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Charley Parkhurst, the Gold Rush Legend With a Secret Identity

On Dec. 18, 1879, a short, stocky rancher named Charley Parkhurst lay dying in his two-room cabin in Santa Cruz County, Calif. Several times he beckoned a friend to his side. Charley seemed to want to tell him something, but he didn’t.

After his death, Charley’s friends made an astonishing discovery: Charley was really Charlotte, and she’d had a baby.

Charley Parkhurst and J. Ross Browne in an illustration by Browne for Harper’s magazine

But that wasn’t the astonishing part. Women dressing as men was not all that unusual in the Old West, a place where people came to reinvent themselves. The amazing part was that Charley — or Charlotte — had been a legendary stagecoach driver in gold rush country. To be a stagecoach whip required nerve, courage, coolness, endurance and skill, qualities not associated back then with the fairer sex.

The news that Charley was Charlotte made news around the country.

Charley Parkhurst

Charley had arrived by steamer in San Francisco in 1851, nearly 40 and aiming to be “the best damn driver in California.”

Charley stood five feet tall and had only one good eye after a horse kicked him. He dressed in tailored coats, handmade boots and a broad gray hat. No matter the weather he wore long-fringed, beaded gloves – perhaps to hide small women’s hands. He drank whiskey, chewed tobacco, smoked cigars and talked to his horses. His profane vocabulary sometimes left his passengers spellbound.

At first he drove from Sacramento to the rough mining towns around Sutter’s mill, the gold region known as the Mother Lode. When the roads opened to Virginia City and the Nevada mining towns, Charley drove those. He drove over the big hump of Mount Madonna, in and out of the Central Valley and down to San Francisco. She drove special missions for Wells Fargo, and in his later years drove between San Juan and Santa Cruz. People called Charley “boss of the road.”

Mount Madonna

His proudest accomplishment: never capsizing a stage or injuring a passenger.

Ed Sams in his book, The Real Mountain Charley, wrote that it took a special person to drive a stagecoach during the gold rush. “Only a rare breed of men could be depended upon to ignore the gold fever of the 1850s and hold down a steady job of grueling travel over narrow one-way dirt roads that swerved around mountain curves, plummeting into deep canyons and often forded swollen, icy streams,” he wrote.

Drivers, or “whips,” also faced highwaymen who ordered them to throw down the wooden box that carried payroll or gold.

One-Eyed Charley Parkhurst

Charley was adept with the whip and the pistol as well as the reins of a Concord coach. He shot at least two bandits, and he could cut the cigar from a man’s mouth at 15 paces without touching him.

Hank Monk

“He was in his day one of the most dexterous and celebrated of the famous California drivers, ranking with Foss, Hank Monk, and George Gordon,” wrote the New York Times on Jan. 9, 1880 (reprinted from the San Francisco Call), shortly after his death. “It was an honor to sit in the spare end of the driver’s seat when the fearless Charley Parkhurst held the reins of a four or six in hand.”

Clients got into the habit of asking for One-Eyed Charley.

Charley Parkhurst, New England Girl

She was born in 1812 in Sharon, Vt., to Mary (Morehouse) Parkhurst and Ebenezer Parkhurst as Charlotte Darkey (or Durkee) Parkhurst. Her mother died the year of her birth. She had an older brother, Charles D., and a sister, Maria. After her brother died in 1813, Charlotte and Maria went to an orphanage in Lebanon, N.H.

The Providence Journal, just after her death, reported, “While in the poor house he discovered that boys have a great advantage over girls in the battle of life, and he desired to become a boy.”

At the age of 12 she dressed in boys’ clothes and ran away from the orphanage. She ended up in Worcester and got a job in Ebenezer Balch’s livery stables. She cleaned stalls, washed carriages and scrubbed floors. “Charley” had an aptitude for horses, and Balch taught her how to handle them.

She watched the Concord coaches that came and went, and she learned how to doctor the horses that she understood so well.

