in New England’s factories. By the beginning of the 20^th century, French-Canadian men, women and children comprised 44 percent of the region’s cotton textile workforce.

Young millworkers from Manchester’s Little Canada, 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

During this period French-Canadians established Little Canadas in industrial towns from Lake Champlain to the Blackstone River Valley, and from the coasts of Maine to the Connecticut River. In towns such as Woonsocket, R.I., and Biddeford, Maine, the French-Canadians eventually became the majority, electing their own as mayors.

St. Ann’s Church complex, Woonsocket. It was built with nickels and dimes from French-Canadian millworkers.

Throughout the region, the newcomers from the North preserved their French language, their Catholic religion and the traditions of their rural Canadian parishes. They established their own schools, and a host of mutual benefit and social organizations. They intended to preserve their French-Canadian identity within the U.S.

A Conspiracy Theory About an Immigrant Conquest

The French-Canadian desire to maintain their language and customs raised alarm bells in New England and throughout the U.S. So did their heavy concentration in densely populated neighborhoods and their ever-increasing numbers. The mainstream press reported on an alleged invasion of New England by immigrants from across the border. Major media outlets including the New York Times, Harper’s and The Nation weighed-in on the political, economic and social implications of this cross-border influx.

In the period between 1880 and 1900, elements in the press spun a conspiracy theory around the French-Canadian newcomers. Some commentators theorized that the Catholic Church had dispatched the French-Canadian workers into New England in a bid to take over the region on behalf of the church. The French-Canadian workers, claimed these conspiracists, would first seize political control of the region. Then, went the theory, Quebec would declare its independence and annex New England to create a revived New France.

Increasing Alarmism

The New York Times repeated these claims on several occasions throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In 1885, the paper stated that there were plans afoot “to form a new France occupying the whole northeast corner of the continent.” Returning to the story in 1889, the Times stated that this supposed revival of New France would include, “Quebec, Ontario, as far west as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New-England States, and a slice of New-York.”

Notre Dame of Montreal Basilica

The newspaper’s rhetoric became increasingly alarmist over time. By 1892, the Times opined that French-Canadian immigration was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith…This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

This editorial seems to have imputed subversive intent to the French-Canadians’ mutual aid societies. In fact, these groups offered insurance and other benefits unavailable to French-Canadian Catholics elsewhere. Such groups were not oriented around the conquest of New England. It was simply false to assert that “every adult French Canadian” belonged to them.

Protestant Efforts To Convert French-Canadians

Some Protestant clergy climbed on the immigrant conquest conspiracy bandwagon. They responded with initiatives to convert the French-Canadians. The Congregationalists of Massachusetts supported Rev. Calvin Elijah Amaron, a missionary who established the French Protestant College at Lowell. A few years later, he moved it to Springfield, Mass. A major aim of this college, today known as the American International College, was to train French-speaking Protestant missionaries to go forth and convert the French-Canadians of New England and Quebec.

American International College in Springfield, Mass.

In 1891, Amaron published a book called Your Heritage; or, New England Threatened. It was a long-form treatment of the theory that a French-Canadian Catholic cabal planned to undermine New England. In Amaron’s mind, Roman Catholics could not be reliable U.S. citizens since they owed their first allegiance to Rome. The “Romish clergy,” Amaron wrote, forced its adherents into a “moral and intellectual bondage” that is “worse than southern slavery.”

The Gospel Wagon

The Baptists also made efforts to convert the French-Canadians of New England. Statistics cited in the 1906 book Aliens or Americans? by Howard Grose showed that the Baptists expended more resources on missionary activities to convert the French-Canadians than on any other predominantly Catholic group in the United States.

The Baptists’ Henry Lyman Morehouse, in an 1893 article titled The French Canadian in Quebec and New England, compared the effort to convert the French-Canadians to the abolitionist movement. “Slavery in the United States has gone,” Morehouse wrote. “The next great act of emancipation is that which shall free from mental and religious servitude the people of Quebec…”

Henry Lyman Morehouse

The Baptists also fielded a contraption called the Gospel Wagon. A large horse-drawn vehicle, it had a pulpit, organ and lanterns for preaching by night. Missionaries deployed the wagon in Massachusetts and New Hampshire mill towns, preaching Protestantism to the French-Canadian enclaves from their customized vehicle.

