Aged Wyoming Quaker Louisa Ann Swain Was the First Woman Voter

Frank Leslie's Illustrated carried this "sketch of Grandma Swain voting based on eye witness accounts bit there were no other women in line when Louisa Ann Swain asked officials to open the polls early while she was out and about running errands.

I believe I have mentioned before my considerable pride that my home state of Wyoming was the first jurisdiction in the United States to give women free and equal suffrage with men in all elections.  This was accomplished in 1869 when the sparsely populated U.S. Territory was still largely raw frontier. 

A fair amount has been written on pioneer women office holders like Esther Hobart Morris, a Justice of the Peace in South Pass or Bailiff Mary Atkinson* in Laramie, both in 1870.  Less well known is the first woman to actually cast a ballot in a general election on September 6, 1870, Louisa Ann Swain.

The best known of Wyoming's pioneer office holders was Esther Hobart Morris who was appointed Justice of the Peace in South Pass in 1870.  She is usually cited as the first woman to hold public office in the United States, but a handful of women had previously been elected to school boards.  This photo was taken in 1902 decades after her service.  A nephew was my 6th grade social studies who enthusiastically told her story in his Wyoming history class not long after a statue in her honor was erected on the state capitol grounds.

White women were still scarce in a place where adventuresome men were seeking fortunes in mining, ranching, farming, and the fine art of separating other fortune seekers from their gains in saloons and whore houses.  Others were laborers on the railroad, hard rock miners, cowboys, and soldiers.  The very scarcity of women raised their esteem and value in the rough and tumble railheads and mining boom towns.

Women came in two classes, although it was quite possible to move up—or down—between them.  First on the scene were, almost inevitably, the whores.  Many suffered and were abused.  But others prospered, saved their money and often became local landowners and businesswomen.  More than a few married their more prosperous Johns and by the acceptable alchemy of the time and place were soon respectable ladies. 

Gentlewomen came first as the wives of officers and non-coms at Army posts, with the bosses and foremen on the Union Pacific railroad construction crews, as the sun-bonnet pioneer wives of would-be sod busters.  Then, as the towns became a little more settled, they came as the wives of merchants, as school marms, and as single fortune hunters.   Many of these women, too, went into business running laundries, hotels, boarding houses, and such. With their husbands mostly too busy grubbing money to pay attention to civic affairs, women of both classes, sometimes in an uneasy and suspicious alliance, sometimes at each other’s throats, became de facto civic leaders even before the Territorial legislature extended the franchise.

For their part the powers in Cheyenne were amenable to this radical new experiment because they hoped sooner rather than later to become a state even though the population was far below the usual requirement.  They knew that the Territory’s chances of admission to the Union would be enhanced if it was safely Republican—the party of the rising cattle barons, mine owners, merchants, and professional classes.  But Democrats—laborers, miners, homesteaders, and small ranchers threatened to swamp Republicans at the polls.  Women, especially respectable women, were considered to be reliably Republican and adding them to the voting rolls gave the party an edge.

Leslie's was still fascinated by the oddity of women voting 20 years after Louisa Ann Swain cast a ballot.  This cover featured women in Cheyenne lined up to vote.  The tower of the Union Pacific Depot is recognizable in the background.

Republicans did come to dominate the state but extending the vote to women frightened the Eastern Establishment and, in the end, probably delayed admission to the Union until 1890.  Certainly, Harper’s Weekly and other popular newspapers and magazines mocked Wyoming women voters mercilessly.  But Wyoming stuck to its guns anyway—some said because Territorial legislators were afraid of their wives.

Modest Louisa Ann Swain, a demure Quaker grandmother, probably did not set out to make history.  She was up and about early and left her home in Laramie carrying a small tin pail, intent on purchasing some yeast at a general store for her baking.  On her errand she happened to pass a polling place that was still being set up and not yet officially open.  Wanting to get on with her baking without having to come back downtown, she inquired if she might be allowed to cast her vote then.

The accommodating election official obliged and as a small crowd of the usual loafers and political hacks looked on, she marked her ballot.  One of the observers was a reporter for the Laramie Sentinel who described her as “a gentle white-haired housewife, Quakerish in appearance.”  The same paper congratulated the good behavior of witnesses, “There was too much good sense in our community for any jeers or sneers to be seen on such an occasion.”

