7—
Making Men in the West:
The Coming of Age of Miles Cavanaugh and Martin Frank Dunham

Mary Murphy

The field of western women's history began as a response to the fact that the majority of academic and popular histories of the North American West portrayed an overwhelmingly masculine world—a world in which Anglo-American men blazed trails, fought Indians, trapped beaver, herded cattle, plowed fields, drank, gambled, and whored. Then—if they survived all that—they settled down with good women and fathered a bunch of native westerners. Susan Armitage aptly called this approach narrating the history of "Hisland."^[1] Over the past two decades, historians of women have sought to revise that portrayal, first by peopling Hisland with women, then by rewriting western history as it would have been seen through women's eyes, creating a complementary "Herland." The most recent wave of women's history uses gender as a category of analysis, rather than a topic of study, a shift beyond work that conflates the term "gender" with women. But if we truly want to employ gender as a category of analysis, then we need to examine categories of both female and male and the ways in which ideal systems of womanhood and manhood influenced the beliefs and actions of women and men. In other words, we need to begin writing the history of the West as a history of "Theirland."^[2]

We know what the gender ideal for white, middle-class, Anglo-American womanhood was in Victorian North America: the prescriptions laid down by ministers, reformers, and Godey's Lady's Book, encapsulated in the "cult of true womanhood." We also know a good deal about how women lived according to those ideals—or deviated from them—through hundreds of examinations of women's lives in every region of the country. The construction of womanhood revolved around women's relationships to men—as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers. However, we know little of what men thought manhood should be or what ordinary fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers

thought about women. As Anthony Rotundo has pointed out, "Nearly everything we know about human behavior in the past concerns men and yet it is equally—and ironically—true that we know far more about womanhood and the female role than we know about masculinity or the man's role."^[3] For instance, did men really believe in the cult of true womanhood? Did men think about women as "good" or "bad"? If so, what kinds of relationships did they want with each? And how did they reconcile them? What exactly did a man want in a wife? And what did he think a husband was supposed to be? How did a good father behave? Within the boundaries of the gender system of North America's dominant culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, how did men themselves define manliness, and what role did their relationships with women have in shaping that definition? To paraphrase Ava Baron, knowing that gender, race, and ethnicity matter tells us little about how the categories of gender, race, or ethnicity develop, change, or operate in society. What we need to do is to historicize those concepts in our particular studies.^[4]

This essay offers a preliminary exploration of these questions through the lives of two men, Miles J. Cavanaugh, Jr., and Martin Frank Dunham, one born in the West, the other an immigrant to it. Cavanaugh and Dunham left behind intriguing, sometimes frustrating documents that reveal glimpses of what they thought about women, about coming of age, about what being a man in the West meant. Martin Frank Dunham journeyed to Edmonton, Alberta, in 1908, corresponding regularly with his fiancee, Edith Sander, in Berlin, Ontario. Dunham's letters cover the news, hopes, and disappointments of three and a half years. He kept writing because he kept postponing the wedding. He hadn't yet proved himself; he hadn't made his fortune in the great western land of opportunity; he wasn't yet man enough to take a wife. He was sure Edith would understand. MilesJ. Cavanaugh, Jr., a Montana pioneer, lawyer, legislator, and poet, wrote an autobiographical essay shortly before his death in 1935, which recounts his life from childhood to his early twenties. The bulk of the document deals with three years Cavanaugh spent in a Montana mining camp. He was a naive eighteen-year-old youth when he arrived, an experienced twenty-one-year-old man when he left. His account is fondly sentimental, dominated by romantic and sexual escapades, and shaped by the conventions of western storytelling with which he was familiar. These documents present the voices of two men informing us about their coming of age, their first jobs, their first serious courtships, and, in one case, his first experience with sex.^[5]

Miles J. Cavanaugh, Jr., was born in Denver in 1865 while his father sought his fortune in Montana's first gold rush at Alder Gulch. Cavanaugh Sr. returned to Denver to claim his son and wife and brought them to Montana in 1866. A victim of wanderlust, Cavanaugh kept the family moving in search of his main chance. At one point the Cavanaughs settled in Butte

long enough for Miles to complete school in 1882 as a member of Butte High School's first graduating class of three.^[6]