Immigrant Conquest Conspiracy Countered

Other voices countered the rhetoric about an immigrant conquest conspiracy. William MacDonald, a professor at Bowdoin College, disputed the notion that the Canadiens were a threat to the region. In an 1896 article in The Nation, MacDonald soberly recounted the facts showing that a French-Canadian demographic takeover of New England was unlikely. MacDonald also summarized the region’s attitude toward the French-Canadians in their midst:

Useful and indispensable as they have become, they are nowhere received with cordiality, or commonly referred to save as an inferior class; even their religion is denounced as un-American, and the influence of the Church little regarded or else misconstrued….As a class, they are treated considerately in public because of their votes, disparaged in private because of general dislike and sought by all for the work they do and the money they spend.

The conspiracy theorists offered little evidence to buttress their claims beyond a handful of utterances from the ultra-Catholic wing of the French-Canadian elites in Quebec. A few firebrands in Quebec had made expansionist noises. But, then as now, the political future of Quebec was hotly debated. There were many views on the subject. There was no semblance of unanimity in Quebec around the notion of a revived New France that would include New England.

Most of the workers coming from French Canada to New England were poor farmers, their non-inheriting adult children, day-laborers and wage earners in small Canadian factories. Their motives for crossing the border were chiefly economic rather than political or religious. Jobs and steady wages were the magnets attracting them southward.

French-Canadians Assert Their Patriotism

While conspiracy theorists were proclaiming that the newcomers were incapable of U.S. citizenship, New England’s small French-Canadian elite were voicing their American patriotism at a series of national conventions held throughout the U.S.

French-Canadian family arriving from Montreal.

At these French-Canadian conventions, speakers pointed to their people’s service in the U.S. military dating to the American Revolution. They also highlighted their historical role in settling the U.S. Midwest. They or their French cousins had founded or helped to found Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, as well as Natchez, Mobile, New Orleans and numerous other cities.

Convention delegates also encouraged their people to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Contrary to the theory that Quebec planned to annex New England, many French-Canadians in the States favored U.S. annexation of Canada.

The End of a Conspiracy

The fear of a French-Canadian conspiracy subsided in the early 20^th century as newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe began to enter the U.S. in increasing numbers. New England manufacturing slowly lost its lead in the textile industry to the U.S. South beginning in the 1920s.

As the mills faded away, the Little Canadas gradually dispersed, a process that continued throughout the 20^th century. And along with these enclaves went the memory of a period when some Americans considered poor French-Canadian mill workers a threat to New England’s way of life.

David Vermette is the author of this story about fears of an immigrant conquest, updated in 2022. He is a writer, researcher and editor born and raised in Massachusetts. He wrote the book A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018).

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Girl Power in 1824: The First Factory Strike in America

America’s first factory strike happened just 30 years after America’s first successful textile mill started churning out cotton cloth in Pawtucket, R.I.

It was May 1824, and the mill owners in the burgeoning industrial city had made an announcement.

Sam Slater’s mill. first in the U.S. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

They planned to increase the workday by one hour and cut wages by 25 percent for power loom weavers – that is, for women between the ages of 15 and 30. They were, after all, earning “extravagant” wages – according to the mill owners.

On May 26, 1824, 102 young women along with sympathetic community members blocked the entrance to Sam Slater’s textile mill, shutting them down. The strike spread to other mills.

The Pawtucket Journal reported:

On Wednesday evening a tumultuous crowd filled the streets, led by the most unprincipled and disorderly part of the village, and made an excessive noise — they visited successively the houses of the manufacturers, shouting, exclaiming and using every imaginable term of abuse and insult. The window in the yellow mill was broken in. … The next day the manufacturers shut their gates and the mills have not run since.