Of course, other women made it to the polls that day.  And it is even possible that in some other town bereft of documentation someone else actually voted earlier.  But let’s give Swain the credit she deserves. 

She was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1800 as Louisa Ann Gardner, the daughter of a sailing captain who was lost at sea in her childhood.  Her widowed mother moved to Charleston, South Carolina where she died sometime later leaving young Louisa an orphan.

Sent to live with an uncle in Baltimore, Maryland Louisa met and married Stephen Swain, who operated a successful chair factory, in 1821.  The couple had four children.  But with the youngest still in swaddling, Stephen got the itchy feet that seemed epidemic among 19th Century men.  He sold the factory and moved west, first to Zanesville, Ohio, and later to Indiana.

When the couple’s oldest son moved his family to Wyoming in 1868, the elder Swains came with him.  Not that they stayed long.   Within a year or so of fateful election with Stephen ailing, the couple returned to Maryland where he died in 1872.  In 1880 Louisa was laid by his side in the Friends Burial Ground.

                              Mrs. Strong in her proper Quaker cap with a book of devotions.

The Louisa Swain Foundation dedicated the Wyoming House for Historic Women in downtown Laramie in 2005.  A life size bronze statue of Swain stands in a plaza in front of the building which houses a sort of Wyoming Women’s Hall of Fame.  Thirteen honorees inside include Esther Hobart Morris, bailiff Mary Atkinson, Nellie Tayloe Ross, first woman elected Governor in the United States and first woman Director of the U.S. Mint, and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney who made headlines as a rare GOP critic of Donald Trump and the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

Louisa Strain's life size statue stands in front of Laramie's Wyoming House for Historic Women.  She is shown with her yeast pail and ballot.

In 2008 Congress declared an official Louis Ann Swain Day.

*A decedent, Otis Halverson of Cheyenne informs me that the bailiff is misidentified, an error perpetuated in various sources.  Her first name was Martha, not Mary, although it is possible that she used Mary as a nickname.  And at the time she served as a bailiff she was known as Boise, the name of her second husband.  After being widowed for the second time she married Mr. Atkinson years later.  As far as I can tell the confusion arose due to reliance on newspaper interviews conducted late in her life which naturally referred to her as Mrs. Atkinson.  Since Mary Atkinson is the name I found most usually cited, I have let it stand in the body of the article and noted the clarification here.

 

A Dorky Cheyenne Boy Had aNutty Obsession With the Rough Rider

  

Theodore Roosevelt--boyhood idol turned obsession.

Brilliant. Bombastic. Explosively energetic.  Arrogant.  Innovative.  Ego maniacal.  Heroic.  Perpetually manic.  Self-inventing.  Those are some of the words and phrases the immediately spring to mind when contemplating the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the man who, among other things, reinvented the Presidency for the 20th Century.  The man who was born into a wealthy and influential old Knickerbocker Dutch family on October 27, 1858 continues to fascinate 106 years after his death in 1919 at the age of 60. 

In recent years he was the subject of widely hailed three volume biography by Edmund Morris and several other books examining various parts of his multi-faceted life, studied in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s close examination of the Progressive era in The Bully Pulpit, portrayed by Tom Berenger in the TV miniseries Rough Riders, and was one of the three main characters profiled in Ken Burns’ epic 5 night PBS documentary series The Roosevelts. And one of my favorite novelists and Facebook connections Jerome Charyn got inside T.R.’s head in The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King.

Jerome Charyn's The Cowboy King was a rip-roaring romp and a reminder of why idolized Theodore Roosevelt.  It even echoed the vibe of my Classic Illustrated comic book.

But 40 years after Roosevelt’s death, he also grabbed the idolizing attention of a 10 year old nerd from Cheyenne, Wyoming.  I was already in the grips of fascination with history as a bespectacled, bookish kid with no friends when I first encountered passing notice of him in my entirely inadequate elementary school social studies text.  From there I checked him out in the illustrated Presidential biography books that I had already collected.  And my folks rook me to the Black Hills where I saq Roosevelt’s visage squeezed in between Jefferson and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore.  So I knew he was a big deal.