The following year, at the age of eighteen, Miles accompanied his father to the Comet mine near Wickes, Montana, thirty-five miles northeast of Butte. He worked as a hoisting engineer and bookkeeper and lived with other single men in the town's boardinghouse. When the new schoolteacher, Isabelle, arrived, Miles "was immediately smitten" and sought to monopolize her company. He became Isabelle's regular escort at all dances and community social events, and took her riding and walking. Miles, however, did not spend all his free time with the schoolteacher, for he had also discovered, in back of the cluster of town residences, "a four roomed frame house, comfortably tho not elaborately furnished, with a seeming surplus of bedrooms." The house was owned by a saloonkeeper and occupied by a quiet, comely brunette of about twenty-four years known only as Nellie.^[7]

Late one summer night Miles "stealthly" paid a call on Nellie. During previous conversations in the saloon he had been struck by her intelligence. This night she told him of her past tainted by an early marriage "to a man who had abused and afterwards deserted her, of her vain struggle with life in the city, and of drifting later into her present way of life." Miles was infused with sympathy, "and somehow, tho I never sensed just how and why it happened we repaired to her bedroom and retired. For the first time in my life I became conscious of the warmth and softness of a womans body in contact with my own. This new experience with its delirious sensation and subsequent languorous relaxation left nothing to be desired, and when just before dawn, I left for my own sleeping room my mind and body were filled with wonderment at this new phase of life that had been opened to me."^[8]

Miles visited Nellie on other occasions, "but never again did I experience the wild joy, the inexplicable delight of that new and entirely strange biological experiment." During this entire period, Miles continued to court Isabelle, to take her riding and for moonlight walks, never hinting of his dalliance with Nellie, nor seemingly moved to engage in similar activity with his schoolteacher sweetheart. In fact, "never a kiss nor caress was exchanged between us to excite desire. I just adored her. I never thot of her as a woman in the sense that Nellie was."^[9]

As two other stories from the autobiography demonstrate, Miles was not as innocent as his recollections of Nellie imply. In describing the social entertainments of the camp, for example, he recalled one masqued ball, during which he had assumed "the guise of an elegantly, if scantily attired young lady," a costume he procured from a traveling prostitute who regularly visited the camp around paydays. When he left the dance intending to cross the street for a drink at the saloon, he was followed by an eager male admirer. Determined not to betray his masquerade, he tried to elude his suitor by weaving through the town, but finally, too chilled to continue, he sought

refuge in his own house, thus starting the rumor mills grinding. His pursuer returned to the dance and reported "that he had run the painted lady to cover" in Cavanaugh's sleeping apartment, and, as Miles wrote, "another scandal was started on swiftly widening waves among the prudes of the village."^[10]

A page or two later Miles related another incident of sexual pursuit, this in the genre of western tall-tale telling. A prospector returned to camp and released his three burros, including a female named Jennie. Shortly thereafter another miner arrived in camp and unloaded his weary male burro. Burro pheromones took over: although tired and hungry, the new arrival "no sooner saw Jennie loitering near, than in his mind thoughts of rest and food were displaced by visions of sexual conquest, and to effect his purpose he unsheathed a very formidable weapon for the attack." Miss Jennie was not interested, and she, too, led her suitor on a race through the camp, at one point into the kitchen of the local boardinghouse. By this time, the chase of asses had drawn quite a crowd, including "many timid housewives peer [ing] thru curtained windows to witness the deflorations of virginity." Jennie finally leapt onto the roof of a dugout, but alas was trapped, and there "in the presence of the interested spectators his fell purpose was accomplished while tears streamed from poor Jennie's eyes." The lesson to be drawn from this incident, Miles concluded, was "that ultimate success depends on ruthless persistent aggressiveness."^[11]

