Roughing It: Yankee Ladies in the American West, 1920–1921

Roughing It: Yankee Ladies in the American West, 1920–1921 Thomas Smith Seeking adventure, Massachusetts socialite Mary Adams Abbott, age fifty-three, and her twenty-six-year-old daughter, Mary Ogden Abbott, embarked in 1920 on a transcontinental automobile journey, the first leg of an extensive global tour. They motored from Massachusetts to California, spent the winter in an abandoned northern Arizona mining camp, then with guide and pack animals, trekked nearly 1,000 arduous miles from the Grand Canyon to the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. The Abbotts were at the forefront of a new trend in tourism that emphasized recreation and adventure more than intellectual and cultural enlightenment. Historian Hal Rothman has drawn a distinction between “old” and “new” types of American Western tourism. At the turn of the twentieth century “old” tourists, mainly affluent Easterners, traveled by rail to visit Western heritage and cultural sites such as the Grand Canyon. Visiting those sites provided aesthetic and intellectual uplift and seemed to affirm the nation’s grandeur. Occasionally, a select few of these old-style tourists, disaffected by traditional cultural sites along railroads, sought more authentic, physically challenging experiences at remote Western archaeological digs or dude ranches. Those participatory activities, Rothman asserts, allowed individuals to test themselves “against the rough, cold realities of the American West in a genuine quest for experience and understanding.” Those affluent, overwhelmingly male adventurers, he continues, paved the way for a “new” style of Western tourism that began in the 1920s and continued for several decades. Traveling in automobiles, “new” tourists, first elites and then ordinary Americans, journeyed for recreation, not cultural uplift, and sought to engage not just observe the West. Wheeling overland by auto in the 1920s “offered a personal proving ground,” he contends. “While some people bought raccoon coats and swallowed goldfish,” others separated Thomas Smith is professor of history at Nichols College. Journal of the Southwest 52, 1 (Spring 2010) : 85–113 86  ✜  Journal of the Southwest themselves from the mainstream by embracing a vestige of the old-style tourism, “the idea of self-worth earned through challenge.”1 The Abbott excursion provides an opportunity to examine the experience of two female “new” tourists who roughed it in the remote American West. Although cultured elites from one of America’s most prestigious families, they toured by automobile rather than rail and journeyed more for adventure than cultural uplift. Originally, they intended to travel in comfort, taking their evening meals in the hotels where they stayed overnight. But at Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, they fished, rode horseback, and became enamored with outdoor life. Like some intrepid “old-style” tourists, they spent the next year setting themselves apart from ordinary automobile wayfarers by seeking out “raw” experiences . They hunted, fished, camped, sojourned with stock raisers and government hunters in northern Arizona, and tested themselves against the Western wilderness during a seven-month pack trip. As unmarried women of privilege, the Abbotts had the time and financial resources for leisure. Maternally, they were descended from Presidents John and John Quincy Adams. On the paternal side, their Abbott forebears had helped to settle Andover, Massachusetts, in the 1640s. The daughter of Charles Francis Adams II, a Civil War veteran, journalist, head of the Union Pacific Railroad, and president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Mary Adams married Grafton Abbott, a Harvard-educated lawyer with a practice in Boston. They lived in Concord, the tidy historic town outside Boston that had been home to high-minded Puritans, Revolutionary War patriots, and inspired writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. The marriage produced two sons, Henry and John, both Harvard-educated professionals, and Mary, the middle child, who became an accomplished artist.2 The daughter, Mary, was educated at the prestigious Westover School for girls in Middlebury, Connecticut, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. At the latter school, her life was wrenched by the deaths from separate illnesses of her grandfather and father in March 1915, and by America’s entry into the Great War in April 1917, two months before her graduation.3 The war necessitated domestic sacrifices, including restrictions on consumer goods and...