But what turned Roosevelt from a passing interest into an obsession was a Classics Illustrated   comic book, The Roughrider.  It told the story of how young Theodore, the weakling asthmatic who was bullied and mocked for his myopia and thick glasses but who by dint of sheer grit and determination transformed himself into a Harvard boxer, South Dakota rancher, New York City Police Commissioner, war hero, and eventually President.  A particularly satisfying panel in the book depicted Roosevelt knocking out with one mighty blow a cowboy who mocked him as four eyes.  The boy Teddy seemed a lot like me, likewise the brunt of ridicule and abuse.  The adult hero held out promise that it did not always have to be that way.

It was a short step from hero worship to nutty obsession.  How so?  Let me count the ways.

Not Batman, Superman, or The Flash could compete with my comic book super hero..

The first thing was appearance.  The mustache stubbornly refused to rise from the fine blonde down on my upper  lip.  Halloween costume fakes were all jet black, lacked the distinctive inward curl around the sides of the mouth, and, well, looked like crap.  And I discovered that pince-nez glasses were not available at my local optician.  I was stuck with the clunky plastic faux tortoise shell frames fit for a middle aged accountant.  But I could get the hat right.

I started with a cheap gray felt hat I bought at a souvenir stand at Cheyenne Frontier Days.  It was supposed to be a Confederate hat and had a paper Stars and Bars Flag sticker on the front.  I was a loyal Union man and spent hours trying to get all vestiges of that peeled off.  The hat did have a satisfyingly military looking gold braid band with end tassels.  I pinned up one side with a brass US collar insignia from my Dad’s World War II uniform.  It made a satisfying reproduction of Col. Roosevelt’s famous Rough Rider campaign hat.

At first I decorated it with a long pheasant tail feather, but discarded that when I realized that no photo showed my beloved Teddy sporting such a plume.  I wore that increasingly battered hat every single day from the moment I got out of bed to the time I turned in at night—except when required to remove it at school or church—for almost three years until it practically disintegrated, and my head got too big.  Needless to say, I attracted a lot of gaping stares.  And the bullies were unimpressed by its martial appearance.

The hat was useful in the back yard fantasy games I played largely by myself.  None of the other neighborhood kids, least of all twin brother Tim who was running with a faster older crowd and already smoking cigarettes in their fort/club house, were interested in daily charges up San Juan Hill or whatever other adventures I could conjure.  My red and white Firestone coaster brake bicycle with the plastic streamers on the hand grips had to be my noble steed.

Alas, there are no extant photos of me in my Rough Rider hat, although I know that several were snapped on our old Kodak Brownie Box Camera.  My mom, likely out of shame and humiliation, left them out of her meticulously maintained photo albums and they can’t even be located in the unsorted shoe boxes of old photos. 

School was a place where my obsession played out with a bit of drama.  I started handing in my homework, busy work Ditto activity sheets, quizzes, and tests with the correct day of the month underneath my name but instead of 1959 listing the year as 1905, the year after Roosevelt’s election to a full term on his own. I picked the year because the old movies I watched on TV when I got home from school painted that era as sunny, pleasant, and free from looming nuclear annihilation—something that was constantly on our minds in Cheyenne where the Air Force was beginning to build the nation’s first ICBM missile base and which, the civic boast proclaimed, would be a top target for Commie obliteration.  The movies, mostly musicals and comedies like Meet Me in St. Louis or Life With Father were all made in the ‘30’s and ‘40s when many ticket buyers were of an age to recall those days with wistful nostalgia.  Most depicted the comfortable middle class in large homes with live-in servants.  It seemed to me that Teddy Roosevelt ruled over an ideal time to be alive.

The comfortable family life depicted in movies like Meet Me in St. Louis made me long to live in the days of Teddy Roosevelt's Presidency. After all, no Ruskie was apt to drop a nuke on this house..

So I decided that, come hell or high water, I would live then.  Neither my teachers, nor the Principal at Eastridge Elementary where I was routinely sent for an attitude adjustment, were amused by this quirk.  They demanded that I use the correct date and used every punishment in their arsenal to compel my acquiescence.  For a while I was given an F (actually a 5 because Cheyenne Public Schools were then using an odd numerical grading system) on every paper I turned in with the wrong year.  But I was a student reading at the level of a senior in high School and in subjects like social studies and science showed every evidence of complete mastery of the lessons.  Of course my spelling was atrocious, my hand writing cramped and nearly illegible, and I was too bored by arithmetic to bother with accurate computations and, it would be discovered much later, was mildly dyslexic compounding that problem.  Despite my wildly uneven academic performance, eventually it was decided that it was hopeless the hold the date thing against my grades.  Besides, if the teachers kept it up, I would be held back for another year and they would be stuck with me again.