In yet another tale of sexual derring-do, Miles again acted as the object of desire, in a play scripted by his father. Cavanaugh Sr. had been in Bannack developing a gold mine and boarding with its owners, Mr. Sheehan, a seventy-four-year-old gentleman and his wife, a blond beauty of twenty-five. Sensing that the May-December match might not last, Cavanaugh Sr. sought to insinuate his son into Mrs. Sheehan's good graces and arranged to have Miles visit. While Cavanaugh occupied Mr. Sheehan with the mine, Mrs. Sheehan became quite taken with Miles, who "was twenty now, and strong healthy and not repulsive in looks or manners and of a very sensitive and sympathetic disposition." One morning while he was in the library, she appeared and suddenly asked, " 'Do you mind if I kiss you?' " He replied, " 'I should say not' whereupon she gave me such a kiss as almost took my breath." Miles claimed to be terrified and as soon as he could, he returned to Comet and his chaste, "adored Isabelle." Mrs. Sheehan later reappeared in the narrative as a rich divorcee, but having been rejected by Miles, she in turn scorned him.^[12]

Late in 1886 the mine at Comet began to fail and the camp to disband. Miles went on to study law. And what of Isabelle and Nellie? In one sentence Miles reported that Isabelle married a miner and moved to a distant camp. Nellie, in the fashion of hundreds of western prostitutes, simply disappeared.

The young Miles Cavanaugh was confused about women and what to do with them. His stories about himself reveal a search for the appropriate role he should play in the quest for romance and sex. Should he hunt the objects of his desire with "ruthless persistent aggressiveness"? Should he become the object of pursuit? Could he steer some middle course? When chased, he retreated in terror, and unlike poor Jennie, escaped inviolate except for one kiss. When he wooed ardently it was without eroticism; his courtship of Isabelle was on an ethereal plane. The result seemed to be that she married someone else. His liaisons with Nellie were hardly the result of an aggressive campaign. Miles wants us to believe that it was an almost unconscious, accidental course that brought him to the prostitute's bed.

Miles Cavanaugh liked all the women he wrote about. Nevertheless, he sorted them and his relationships with them into categories shaped by late Victorian sexual ideology, which limited his ability to respond to any of them as a full human being who combined the intellectual, spiritual, and erotic. Isabelle was the lady: pious, pure, educated. She came to the mining camp as the symbol and instrument of civilization. Isabelle was Molly Wood to Miles's Virginian. Nellie was the whore with the heart of gold. Mrs. Sheehan became the dramatized version of the gold digger and western divorcee, a relatively unexplored stereotype of western women. She is the woman who comes west not as a bearer of civilization and not as a prostitute, but as a person looking for her main chance. As we will see in the examination of Frank Dunham, such women made men very uncomfortable.^[13] Miles Cavanaugh's autobiography reveals his affection for women and his delight in their company, but he portrays them as virtual caricatures. None possesses the complex personality of an interesting person nor the many-hued emotional palette of fears, desires, and curiosity that Miles himself did.

Martin Frank Dunham was nearly twenty years older than Cavanaugh and an immigrant to the West, yet the two had much in common. Born in Ontario in 1882 into a family of devout farmers, Frank signed the pledge not to drink or smoke at the age of eighteen, and as a young man in Edmonton he occasionally felt hampered by his inability to dance. Nevertheless, his religious upbringing brought him comfort and imbued him with a strong sense of morality. Although he irregularly attended church in Edmonton and later Camrose, he enjoyed himself at Methodist socials which echoed his life in Ontario. In the West, however, he broke his pledge, regularly smoking cigars and occasionally taking a drink.^[14]

Frank apparently had no desire to be a farmer. He attended Normal School, for two years taught in Berlin (the town name was changed to Kitchener during World War I), and in 1904 was accepted at the University of Toronto. In order to earn money for school he spent two summers in England selling stereoscopic views. In 1904 he also met Edith Lillian Sander, daughter of Solomon Sander, a successful Berlin merchant. They began

corresponding when Frank went to England in the summer of 1904. In 1907 Frank graduated from the university and started work as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star. A year later he headed west having accepted ajob on the Edmonton Bulletin, founded by Frank Oliver to promote regional agriculture. In route he stopped in Chicago where Edith was studying music and painting and presented her with an engagement ring.