The Textile Industry Takes Hold

Sam Slater gets credit for starting the Industrial Revolution in America because he built his water-powered textile mill in 1793. Similar textile mills then sprang up along the Blackstone River and beyond. Industrialization got further boosts from the Embargo of 1809 and the Tariff of 1816, which protected U.S. textiles from British imports. By the Civil War, textiles were America’s most important industry.

Sam Slater

Along with the modern factory, Slater also introduced child factory labor to America. He would seek out children aged 7-13 from poor white families. Then he’d hire them for 40 cents to 60 cents a week. They worked 12- hour days in winter, 16 in summer. Many children hated working in the gloomy and dangerous mills, and some ran away. Their parents sometimes took them away from work because they wanted them to earn higher wages.

Slater also hired entire families, putting them in company housing and forcing them to shop at the company store.

He and other mill owners found workers harder and harder to control. Some sabotaged the factories, stealing property and setting fires. Some showed up late. And some didn’t show up at all.

In 1814, the Pawtucket mill owners petitioned the state Legislature to organize a police force as ‘it has often been found difficult to preserve order and due subordination.’

Slater had another method. He introduced Sunday school for children, who, after working six 16-hour days could get indoctrinated in the Christian virtue of hard work and submissiveness.

1824 Factory Strike

After about 1810, Slater could no longer rely on child labor because he started using the power loom. The machinery was too much for young children, so to run them he hired the second-cheapest workers: young women.

Mill girls

But the ladies proved less submissive than the mill owners hoped. When the Pawtucket factory owners announced the pay cut and the longer work day, the women decided to have none of it.

At the Slater mill, 102 young women started the strike – then called a turnout.

The strike spread to seven other mills, and 500 workers walked off the job. And they didn’t just shut down the mills. They went to the owners’ houses, shouted insults at them and broke their windows. A local judge wrote that the streets were, ‘literally filled with Men Women and Children — making a mob of very daring aspect, insulting the managers of cotton mills in every shape — pulling and hauling — screaming and shouting thro the streets.’

On the last day of the strike, one of the mills burned down in a fire probably set by a striker. The owners agreed to a compromise, the details of which are lost to history. On June 3, the strikers returned to work.

Aftermath of the Factory Strike

We know little of the factory strike from the women’s point of view. But the Pawtucket strike set off a wave of labor organizing in Pawtucket and across the region. In Lowell, Mass., for example, the mill girls went on strike in the 1830s. They also went on factory strikes in Providence, Waltham and Woonsocket, in Lynn, Mass., and in Brunswick, Maine, to name a few.

Child labor would persist, however, as documented by photographer Lewis Hine. In 1938, Congress outlawed child labor, but women still struggle for equal pay.

Image of the Slater Mill (rear view) By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72955211. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Amazing Indian Women From New England

Indian women faced double discrimination since the first European colonists arrived in the Americas. Many fought back against the prejudice that destroyed their traditional way of life.

Some Indian women like Lucy Nicolar exploited stereotypes to put across a message of equality for all. Other Indian women like Gladys Tantaquidgeon used modern education to preserve traditional customs and arts.

Here, then, are six amazing Indian women from New England. If you know of others, please mention them in the comments section.

Lucy Nicolar

Lucy Nicolar, a talented musician, took the stage name Princess Watahwosa, and spent her life mixing entertainment with political activism.

Publicity photo of Lucy Nicolar as Princess Watahwaso

She was born June 22, 1882, on the Penobscot reservation, which stretched along the Penobscot River in Maine from Indian Island to East Millinocket. As a child she traveled with her family to Kennebunkport. There they sold baskets and performed in Indian dress for tourists.

Lucy came to the attention of a Harvard administrator who hired her as his assistant, took her into his household and gave her musical and educational opportunities. Eventually she became a recording artist with Victor Records, performing adaptations of Indian songs such as By the Waters of Minnetonka and By the Weeping Waters.

Lucy Nicolar eventually returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation with her husband Bruce Poolaw, a Kiowa entertainer from Oklahoma. They opened a gift shop while Lucy and her sister campaigned to improve life on the reservation. The two Indian women raised the educational standards for Penobscot children by gaining access to the public schools. They also persuaded the state to build a bridge to the island.