So, they tried keeping me in for recess.  Hardly a punishment as it kept me from getting beat up on the playground.  While the others were outside running around and screaming, I was happily alone in the classroom partaking of my favorite activity—reading.  Keeping me after school was no skin off my nose either.  Things were not all that rosy at home where my Mom was battling mental health and rage issues and I was the #1 object of her wrath and dissatisfaction with the hand life had dealt her.  Of course, that also meant that when the school sent home notes complaining about my stubborn misdating, she took it as a purposeful disgrace to the family—the gravest of all possible offenses.  Then out would come the wire handle of the fly swatter, down would drop my jeans and underwear and my ass got whipped to hamburger.

None of it mattered.  I just kept entering that date, and dreaming of the time and place where nothing like that happened. 

Roosevelt made several visits to Wyoming including this 1902 Presidential visit to Yellowstone National Park.  A special full scale rodeo was once put on for him in Cheyenne at the Frontier Days grounds.  Several Wyoming cowboys had joined his Rough Riders and other were ready to sign up for the new volunteer cavalry unit that Woodrow Wilson would not let him raise for World War I.

The whole thing lasted almost three years until I entered Junior High School and just let it all slide for new dreams and obsessions, every bit as weird perhaps, but not as apt to draw notice. 

Then in a few more years I would discover the underside of 1905 and the Roosevelt utopia—the world of vicious capitalist exploitation of working people, their resistance and rebellion, of open class war, Jim Crow, lynchings, and of nasty little imperialist wars.

Native Holy Site Devils Tower Became the First U.S. National Monument

 

                                            A 1950's era National Park Service poster promoted visits to Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. 

My old home state of Wyoming has a lot of memorable, iconic sights—the Yellowstone geyser Old Faithful, the front range of the Grand Tetons, Independence Rock on the old Oregon Trail.  But nothing is more unusual or more recognized than the formation that looks like a giant tree stump rising high above the winding Belle Fouche River in a remote corner of the state—Devils Tower. 

After 10 years of futile efforts by the Wyoming Congressional delegation to have a much larger area including the formation declared a National Park on September 24, 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt, proclaimed Devils Tower a National Monument. It was the first ever use of that designation.  Only 1,152.91 acres of the originally proposed park were protected.  

Two years later the rest of the abortive park in the drainage, including the nearby Little Missouri Buttes, were opened for public use—a victory for both timber interests and cattlemen seeking yet more open range grazing.

No one is exactly sure when the imposing feature was first seen by Whites.  Likely early trappers caught a glimpse, but accounts have not been found.  In 1857 Lt. G. K. Warren’s expedition to reach the Black Hills from Ft. Laramie was turned away from the area by a large party of hostile Lakota.  Warren’s log mentions seeing the Bear Lodge—one of several indigenous names for the rock—and the Little Missouri Buttes in the distance through a powerful telescope.  But some scholars believe, because he did not remark on its unusual configuration, that he was probably referring to the Bear Lodge Mountains also nearby.

On July 20, 1859 topographer J. T. Hutton and Sioux scout Zephyr Recontre reached the formation.  They were a small party from the larger Capt. W. F. Raynolds Yellowstone Expedition.  But once again neither Hutton nor Raynolds left a detailed account.  

 

 A 1900 photograph of Devil's Tower.  Few visitors came to the remote location far from rail lines and improved roads of any kind.  Most visitors packed in by horse and mule for days to see the marvel.

It wasn’t until 1875 that a U.S. Geological Survey expedition and its military escort under Col. Richard I. Dodge studied the formation and described in detail.  Expedition member Henry Newt wrote: 

Its remarkable structure, its symmetry, and its prominence made it an unfailing object of wonder. . . It is a great remarkable obelisk of trachyte, with a columnar structure, giving it a vertically striated appearance, and it rises 625 feet almost perpendicular, from its base. Its summit is so entirely inaccessible that the energetic explorer, to whom the ascent of an ordinarily difficult crag is but a pleasant pastime, standing at its base could only look upward in despair of ever planting his feet on the top.