Frank was twenty-six when he arrived in Edmonton, and ready to take advantage of any opportunities the West offered him. Edmonton was a bustling prairie city. Originating as a Hudson's Bay Company fort, Edmonton had boomed as a launching point for the Klondike gold rush in 1897–98. In 1906 Edmonton became the capital of the recently formed province of Alberta. By 1908 the city had over eighteen thousand residents and Strathcona, the community situated on the bluffs across the North Saskatchewan River, another forty-five hundred. It was a market city, with grain elevators, flour mills, lumber- and brickyards, a pork packing plant, and the commercial businesses necessary to support a regional economy of coal mining and agriculture.^[15]

Frank Dunham was an unadulterated optimist. On his first day in Edmonton he wrote to Edith that he was "simply delighted with the West. To come out here is the best move I ever made and after being here only one day I can almost say that I never want to live East again." For all the time he remained in the West he never changed that point of view. Time after time, he told Edith that the West was a land of opportunity, a great country, a place where an ambitious and hard-working man could make his fortune: "The longer I live out West the more hope I have in this country and the brighter I see my chances for success. I have some big schemes in my mind at the present time, which I must not mention further, but which will mean great things somewhere in the future if I can carry them out." When a visitor from the East reminded him of the West's lack of music, culture, and art, he momentarily regretted the possibilities of the life he had abandoned in Toronto. Nevertheless, he was ever optimistic that these amenities would soon arrive in Edmonton. He agreed with his visitor that westerners seemed to think of very little but "the race for wealth," but he was content to be one of them, "to remain in the west where a great country is being built up and where I feel that I am sort of getting in on the ground floor.^[16]

Frank chronicled with personal satisfaction the completion of a streetcar system in Edmonton, negotiations for a railroad bridge across the North Saskatchewan River, the laying of the cornerstone for the provincial legislature building, the arrival of a new steamer for outings on the river, and the performance of every visiting artist to the city—all of whom received favorable reviews from him in the pages of the Bulletin. Frank was a booster. His job required him to travel throughout Alberta reporting on the state of ag-

riculture and the growth of communities. When he took charge of the Camrose Canadian in 1910, he also readily assumed the job of publicity commissioner for the town and produced an immigration bulletin designed to lure settlers to the area.

Newspaper reporting was hardly the most lucrative of jobs; although Frank made steady improvements in his position, from reporter for the Bulletin to managing editor of the Canadian, he saw his real economic opportunity in real estate. He plowed all of his savings into city lots, first in Strathcona and then in Camrose. He eagerly took on the job of publicity commissioner in Camrose, figuring that when immigrants contacted him about opportunities, he would be able to sell them his land. Frank did turn a profit, but apparently never as much as he hoped. At one point he sold two lots in Strathcona and reported that had he waited a week he could have made considerably more. On the eve of his marriage he informed Edith that he was not doing as well as some, although he had improved his assets, and she need not worry about being provided for.

For Frank, manhood was achieved through comradeship with his male friends ("I never aspired to be popular with the ladies but I always covet the respect and good will of my own sex"), respect earned from his boss and coworkers, and ability to provide for a wife. Frank did not become part of the cult of physicality that Anthony Rotundo describes as part of the "the Masculine Primitive," the ideal of manhood that was coalescing in the last half of the nineteenth century. Quite matter-of-factly, Frank recounted riding and walking miles across the Alberta countryside in the course of his daily work and relaxing on Sunday by skating and playing hockey. Frank loved sports and admired sportsmen, but he was not enamored of competition and drew no particular attention to his physical accomplishments. Most often he would write about skating parties, amateur hockey, and organizing baseball games and contests as part of agricultural fairs designed to boost Alberta. In 1911 Frank told Edith that he had met a man whom he would like to emulate. This was the Methodist minister, Reverend Robert Pearson, whom Frank had known in Toronto and who was now evangelizing in the West. Frank felt Pearson, by example more than by his preaching, set the model for manhood: "In his college days he was a great rugby player and has continued to be a great lover of sport while preaching the gospel. His life exemplifies the manly man, the man who knows the temptations of life and yet who instead of shunning the world mingles with the world and does what he can to make it better."^[17] Frank, too, embraced his world and presented himself to Edith as a man always on the go, hard pressed to carve out time on Sunday to write to her.^[18] He was always making contacts who, he assured her, would prove useful in the future, and he kept an eye out for his golden opportunity. He seemed to relish just about everything he did.

