The Women of Bannack

I used to wish I had been born in more exciting time.  When I first visited Virginia City and Bannack I thought that living during the gold rush would have been thrilling.  After reading some the letters and diaries written by women who lived in Bannack, I realize that I was delusional.  While men had all sorts of diversions to occupy their time, saloons, stores, dance halls, not to mention politics and hard work, respectable women had only their homes and families. 

Emily Meredith and her husband Frederick spent the winter of 18262-63 in Bannack.  She found it to be a barbaric place full of Southern sympathizers and no sign of religion.  In a letter to her father, written the following spring, she wrote, "I don't know how many deaths occurred this winter but that there have not been twice as many, is entirely owing to the fact that drunken men do not shoot well."    

In her letters to her sister "back in the States" Mary Edgerton writes of doing without the things that she had been accustomed to having. When describing her family's living arrangement, she writes: "We are all living, or staying rather in a house."  That single sentence summarizes how Mary felt about the time she spent in Bannack.  If you are able to find a copy of the book, A Governor's Wife on the Mining Frontier, the Letters of Mary Edgerton from Montana 1863-1865, it will give you a good idea of what life was like in the early days of Bannack.  The complete text of Emily Merediths Letter can be found in the book, Not in Precious Metals Alone: a Manuscript History of Montana.