Dodge was credited with giving the formation its now familiar English name.  As was so often the case, it came from a misunderstanding about a native name.  An interpreter mistranslated one of the native names—most of which were some variation of Bear’s Lodge in several different Plains tribe tongues—to Bad God’s Tower.  Expedition members converted this to “Devil’s Tower.”  Following standard topographical practice, the apostrophe was dropped from the official name given the formation.  We can be fairly certain that the translation somehow went awry because none of the many native legends associated with the rock have anything remotely to do with a “bad god.” 

Of course, Native tribes had been aware of the Tower.  It was considered magical or sacred by many tribes—in addition to the Lakota and other Sioux the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, and Kiowa.  The Lakota, the dominant tribe in the since their arrival from the area around the headwaters of the Mississippi in the late 18th Century and their spectacularly successful adoption of the horse centered Plains Indian culture, regarded the Bear Lodge—Matho Thípila—as a sacred location second only to the Black Hills. 

The various tribes have different origin stories for the great rock and many associations with mythic figures or great heroes.  Many used the Tower as the site of individual cleansing rituals, group spiritual practice such as the Sun Dance and Sweat Lodge purifications, and as a sacred burial ground for heroes and great shamans.  The Lakota associated it with one of their most sacred objects, the White Buffalo Pipe, a gift of White Buffalo Woman, a great spiritual mythic or semi-mythic presence. 

 

Of several origin stories from various tribes, the Park Service has heavily promoted the somewhat dubious Bear Legend connecting the tower to the Pleiades star formation--a Lakota tale grafted to stories of European origin.  This painting is on display at the visitor's center and is regularly used in Park Service literature. 

Among the many legends associated with the tower, the National Park Service, custodians of the Monument, heavily promoted one story in their literature.  In this tale, shared in slightly different forms by the Kiowa and Lakota, seven Indian girls were playing or gathering food near the river when a giant bear attacked them.  The girls fled and ran to a large stump.  They jumped on it and began to pray to the Great Spirit (this language is a tip-off that the story has been laundered through Whites and not collected directly from the people) for help.  Hearing their prayers, he began to raise the stump to the heavens.  As it grew and grew, the enormous Bear tried to climb the stump leaving his claw marks on the side and littering the base with the shredded bark.  The Bear could not reach the girls and went away.  But by then the stump had grown so high that the girls could not climb down.  Taking pity on their plight, the Great Spirit transformed the girls into seven stars directly above the tower, stars known to Europeans as the Pleiades.  It is difficult to tell know exactly how much of this popular story—I was entranced with it as boy—came from authentic tradition, and how much grafted from similar tales in Western mythology.

 

Standing in a spring snow, this Park Service Sign warns visitors to leave Native sacred objects alone.  Despite the admonition tourists steal or attempt to steal objects as souvenirs. 

Today members of several tribes continue to hold ritual observances at the Tower, although burials are now forbidden by the Park Service. 

It is also a popular tourist attraction, although it takes a fairly determined tourist to get there.  Located hours away from the nearest attractions in the Black Hills, far from any town of even modest size, well away from major highways, most visitors have to dedicate an entire day to seeing just this one sight.  There is only one café at road junction miles away and a Park Service concession stand on site for food.  There are a couple of 1950’s style motels nearby, dude ranches in the area, and camping at Monument.

 

Devils Tower became an alien landing place in Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of a Third Kind sparking new waves of visitors to the remote location. 

Yet people come.  Visits took a dramatic jump when Steven Spielberg featured the Tower as the alien landing spot in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  And it has become a Mecca for the growing sport of rock climbing.  Hundreds make the climb every season, as many as a dozen a day, using several well established routes to the top on every side. 

Native tribes, for home the site is sacred, objected to any climbing.  White climbers and the tribes were at odds for years until the Park Service brokered a “voluntary” compromise.  Since most tribes hold their holiest ceremonies at the Tower in June, the Park Service asked climbers to voluntarily refrain from ascending the rock in that month.  They estimate that 85% of climbers honor that agreement.  But authorities are powerless to stop those who do not.  A climbing group and local tourist interests have sued the Park Service for even suggesting self-restraint.

 

On a nice summer day dozens of parties can be seen ascending the tower.  Here two groups are rappelling down from the top. 

I visited Devils Tower several times as a boy.  Years ago, when my two oldest daughters were still children my wife and I made the long trip from the Black Hills to show it to them.  It was one of the few natural wonders that they saw on that Western trip that actually impressed them.  They even managed to hike the trail that encircles the rock, quite an achievement for kids allergic to walking.