But what did he think about women, about Edith, and about how she would fit into his life? Frank Dunham was a man who believed that a woman's place was in the home, the church choir, and the ladies' club. He disparaged a spinster he met as "single and fair fat and forty." One evening in 1910 he planned to go to a Methodist service where the advertised sermon was "the ideal wife." "No doubt," he wrote, "there will be a large gathering of the fair sex there to attempt to divine the reason why they have not as yet worked their charms on men." Noting an apparently large number of single women in Edmonton, he confessed he did not understand why they had come there: "They occupy positions as stenographers in business places and the government offices and cannot help but lose more and more their power of being home makers." Frank acknowledged women's struggle to meet the expenses of city life, and pitied them, but he seemed to have no understanding that perhaps women also hoped Edmonton would be their place of opportunity. In fact, Frank seemed to think that the women who came west were of dubious character. In a discussion of unsuccessful marriages, he noted, "I have seen several cases lately where young men have picked up with western girls whom they know very little and have been sorry for it, or at least I had better say that I have been heartily sorry for them." In his mind the problem was not with western men, but with western women: "the girls down East are far superior to the majority that can be found out here." Frank may only have been trying to reassure Edith that he was not attracted to any of the women he met in Edmonton, yet his comments betray a deeper uneasiness. What seemed to disturb Frank was not a migration of "unsuitable" women, but the fact that women who came west to find work or husbands, who independently and aggressively pursued their futures—as he was—were not behaving as he thought women should.^[19]

For Frank, women who did not choose a life of domesticity were deeply flawed. In one of the many letters to Edith anticipating their future together, he attested, "I know . . . that the instincts of home are strong in you and mean more to you than all the foolish vanities which so many girls are engaging their paltry brains in these days. You have a better conception of a true woman's career, Edith, than any girl I ever met, and I love you for that." He looked forward to the day when they could set up housekeeping for he believed "that the home life is the only life and that no man is truly happy and fortified against temptations until he is a married man." Frank respected Edith's good influence, her kindness, her sense of Christian duty, and her common sense. He treasured these qualities and, since he continued to postpone their wedding, he relied upon them to keep in her good graces.^[20]

Frank delayed their marriage because he had not yet met his standards of what he believed necessary to take a wife. Edith was at home surrounded

by friends and family, who apparently kept wondering when Frank was going to come and marry her. He did not see the public side of their engagement; he interpreted friends' interest as inappropriate inquisitiveness. Frank offered Edith sympathy, but he was not about to be rushed. In the first letter in which he addressed this issue he wrote, "I have only been out of college a year and a half and in that time I do not think I have as yet a sufficiently firm grip on this old world to launch on the sea of matrimony." He summed up, "I do not feel that as yet I have made good." Frank confessed he needed more time to convince the people of Edmonton that he had "the right stuff." Again in May 1909, after accompanying a newly married friend to look for an apartment, he told Edith that he would not consider a flat a suitable home for her. Since she had been raised in a beautiful house, he would not ask her to begin life "at the bottom of the ladder." In 1909 he canceled a trip to see her in order to take a new job as city editor for a new paper, the Daily Capital, and in 1911 he delayed his scheduled departure for his wedding several times because he wanted to take advantage of situations which he believed would advance his position. Edith was disappointed, and probably angry, but she kept her anger well hidden, perhaps because the one time she expressed it, Frank's response was so unsatisfactory.^[21]

Only once in more than three years of correspondence did Edith reveal her ire concerning Frank's behavior. She had not heard from him in several weeks and must have expressed her displeasure strongly. Frank apologized but also patronized: "I do not blame you for feeling the way you do, but are there not other ways of curing a man of a bad habit other than giving expression to your anger? Explosions of this kind do ease one's sense of injustice I know but they really do not look well on paper. Good nature in a girl is everything." Frank postponed their marriage because he believed he had not yet proved his manhood, either to Edith or to his peers. Yet, while caught up in his own efforts to construct his identity, he found time to give Edith advice on how to hone her femininity—mainly by acquiescing to his decisions.^[22]