This Concord Coach ran from Charlestown, N.H., to Springfield, Vt.

Providence

Balch then bought the Franklin House and the What Cheer stables in Providence. Charley followed him. Still young, he drove stage routes along the Boston Post Road to Boston, Providence, Worcester and New York.

He earned a reputation as a skillful hostler handling teams of two to six horses – her favorite, a team of six matched grays.

Once, in Patuxet, he waited outside for passengers at a dance and his hands froze. Ever afterward, Charley wore his signature gloves.

Charley also drove coaches in Georgia, though it isn’t clear whether he moved there or not.

In 1837, the city directory listed Charles D. Parkhurst, hostler, living at “College, corner of Pine and Dorrance” in Providence. Then at 77 North Main, then Central and finally Weybosset streets.

In 1854-55, the Providence directory listed Charles D. Parkhurst, coachman, at Dorrance Street. But the directory got it wrong. Charley lived in California by then.

Westward, Ho!

After two decades of driving in New England, Charley boarded the steamer R.B. Forbes, bound for South America. On board, Charley chatted with his fellow passengers. A San Francisco businessman named John Morton called Charley “an agreeable ‘companion de voyage’.” He told Morton he planned to drive a stage, and Morton, who ran a drayage company, offered Charley a job.

Another fellow passenger may have left a clue to the missing pages of Charley’s story.

While traveling overland in Nicaragua, John Charles Duchow, on May 18 mentioned in his journal a passenger who called himself “Charles Clifton.”

“[P]assengers on board call him ‘Thunderbolt’,” wrote Duchow. “He says the reason for passing under an assumed name was that he was an important witness in a case and wishing to have nothing to do with it, adopted a false name to get out of the way. He told us that he’s married to a Boston merchant where he is keeper of the American’s house…In short, he is a very queer fellow indeed!”

Was “Clifton” really Charley Parkhurst? The San Francisco Call left a further clue shortly after Charley died. A young woman in New Hampshire had been disappointed in love and left her native state “disguised in the habiliments of the sterner sex,” the newspaper reported.

California

Jim Birch, whose mansion still stands in Swansea, Mass., had arrived in California at 21 during the gold rush to seek his fortune. He had worked in a Providence livery stable, where he probably met Charley. In California, he hired him.

Birch started his California Stage Company in Sacramento, the supply center for the gold rush belt known as the Mother Lode. Thousands of prospectors left the town every day in search of riches. Birch started out charging them two ounces of gold for a one-way trip between Sacramento and the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

Sutter’s Mill, where the gold rush started

Charley often faced down danger on the job. Once, a highwayman, perhaps nicknamed Sugarfoot, held up Charley’s stage on the road from Stockton to Mariposa. He made off with $100,000 in gold dust. Charley vowed revenge.

Later, on that same road, a band of highwaymen jumped out and seized Charley’s horses. Charley pulled on his reins and called to his horses, who flew through the bandits. Charley then aimed his pistol at the bandit — Sugarfoot — and fired. Sugarfoot, according to the newspaper report, crawled into a miner’s cabin and gave up his sinful ghost.

Later, Charley was urging his horses through mudholes in a Grass Valley creek bed and a highway robber ordered him to put up his hands. Charley cracked his whip across the robber’s eyes, blinding him in one of them.

An Eyewitness

J. Ross Browne, a writer and illustrator of tales of the old West, rode once with Charley from Placerville to Virginia City.

“I was proud and happy to sit by the side of Charlie — especially as the road over which we passed after dark, branches off over hills, and along the sides of hills, and into deep canyons, and up hills again; dark, dismal places in the midst of great forests of pine, where the horses seem to be eternally plunging over precipices and the stage followed them with a crashing noise, horribly suggestive of cracked skulls and broken bones.”