Lucy and Florence also demanded the right to vote for their people. When the state extended suffrage to the Penobscots in 1955, Lucy Nicolar cast the first ballot.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain promoted the then-radical idea that Indians – and Indian women — are people.

The Lowell Offering

A half-Algonquian mill girl, she published some of the first criticisms of the treatment of Native Americans in short stories from 1841 to 1848.

Born sometime around 1797, perhaps in Wolfeboro or Brookfield, N.H., she was part European. She married Josiah Chamberlain, a farmer, in 1820 and they had three children. Her husband died in 1823. Betsey sold their farm and went to work in the Lowell textile mills to support herself and her children.

The mill girls wrote for magazines published in town called the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering. Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote for both.

Harriet Hanson Robinson, a Lowell Offering contributor, wrote that Betsey Guppy Chamberlain probably came to the mills from a Shaker community.

She had inherited Indian blood, and was proud of it. She had long, straight black hair, and walked very erect, with great freedom of movement. One of her sons was afterwards connected with the New York Tribune.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote 37 stories and poems for the magazines. In them, she embraced themes of Indian gods and spirituality while satirizing Christian hypocrisy. Robinson called her the most original, prolific and noted of all the Offering writers.

In a story called A New Society she wrote of her dream where new rules of living are adopted. Among those rules:

Resolved, That every father of a family who neglects to give his daughters the same advantages for an education which he gives his sons, shall be expelled from this society, and be considered a heathen.

Weetamoo

Weetamoo, a Pocasset Wampanoag Indian, was married to Wamsutta, the eldest son of Massasoit. Massasoit had negotiated a treaty of friendship with the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation, and the English and Indians coexisted peacefully for 55 years.

Wamsutta succeeded his father as the tribe’s sachem. When war broke out between the English and the Narragansetts, Wamsutta and the Wampanoags joined the English against their rival tribe. After Wamsutta died, the Plymouth Colony grabbed more and more Indian land, subjected the Wampanoags to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three of their men.

Weetamoo became sachem after Wamsutta died because the Wampanoags allowed women to become sachems in the absence of an adequate male heir.

Weetamo allied with her brother-in-law, Metacomet, also known as King Philip, to drive out the European settlers. They attacked the English in June 1675.

After months of bloody fighting in King Philip’s War, the English defeated the Wampanoags in August 1676. While trying to escape from them, Weetamoo drowned in the Taunton River. The English fighters mutilated her corpse, cut off her head and displayed it on a pole.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian acclaimed for her dancing in Paris.

Mary Alice Nelson

She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for recognition as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly was born on the Indian Island Reservation on Nov. 17, 1903, about 20 years later than Lucy Nicolar, with whom she performed early in her career.

As Molly Spotted Elk, she started out on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

In 1930, she starred in the film documentary The Silent Enemy. The next year Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned home, she stayed behind.

Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he wrote passionate love letters to her. She agreed to marry him, and they had a daughter. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

The Nazi invasion of Paris separated Molly and Jean. She fled with her daughter on foot over the Pyrenees and found her way home to Indian Island. For the rest of her life, she drifted between New York and the reservation, taking menial jobs. She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73, in poor physical and mental health. But she left a legacy: a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language.

Buffy St. Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a rising pop star in the 1960s until her activism on behalf of her Native-American people put a lid on her career.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970

She was born Feb. 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree Nation Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan. Her parents abandoned her as an infant. Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a Wakefield, Mass., couple of Mi’kmaq descent, adopted the baby known only as Beverly.

Nicknamed Buffy, she played piano and guitar by the time she went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

There she began to write songs about Native-American rights, addiction, incest and war. When the singer Donovan recorded one of her songs, Universal Soldier, it rose to the top of the charts. That launched her on a successful recording career – which began to sputter in the mid-1960s.

Starting in the 1990s, Buffy Sainte-Marie came out and said the industry blacklisted her in the 1960s because of her activism. She sent money to buy water for the Indians who seized Alcatraz Island the year before. She’d also set up a foundation to send young Indians to law school.

