Frontier Comrades: From the Fur Trade to the Ford Car

In this eye-opening if meandering exploration of sexual diversity in America’s borderland, historian Wilke (Stagecoach!) depicts the western frontier as caught in a tense push-pull between a high degree of tolerance—nurtured by the frontier’s wide-open sense of possibility—and the settler project’s impulse to “tame” and civilize. Among the figures he profiles are two trans westerners: Charley Parkhurst, a famous stagecoach driver, and Mrs. Noonan, a teamster turned laundress at a fort run by General Custer. Both became notorious following their postmortem gender reveals, even as the communities who accepted them in life seemed unruffled by the disclosures—Custer’s wife even penned a defense of Mrs. Noonan. Elsewhere Wilke spotlights the 1880s affair, sensationalized in newspaper reports after their attempted elopement, between 16-year-old Ora Chatfield and 26-year-old Clara Dietrich; he uses the episode to note how increased “pathologization” came with increased settlement (both lovers were threatened with institutionalization). Wilke also analyzes an anonymous logger’s turn-of-the-20th-century memoir, which painted loggers as frequently engaged in homosexual liaisons for reasons ranging from “pragmatism to companionship,” and characterizes logging camps as a final outpost of same-sex love not overlain by the modern concept of identity-based queerness. Though well-researched, the diffuse narrative and multipronged arguments can sometimes drag. Still, it’s an illuminating survey of the past’s hidden queer lives. (Aug.)