However, he wrote, he had confidence in the old driver. “The way he handled the reins and ppered through the clouds of dust and volumes of darkness, and saw trees and sumps and boulders of rock, and horses’ ears, when I could scarcely see my own hand, was a miracle of stage driving.”

Browne reported that Charley was thinking of retirement.

“I’m no better now than when I commenced. Pay’s small and work’s heavy. I’m getting old. Rheumatism in my bones — nobody to look out for old, used-up stage drivers. I’ll kick the bucket one of these days and that’ll be the last of old Charley.”

Retirement

At least once in the 1860s Charley risked exposure while working for a man named Andy Jackson Clark, according to Sams. Charley came home drunk and Mrs. Clark told her 17-year-old son to put Charley to bed. The boy put Charley to bed and then ran back to his mother. “Maw, Charley ain’t no man, he’s a woman!”

They never told anyone until after he died.

Charley decided during the Civil War to retire to farm life, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

For a while he ran a stage stop on the Santa Cruz to Los Gatos road. He then bought a little spread somewhere between Soquel and Watsonville. Charley built a two-room cabin and planted an apple orchard. In winters he hired out as a lumberjack. Charley joined the local Odd Fellows and registered to vote.

In his will, he left money (either $900 or $4,000) to George Harmon, the 16-year-old son of a neighbor (Sams) because he’d been nice to him.

After she died a little red trunk filled with baby clothes was found in her cabin.

Parkhurst’s headstone at the Pioneer Cemetery in Watsonville

Lots of Charley Parkhursts

in 1859, newspaper editor Horace Greeley took a trip west. He met a young clerk who’d had enough of gold hunting and intended to return home to his parents in Indiana. The next day, his conductor told him the clerk was a woman.

After the Civil War, three separate women in Colorado and Wyoming wore men’s clothes and called themselves Mountain Charley.

Harry Allen, born female, was a petty criminal in the Pacific Northwest who refused to wear women’s clothes. A lumberjack named Sammy Allen died at the age of 80 in Montana, and, like Charley Parkhurst, was discovered to have been a woman.

Historian Peter Boeg was researching the gay West for a book and was shocked to hear hundreds of stories about people who cross dressed.

“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,” he concluded.

Shortly after Charley Parkhurst died, the San Francisco Call reported on her death.

“The discoveries of the successful concealment for protracted periods of the female sex under the disguise of the masculine are not infrequent,” reported the newspaper. “But the case of Charley Parkhurst may fairly claim to rank as by all odds the most astonishing of all of them.”

Images: Painting of Charley’s stagecoach By Avital Shtapura – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110092075. Charley Parkhurst and J. Ross Brown from “Washoe Revisited,” 1865, Harper’s Monthly. Mount Madonna By Wahn – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69836978. Hank Monk By http://www.visitcarsoncity.com/history/people/hank_monk.php, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14924459. Charley Parkhurst’s headstone By Wikicuda – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48349758. This story last updated in 2023.

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Island Castaways, New England’s Huddled Masses Yearning to Get Well

Island castaways don’t have it easy. Just ask Robinson Crusoe. Yet, for centuries, medical and political authorities relied on the general inaccessibility of islands to isolate patients for whom they had no effective therapies.

In that tradition, New England governments made routine use of coastal islands to isolate patients and to protect the mainland populations from potential contagion and epidemics.

Here are seven islands, once home to island castaways in New England.

Rainsford Island

Tiny Rainsford Island in Boston Harbor may get even tinier as rising seas threaten to cut it in two. But at one time its eleven acres held a quarantine hospital, an almshouse, a reformatory and a pauper’s graveyard. The quarantine hospital moved to Rainsford in 1737 from nearby Spectacle Island. A smallpox hospital was added to Rainsford in 1832.

Even as public health practices improved and vaccines for many communicable diseases became available, the island continued as an offshore dumping ground for delinquents, unwed mothers, the indigent, the mentally ill—in other words, society’s undesirables.