Still, with a few exceptions—when Frank felt Edith was pressing him to come home or write more frequently—he had nothing but praise for her nature and her activities. Frank approved of Edith's participation in women's clubs and in fact hoped that when she arrived in Camrose, she would breathe some spirit into the women's clubs of that town. However, he had a limited vision of appropriate public activity and was confident she agreed: "You would make a fine militant suffragette with all your physical strength and auburn hair," he wrote in 1910, "but I know it would be useless to have anyone solicit your active interest. You know the value of the women at the fireside too well for that."^[23]

During the time that Frank was in Alberta, he often escorted young women to recitals, house parties, church socials. Yet he apparently always acted in the most platonic and brotherly fashion. According to his letters, Edith was the only woman whom he ever courted, and in some ways the only woman to whom he ever paid any real attention. On the eve of his departure to marry her he penned, "Believe me Edith there never at any time has been any thought in my mind but that you are the only girl I have ever met that I would want to marry. This has often had the effect of my being very independent towards women an attitude which I believe I have carried too far for my own good." Interestingly, he assumed marriage would change his attitude toward all women: "when we get together around our own fireside I must be taught to respect the wishes of yourself and women in general much more than I have done. It will take me some time to do it Edith but you will find me a willing student for I realize what a man loses by shunning too much the society of women." According to the record he left, Frank had shunned sexual activity as well as the companionship of women. In this same letter, which he used to allay any fears Edith might have about what kind of bargain she was making, he testified, "I know what you expect of me in the way of purity of life and conduct and I am glad to say Edith, that I do not expect to have to make any apology to you in this respect." (Of course, Miles may have said the same thing to Isabelle.)^[24]

What happened to Cavanaugh and Dunham after they completed their apprenticeships as men? Miles read law with Senator Thomas Carter, was admitted to the bar in 1891, and returned to Butte in 1894. He served two terms in the state legislature, one term as assistant city attorney, and on the city school board. Sometime in the early 1890s he married Alphonsine Milot, who bore him two daughters, and presumably died, for there is no record of divorce and Miles remarried in 1897. He was active in Butte civic clubs and in the Society of Montana Pioneers. He also wrote poetry, hundreds of verses over the course of his life, and short stories. Miles Cavanaugh's passing made the front page of both Butte newspapers. He died in 1935 at the age of seventy and was lauded as a scholar, poet, and citizen. His wish that a volume of his poetry be published was never fulfilled, although individual poems were. None of his stories or autobiographical writings ever saw print but were included in a vast collection of Montana history and memorabilia collected by his son-in-law and donated by his daughter to Montana State University.^[25]

Frank Dunham left the West much sooner than he had anticipated. He did bring Edith back to Camrose after their wedding in 1911, seven years after they began courting. She did host tea parties and join the church choir. Their first child was born the day before their first wedding anniversary, another daughter sixteen months later. When World War I broke out Frank

moved his family back to Ontario. If he was called overseas he wanted Edith close to her family. But he spent the war years working for a newspaper in Stratford, Ontario. He died in 1948 at the age of sixty-six; Edith lived for another seven years.^[26]

Dunham and Cavanaugh, one son of the East, one of the West. These are, of course, only two men, a small and perhaps unrepresentative sample. So can their voices, autobiographical and intimate, tell us anything about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideologies of masculinity? Miles and Frank had much in common. Although born almost twenty years apart, their life courses paralleled in many respects. Both were ambitious. Not satisfied with the work they obtained after high school, they went on to college. Both graduated at age twenty-five and then spent several years establishing themselves in their respective fields—law and journalism—before they married, Frank at age twenty-nine, Miles also in his twenties, and for the second time at age thirty-two. But what of their attitudes toward women, their ideas of marriage, their sexual behavior? Do they share anything here as well? Does Frank's eastern Methodist upbringing shape him to be a different man than Miles, son of western wanderlust?