Her career took a twist in 1975, when Sesame Street called to ask her to make a one-time appearance on the show. Buffy Sainte-Marie then appeared on Sesame Street for the next five years.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon revived dying Indian traditions, published books on traditional herbal medicine and helped the Mohegan tribe gain Federal recognition.

She was born on June 15, 1899 to Mohegan parents, a descendant of the Mohegan chief Uncas. She grew up on Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, Conn.

Indian women elders selected her when she was five years old for training in traditional pharmacology and culture. While studying anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladys researched traditional Indian herbal medicine. Over her lifetime, she published several books about traditional medicine.

In 1931, Gladys, along with her father and brother, started the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum. It displays eastern Indian artifacts and is still run by the Mohegan tribe.

During the Great Depression, she worked as a native arts specialist with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. She helped western tribal artisans preserve traditional skills and arts by finding ways to sell their work. She also saved customs like the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance, banned in the 19th century.

Gladys saved tribal records and correspondence, documents that helped the tribe’s case for federal recognition.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon died in 2005. Her great niece, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, continues her work as an author and the current Mohegan Medicine Woman.

End Notes

Images: Gladys Tantaquidgeon By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37390510. Thanks to Bunny McBride for research on Lucy Nicolar and Molly Spotted Elk in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (Viewpoints on American Culture) edited by Theda Perdue and Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris . Thanks to Annalyssa Gypsy Murphy for her research on Betsey Guppy Chamberlain in Dissent Along the Borders of the Fourth World: Native American Writings as Social Protest and Judith A. Ranta in The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. And thanks to Jason Schneider for his research on Buffy St. Marie in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music… from Hank Snow to the Band. For more about Weetamoo, read Longing To Be Free: The Bear, The Eagle and The Crown by Judith Guskin. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Dover Mill Girls Walk Out in America’s 1st Women’s Strike

When Dover mill girls went on strike against the Cocheco Manufacturing Co., they said their bosses secretly ‘abused and insulted’ them by calling them ‘slaves.’

19th-century mill girls

It was 1828, and women had never organized and walked off the job before in New Hampshire. It was the first all-women strike in the United States. Four years earlier, women had led a widespread textile workers’ strike in Pawtucket, R.I.

The Dover mill girls viewed their cause in the spirit of the American Revolution. They marched to martial music outside the mill and fired artillery.

But they faced a tougher opponent than the British military: Boston bosses with a financial investment to protect.

Cocheco Manufacturing Co.

Manufacturing textiles by machine was relatively new when the Dover mill girls stopped work. Sam Slater’s water-powered cotton spinning mill, the country’s first, had only started running 35 years earlier in Pawtucket, R.I. The Waltham, Mass., mills began weaving and printing cotton cloth in 1813. And the giant Lowell mill complex was a mere six years old, having been opened by a group of Boston money men called the Boston Associates.

The Cocheco Millyard today

In New Hampshire, the Cocheco Manufacturing Company started out in 1812 as the Dover Cotton Company. It used waterpower from the Cochecho River to make cloth. The company thrived and expanded, shipping cotton cloth down the river to international ports. It attracted so many workers Dover’s population nearly doubled over a decade to more than 5,000 in 1830.

The company’s owners bought more land, built more mills and replaced the wooden blocks to print cloth with rolling cylinders.

But they needed financial help to expand. They got it from the Boston Associates.

The new printworks turned out to drain the Boston Associates finances. So they spun it off to the Boston investors as the Cocheco Manufacturing Company in 1827.

The new owners decided its employees made too much money.

Dover Mill Girls

In 1822, the textile mill had run a Help Wanted ad for smart, capable girls ‘between 12 and 25 years old,’ promising ‘constant employment and good encouragement.’

A 12-year-old mill girl. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

The Dover mill girls, mostly from farms in New Hampshire and southern Maine, earned 47 cents a day plus room and board. Two cents were taken from their paychecks for medical insurance. They needed it. The girls worked with only one break from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. They breathed noxious fumes and worked with noisy, dangerous machinery that mangled fingers and limbs.