Today, according to a recent Boston Globe article, the island still holds the remains of 1,777 of “Boston’s poor, diseased, and unwanted from Colonial times to the dawn of the 20th century.”

Quarantine hospital on Rainsford Island

Spectacle Island

The Boston Customs House maintained a quarantine hospital on Spectacle Island. In April 1721, a British ship arrived in the harbor with smallpox cases onboard. The infection spread ashore before authorities could move the ship and quarantine the infected crew and passengers at the island hospital.

The Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, noted in his diary, “The grievous calamity of the small pox has now entered the town.”

Spectacle Island.

Mather had other worries. He advocated a primitive method of inoculating people against smallpox. Called variolation, the technique involved exposing healthy people to the exudate of other smallpox patients in the hope of producing a mild, manageable form of the disease.

The idea was wildly unpopular, and angry mobs threatened Mather and his allies. It was, in effect, the beginning of the anti-vaccine movement in America. Not until 1796 did Britain’s Edward Jenner use cowpox exudates to develop the first safe and effective vaccine against smallpox.

Noddles Island Castaways

Noddle’s Island doesn’t exist anymore. It belongs to the artificial peninsula that makes up Logan Airport. But once it was an island and the site of a hospital for the French naval fleet. During a smallpox outbreak in 1764, the island served as the site for an inoculation hospital.

Variolation inoculation against the pox was dangerous. So, an island seemed like the best place to contain the inoculated patients. It also kept out the anti-inoculation public.

In 1802, Harvard’s Benjamin Waterhouse used the island hospital to experiment with some of Jenner’s new cowpox vaccine. Waterhouse vaccinated 19 children with cowpox, then took them to the Noddle’s hospital to expose them to smallpox patients for 20 days. (They had no “informed consent” forms to sign in those days.) None of the vaccinated children developed smallpox.

Benjamin Waterhouse, 1833 painting by Rembrandt Peale.

Six years after the Noddle’s Island cowpox experiment, the Massachusetts Medical Society reported…”persons who undergo the cowpox are thereby rendered as incapable of being affected by the virus of smallpox as if they had undergone the latter disease.”

Deer Island

Deer Island in Boston Harbor lost its island status when the 1938 hurricane filled in the channel between it and the mainland.

But in 1677 it was an island and a convenient spot to establish a quarantine station for holding smallpox cases. It evolved into an important quarantine hospital in the late 1840’s as vast numbers of Irish refugees arrived.

Many already suffered from typhus and dysentery. Between 1847 and 1849 the island hospital received some 4,800 people. A few years later, the facilities expanded to support Boston’s regular population of criminals, delinquents and paupers—very much like the earlier residents of Rainsford Island.

Almshouse, 1851

Widow’s Island

Almost lost in the archipelago of Maine’s coastline off North Haven is Widow’s Island, sometimes written as Widow or Widows. In the 19th century, the U.S. Navy built a quarantine station on the island to house sailors suffering from a tropical disease called yellow fever. A deadly infection, it regularly caused epidemics in the tropics and in American cities as far north as Boston. Scientists didn’t know what caused yellow fever or how it spread from person to person.

The Navy built a temporary facility in 1885, and then an imposing 50-bed hospital in 1888. But it never quarantined yellow fever patients on the island. An 1892 report from the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery noted various repairs to the island hospital. But “no cases of yellow fever have been received at Widows Island.”

After describing the cleaning, fumigating and disinfecting of two ships in the New York Navy Yard, the report reached a conclusion. “It is probable that ships in the future infected with yellow fever will enter the quarantine port at New York….”

So much for Widow’s hospital.

Aerial view of Widow’s Island

In 1900, researchers in Cuba discovered mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever. So the elaborate and expensive efforts to disinfect and decontaminate ships and cargo was both unnecessary and useless. Eliminate the mosquito and you’ve eliminated yellow fever. The Widow’s Island hospital got torn down in 1935.