Frank held the nineteenth-century middle-class view that a man's life was incomplete without marriage, that in fact a dwelling place only became a home when it was the locus of a wedded couple. He believed that a true woman like Edith would be a morally uplifting influence, that she would temper his overweening materialism, polish his rough edges, gently incorporate him into a social life he had shunned. And all this would be to the good. Frank had put Edith on a pedestal. He measured all women he met against her and found them wanting. Surely his words of praise and love must have pleased her. However, it was a daunting task to live up to Frank's ideal. On those few occasions when Edith got angry or expressed impatience or disappointment, Frank reacted with some sympathy, but with greater defensiveness and condescension. Frank was lonely and working hard in order to bring Edith west and make her his wife. Indeed, he saw Edith as his reward for years of work and loneliness. He seemed unaware of the inequality of their relationship or the powerlessness that Edith must have felt. Edith, in the prime of her life, was waiting at home to take up her career while Frank was busily consolidating his.

Miles shared Frank's view of marriage. In a wedding toast in 1888, he proposed, "He has not lived who never had a wife, nor she who never had a husband. The happiest phase of man's existence is born of the very ceremony we witness here tonight." Miles revealed more of his sexual behavior and attitudes about sexuality than did Frank. What he discloses are ideas also documented by Anthony Rotundo in his study of hundreds of middle-class men in the Northeast. Miles's sexual experimentation and attitudes were

not unique to western men. Miles made distinctions between "good" and "bad" women, or more accurately between asexual and sexual females. Female sexuality was alluring, comforting, dangerous, and disreputable. We do not have enough information about Miles's wives to know anything about them, but odds are they were both more like Isabelle than like Nellie or Mrs. Sheehan. Miles came of age in Comet. He lived independently of his family and had his first steady work. He fell in love, and he lost his virginity, quite significantly with different women.^[27]

Dunham and Cavanaugh's presentations of themselves suggest the strong persistence of a core of values that defined Anglo-American middle-class manhood from the early nineteenth century perhaps to the norm-shattering days of World War I. These included a commitment to work as the defining attribute of identity and a conviction that youthful work should result in a professional career; a belief that marriage was the validation of mature manhood and that an appropriate mate embodied the tenets of the cult of true womanhood; and a sexual ideology that could and did divorce love from eroticism.

One problem in assessing the stories of Dunham and Cavanaugh is that we lack a context for the examination of western-bred men. Just as women's history was born in the cradle of New England, historians' first studies of manliness, manhood, and masculinity are coming out of the Northeast and Midwest. And just as historians of western women first had to break down lingering stereotypes of gentle tamers, pioneer drudges, and whores with hearts of gold, historians of western men will have to humanize even more deeply entrenched icons of rugged mountain men, stoic braves, and romantic cowboys. Attention to the experiences of Teddy Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and Frederic Remington has created a West that served as a spa for the restoration of masculinity eroded by the pressures of industrialization, incorporation, and urbanization—a spa whose therapeutic retreat prepared men to return to the fray of eastern life. If anything, Dunham and Cavanaugh's stories show that the West was home, not way station. White, middle-class, well-educated though they were, Cavanaugh and Dunham were not caught up in the clutches of the masculine primitive ideal that apparently gripped so many eastern men of the late nineteenth century.^[28]

Pursuing this difference may be a fruitful avenue of further research in regional variations of gender ideology. Were men like Cavanaugh and Dunham, who were born in the West or who came, stayed, worked, and married there, more secure in their ability to deal with the "primitive"? Dunham and Cavanaugh accessed the western environment through daily work. Did the vigorous life become so much a part of everyday life that it negated a compulsion to impose continuous physical challenges to prove one's manhood? The stories of Miles Cavanaugh and Frank Dunham tell us that much

is yet to be learned about men's response to the West. They remind us that work and family were at the heart of men's daily lives as well as women's, and that men as well as women shaped themselves in the mirror of each other's eyes. Only by recovering and analyzing the intimate stories of men's and women's relationships with the western experience will we be able to write a truly gendered and truly human history of the region.