Managers forbade the girls from talking to each other during the 11-hour day. They were paid in scrip and required to shop in the company store, which raised prices higher than other shops. Most lived in boardinghouses supervised by a widow, who enforced strict rules of behavior.

At the end of 1828, the Boston owners of the Cocheco Manufacturing Company lowered the wages of the 800 Dover mill girls by five cents a day and speeded up their work. Male millworkers and managers received no such pay cut.

Indignant, 600 of the Dover mill girls met that weekend to formulate a three-part resolution:

They would never agree to work for the lower wage. They believed the new owners had artfully manipulated the situation at the mill to promote their own wicked ends. Finally, they were far from home and they weren’t paid enough.

In a rhetorical flourish, the Dover mill girls concluded the owners’ aim was to turn them into slaves.

The Dover Mill Girl Strike

On the day after Christmas in 1828, about 600 of the Dover mill girls marched out of the factory yard, declaring war on the mill owners. They formed a half-mile procession and marched around the mill waving signs and banners, playing martial music and setting off artillery. They then marched through town.

The local newspaper, as is so often the case, sided with management. The Dover mill girls had walked out ‘over some imaginary grievance,’ the Dover Enquirer reported, and presented “one of the most disgusting scenes ever witnessed.”

The Dover mill girls underestimated management. The next day, the company ran a Help Wanted ad for several hundred scabs to break the strike.

By Tuesday, most of the Dover mill girls went back to work, except for the strike leaders who the company had blacklisted.

Though the strike failed, women like Harriet Hanson Robinson and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn would lead many more: in Lowell and Lawrence, in Bridgeport, New Haven and throughout New England.

Many would fail. But some would succeed in raising pay and improving working conditions.

Cocheco Mill: By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33639649. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Woman Suffrage Cook Book Prints Recipes for Subversion

Putting together the first woman suffrage cook book in 1886 must have been a lot like herding cats for Hattie A. Burr of 12 Wayne St., Boston.

The Woman Suffrage Cook Book cover.

The cookbook raised money for the Woman Suffrage Association. It included recipes from famous suffragists, Boston Brahmins, a governor’s wife and prominent women doctors, ministers and journalists.

Abby Kelley missed the deadline

Firebrand suffragist Abby Kelley Foster missed the deadline. Two famous suffragists contributed screeds against some of the recipes. The most eminent suffragist of all, Julia Ward Howe, sent in a lame paragraph about working women instead of a recipe. Louisa May Alcott, a member, didn’t send in anything, and not because she didn’t have any recipes.

But Hattie A. Burr managed to keep it all together, and the Woman Suffrage Cook Book inspired at least a half-dozen other such subversive publications. Women, after all, didn’t get the vote until 1920.

Woman Suffrage Cook Book

The Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association Festival and Bazaar kicked off on a rainy night in December 1886 at the Boston music hall. The ladies decorated the venue with a white banner with that carried the motto: “Male and female created He them, and gave them dominion.”

The Boston Music Hall in 1852, where the suffragists sold their cookbook.

Journalist Mary Livermore served as festival president and edited its official publication, The Bazar Journal. She also contributed a complicated recipe for making yeast. Hattie Burr must have despaired as another suffrage rock star, Lucy Stone, also submitted a complicated recipe for making yeast. Burr included both.

She dealt with Foster’s tardy entry for Roast Beef Dinner by sticking it at the end, in a chapter called, ‘Supplementary. [Too Late for Classification.]’

Elizabeth Cady Stanton sent in a recipe in verse form, but it sounded awful: layers of bread, milk, hard-boiled egg and fish.

Moisten two pieces of the bread,
And lay them in a dish,
Upon them slice a hard-boiled egg,
Then scatter o’er with fish.

Old and New

The Woman Suffrage Cook Book tried to show that women’s traditional roles did not conflict with the vote. It communicated with women about food and housekeeping, but also about women’s suffrage. The recipes themselves mixed traditional Yankee tastes and modern, cosmopolitan cuisine.