Gallops

Back in Boston, a 2018 winter storm exposed the forgotten graves of hundreds of smallpox victims on Gallops Island. Like many other islands scattered about Boston Harbor, the city used Gallops as a quarantine station.

NOAA map of the Boston Harbor Islands, home of countless island castaways.

A hospital for immigrants was built in 1866, and by 1886 the staff was examining over 33,000 passengers annually. A smallpox outbreak during 1872-73 sent a hundred Boston-area patients to the island. In 1873, two additional buildings were erected for cholera and yellow fever patients. In 1878, another hospital went up for passengers suffering from ‘ship fever,’ otherwise known as epidemic typhus. The following year, the old smallpox hospital was torn down and replaced.

Construction on the island, and the numbers of passengers with a variety of illnesses, hint at the vast number of immigrants passing through the port of Boston in the 19th century.

Despite the large number of ship passengers to examine and patients to quarantine and treat, the island also served as a site for the production of experimental anti-toxin. In 1891, German bacteriologists prepared anti-diphtheria anti-toxin in the blood of horses. They then used it to treat a patient dying of diphtheria. It worked, and serum-based anti-toxins, or ‘passive immunization’ became the standard treatment for many bacterial infections until the discovery of antibiotics.

(Passive immunization is now being revived to treat some COVID-19 patients.)

The Federal government took control of the island hospital during World War I and finally closed it in 1937. Today, the dead still remain at Gallops, now an island park.

Two lepers refused entrance to town, 14th century.

Penikese

Stranger than a yellow fever hospital in chilly Maine is a leper colony in Massachusetts. The U.S. has never had a large number of cases of leprosy, now called Hansen’s Disease. Still, the social stigma associated with leprosy, and scientific ignorance about its transmission and pathology, compelled local, state and federal governments to quarantine anyone suspected of having this ancient affliction.

Massachusetts was no different. The first known case in the state occurred in 1875. The infected man was isolated on Gallops Island. Immigration brought more cases and Massachusetts began looking for a site to build a leprosarium. But no one wanted it at the state’s infirmary in Tewksbury or on Cape Cod. In 1905, the state bought the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay.

For the next 16 years, 36 patients and their doctor lived on the island in a smattering of buildings and cottages.

The patients were prisoners, but not criminals. Communicable disease has often permitted that tricky distinction. Yet, the Penikese patients—mostly immigrants—were not abandoned entirely. Doctors tried to treat their disease. A 1976 research paper described experimental “drug therapy at the Massachusetts Leper Colony, 1905-1921.” The invention of wireless radio in the 1910s also gave the islanders a link to passing ships and the Marconi News Service broadcasts.

The National Leprosarium in Carville, La., opened in 1921. The Massachusetts governor wasted no time packing the Penikese Island castaways onto a southbound train. The state fumigated the island’s emptied buildings and then dynamited them.

For the next 50 years, the island served as a bird sanctuary. Then between 1973 and 1980 the island again became a place of isolation for some of society’s troublesome members. The Penikese Island School for delinquent boys found a temporary home among the graves and wreckage of the vanished leper colony.

Island Castaways Remembered

Penikese Island in 2005.

Penikese may be an obscure island that once housed a small number of people with a rare infection, but it has not been forgotten. A book about the island’s inhabitants was published in 1997. The poet, Eve Rifkah, wrote Outcasts in 2010. She listed information about the island’s individual residents in the back of her book.

Islands often appear convenient solutions to all manner of problems. Alcatraz held criminals. Elba held a would-be emperor. Robben held apartheid’s political prisoners. North Brother held Typhoid Mary.

The islands all eventually gave up their inmates and patients to become parks, sanctuaries and tourist attractions.

For more information: See Paul Cyr’s The Exiles of Penikese Island: Politics, Prejudice and the Public Health. See also Richard J. Kahn’s The Widow’s Island Yellow Fever Quarantine Hospital in Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1885-1904: A Medical, Political, and Social History.

