wild woman wednesday

In the spring of 1858, a friendly, two-horse match race attracted the attention of many residents in the town of Atkinson, Mississippi.  Mrs. Franklin Robbins and Mrs. R. C. Potter, both guests at one of the community’s finest hotels, had decided to see which one of their mounts was the fastest.  They had begun their...

The depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad in Philadelphia was strangely bustling with an assortment of customers on the evening of February 22, 1861. Business men dressed in tailcoats, high waisted trousers, and elaborate cravats milled about with laborers adorned in faded work pants, straw hats, and long dusters. Ladies wearing long, flouncy,...

Eighteen year-old Nellie Mattie MacKnight stepped confidently into the spacious dissecting room at San Francisco’s Toland Hall Medical School.  Thirty-five male students stationed around cadavers spread out on rough board tables, turned to watch the bold young women enter.  The smell of decomposing corpses mixed with tobacco smoke wafting out of the pipes some of...

A thin, unshaven prospector took a long drag off the butt of a cigarette before flopping into an oversized chair in the plush lobby of the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada. The six-story building featured all the conveniences possessed by establishments like it in New York. The rooms and foyer were primarily occupied by stylishly...

A shabby-looking prospector emerged from the dark, weathered entrance of the Matchless Mine in Leadville, Colorado and straightened his stooped shoulders. He dropped his pickaxe beside a rusty ore cart and rolled and lit a cigarette. His weary face was set in a scowl as he surveyed the mountains rising precipitately around the well-worked diggings....

Night had fallen over Tombstone, Arizona, and every restless and rowdy character in the vicinity of the southwestern town had poured into the saloons and gambling dens to while away the hours until dawn arrived. The doorways of the numerous taverns that lined Allen Street were illuminated with smoky kerosene torches. Signs that hung over...

Bitterly cold snow flurries pelted the determined features of twenty-one-year-old Ethel Berry’s face as she drove her dog sled over the Chilkoot Pass in Alaska. Clad in a pair of men’s mackinaw breeches and moccasins, she cracked her whip over the team of animals hauling an enormous mound of supplies behind them. Ethel was slowly...

Nature writer and conservationist John Muir sat alone at a table in the Leidig Hotel in Yosemite, patiently waiting for the breakfast he ordered to be served.  He was a tall, gangly, bearded man deeply focused on a stack of geological surveys in front of him.  The hotel kitchen doors swung open and appetizing aroma...