The cookbook had recipes for quintessential Boston baked goods such as Parker House rolls and Brown Bread. There was Mother’s Election Cake, Old-Time Baked Indian Pudding, Last Century Blackberry Pudding and a method “To Fry Spring Chicken and Make Gravy as Mother Did It.” Harriet Hanson Robinson, a Lowell mill girl turned writer, contributed recipes for Boston Fish Chowder and Mothers Buns.

Cold Mutton

Harriet Hanson Robinson

But the recipes reflected the cooking fads, tools and ingredients of the era. The cookbook included instructions for ‘gems,’ muffins made with whole wheat flour and baked in cast-iron gem pans. It recommended saleratus, a form of baking powder, as well as the Dover egg beater, sago, Akron flour, Lucra oil, tapioca and the brand-new Fleischmann’s yeast.

Mrs. Ellen W.E. Parton anticipated today’s convenience food with “Newburyport Housekeepers’ Way to Glorify Cold Mutton.” She recommended layering cold mutton with canned tomato, cracker crumbs and butter.

Newfangled meatballs and meatloaf were called, variously, Frigadelle and Fricandelles.

Alice A. Geddes offered a mutton curry recipe served over rice. Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland offered “Macaroni a l’Italien,” a bizarre 19th century version of spaghetti and meatballs that included ‘Lucra oil,’ ‘grated cheese’ and ‘dice-shaped bits of beef.’ She boiled the ‘Italian macaroni’ in salted milk and water and thickened canned tomatoes with corn starch.

Cooking methods in 1886 were a long way from today’s. To make turtle soup, for example, “Decidedly the terrapin has to be killed before cooking, and the killing is often no easy matter,” wrote Anna Ella Carroll, a prominent political activist from Maryland. “The head must be cut off, and, as the sight is peculiarly acute, the cook must exercise great ingenuity in concealing the deadly weapon.”

Eminent Positions

The fight for women’s rights grew out of the abolitionist movement, which had also held fairs and bazaars. Many suffragists had been abolitionists like Mrs. William Bowditch, who with her husband maintained their Brookline home as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

As cookbook editor, Hattie A. Burr tried to muffle the radical call for change with a cloak of respectability and tradition.

Julia Ward Howe

The roster of cookbook contributors included women prominent in the New England establishment. Mrs. Oliver Ames, wife of the future Massachusetts governor, contributed a recipe. Brahmin names peppered the book: Forbes, Sargent, Perkins — as well as the eminent Julia Ward Howe.

There was a section on cooking and caring for invalids, including a recipe for raw beef sandwich and a warning against opium. The Woman Suffrage Cook Book also included a recommendation to chew on the skin of salt codfish. And there were household hints on how to maintain a pretty bedroom.

Despite the nods to women’s traditional roles, it was hard to miss that some of the suffragist cooks were shattering glass ceilings in traditionally male professions.

Eminent Contributors

Mary C. Ames, the highest paid woman journalist of her time, had a recipe for Lobster Soup. Alice B. Stockholm, the fifth woman medical doctor in the United States, submitted a recipe for ‘pie-plant,’ or rhubarb, that removes the medicinal flavor.

And Annie Jenness Miller, a leader in the movement to reform clothing, also contributed recipes.

Toward the end of the Woman Suffrage Cook Book, notes of stridency began to dominate.

No desserts for Frances Willard

Mary J. Safford, who became a medical doctor after nursing wounded Union troops in the Civil War, was allowed a tirade against the abomination of black pepper. Frances Willard, a suffrage and temperance leader, submitted a screed against pastries, cakes, hot bread, rich gravies, pickles, pepper sauces, salads, tea and coffee.

The final section was called “Eminent Opinions on Woman Suffrage, and it included a bundle of quotations about equality from Plato to Abraham Lincoln.

Hattie A. Burr, though, had the last word on the Woman Suffrage Cook Book published on Nov. 25, 1886:

I believe the great value of these contributions will be fully appreciated, and our messenger will go forth a blessing to housekeepers, and an advocate for the elevation and enfranchisement of woman.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

To read the Woman Suffrage Cook Book, click here. This story about the Woman Suffrage Cook Book was updated in 2022.

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