The author of this story about island castaways, Edward McSweegan is a Rhode Island microbiologist who writes about infectious diseases and history.

Images: By Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA – 2007_02_19_iad-bos_41.JPG, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2180315, and Widow’s Island courtesy Google Maps.

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Harriet Wilson Describes Racism in 1859. Few Cared.

On April 19, 1859, Harriet Wilson copyrighted and deposited a copy of her novel in the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.

She called her novel Our Nig Or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House . It was the first ever published by an African American on the North American continent. In it, Harriet Wilson told her own story: of her mother’s abandonment, of her indentured servitude to a cruel mistress, of her eventual decision to fight for herself.

The novel got little notice until 1983, when scholar Henry Louis Gates established her identity. The book, wrote Gates,

…stands as a hallmark of literary history as the first novel published by an African American woman in the United States; and it subtly combines compelling storytelling with unflinching indictments of Northern anti-black racism.”

Harriet Wilson

Indentured Servitude

Harriet Adams was born on March 15, 1825 in Milford, N.H., to Margaret Ann Smith, who was white, and Joshua Green, an African American hooper of barrels. Her father died when she was young and her mother abandoned her when she was six at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr. The court bound the orphaned child to the Hayward family as an indentured servant.

Scholars believe Our Nig is a fictionalized account of her abuse by Mrs. Hayward and her daughter. They mocked her, beat her and forced to do hard physical farm labor.

Hutchinson Family Singers

The Haywards had connections to the abolitionists in town and to the Hutchinson Family Singers. In Our Nig, Harriet Wilson vehemently denounced Northern racism and hypocrisy. But she also told a story about a young girl who learned to fight back.

The crucial scene comes in Chapter 10, when her character ‘Frado’ is told to fetch wood by her mistress, ‘Mrs. Bellmont.’

She was sent for wood, and not returning as soon as Mrs. B. calculated, she followed her, and, snatching from the pile a stick, raised it over her.

“Stop!” shouted Frado, “strike me, and I’ll never work a mite more for you;” and throwing down what she had gathered, stood like one who feels the stirring of free and independent thoughts.

By this unexpected demonstration, her mistress, in amazement, dropped her weapon, desisting from her purpose of chastisement. Frado walked towards the house, her mistress following with the wood she herself was sent after. She did not know, before, that she had a power to ward off assault.

Escape

Harriet Wilson turned 18 in 1853 and could finally leave the Haywards. She quickly married a man named Thomas Wilson, who claimed to be a fugitive slave. She had a child, George Mason Wilson, but his father soon abandoned them. He admitted he made up the fugitive slave story to gain support from abolitionists.

Harriet worked as a seamstress and a house servant. She also sold a hair restoration product, but she couldn’t earn enough to take care of her young son. She left him in the Poor Farm. And she wrote her novel, hoping it would support them. In the preface to Our Nig she wrote:

Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.

A few weeks after she copyrighted the novel, George C. Rand and Avery published it anonymously. It faded into oblivion, possibly because its indictment of Northern racism offended abolitionists. George then died at the age of seven.

Moving On

Hattie Wilson gave up trying to earn a living in Milford. She moved to Boston, where she became a spiritualist, communicating with the dead. People knew her as “the colored medium.” Harriet gave lectures, either entranced or in her normal state, at camp meetings, theaters and in private homes. She spoke, often humorously, about her life experiences, about childhood education and about labor reform. She traveled to Chicago as a delegate to the American Association of Spiritualists convention.

From 1879 to 1897, she worked as a housekeeper at a Boston boardinghouse on the corner of Berkeley and Tremont streets. She also worked as a healer and nurse. She died at age 75 at the Quincy Hospital in Quincy, Mass.

In 2006, The Harriet Wilson Project raised money to create a bronze sculpture of Harriet Wilson in Milford, N.H.

This story was updated in 2022.

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