On that day in the mid-1800s, the stagecoach driver, stout, with sun-browned skin, cast a single bluish-gray eye along the dusty, winding road.
It ran for 100 miles along the mountainous Sierra Nevada, connecting large California hubs like Stockton and Mariposa to tiny encamped gold towns, where one was as likely to speak French or Chinese as English. For stagecoach drivers, the rough terrain was made even rougher by the increasing threat of robbers eager to plunder the strongboxes owned by an up-and-coming banking and express company called Wells Fargo.
The driver, a native of the Upper Valley named Charley Parkhurst, was on high alert. On the way to Mariposa from Stockton, Parkhurst had reluctantly handed over a strongbox to a group of at least three robbers, which added an elevated sense of danger to the return trip.
The gruff-voiced stagecoach driver also had an added burden.
In addition to protecting the strongbox, Parkhurst was also protecting a secret, one that no one, even close friends, had even guessed at over decades of rough-and-tumble exploits along the trail.
Charley Parkhurst, famed stagecoach driver, was actually a woman.
Even before the world learned her secret, Parkhurst was famous, easily recognizable for her habit of blowing a horn as she rounded sharp turns on the stagecoach trail (the tobacco-chewing Parkhurst’s vocal limits were strained by mouth cancer) and the patch covering her left eye (which had been blinded by the kick of a horse, giving her the nickname “One-Eyed Charley”).
That day, driving her six-horse team on the return trip to Stockton, Parkhurst was once more targeted by the same group of robbers, including a notorious highwayman known as “Sugarfoot,” so named because he wrapped his feet in burlap sugar sacks. The assault against Parkhurst is known because a bleeding Sugarfoot later recounted the incident in a miner’s cabin in the hills, according to Parkhurst’s obituary in The New York Times.
Parkhurst, Sugarfoot said, had waited for the right moment and then turned the horses loose just as she opened fire with a revolver, hitting Sugarfoot and speeding away. The wound proved fatal to Sugarfoot, who died shortly after giving his account.
The discovery, made in 1880, that Parkhurst was actually a woman stirred the national imagination at a time when the roles and freedoms of women were severely restricted. People were fascinated with the story of how a teenaged Parkhurst left an orphanage and learned to ride horses and drive a team while living with a livery stable owner in Worcester, Mass.; rode from Boston to Panama on a steamship; and made her way to the booming, gold-crazy hills of California to seek opportunity, as recounted by the California Department of Parks and Recreation on a webpage about Parkhurst.
But little, if any, of the public attention focused on Parkhurst’s origins, which poses a question as interesting as her lifelong charade: How did a girl born into one of the most prestigious families in the Upper Valley wind up in an orphanage in the first place?
A Western Legend Is Born
Today, Charley Parkhurst has become a fixture in accounts of the iconic Wild West, only slightly less well-known than such household names as Butch Cassidy, Calamity Jane and Wyatt Earp.
Even when she was alive, her skill with a team under adverse conditions was legendary, and reported in at least one case by the author John Ross Browne, who wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 1860 about riding alongside Parkhurst, though he seems never to have guessed her secret.
“The way he handled the lines,” Browne wrote, “and peered through the clouds of dust and the volumes of darkness and saw trees and stumps and boulders and horses’ ears, when I could scarcely see my own hand before me, was a miracle of stage driving.”
The public imagination latched on to Parkhurst not simply because she had fooled the world into thinking she was a man, but because she became a man among men, earning distinction in a profession whose whip-carrying practitioners, including Buffalo Bill Cody, were lionized for their feats of strength and bravery. She drove a stagecoach, and built her legend, from the late 1830s to the late 1860s.
Author Karen Kondazian spent six years researching Parkhurst while writing The Whip, a novelization of her life.
Kondazian marveled at Parkhurst’s ability to keep the secret for her entire life.
“How in God’s name did this woman carry this off?” she said in a telephone interview from California. “These were the truck drivers of her time. They peed together. They spit together. They drank together. How she carried that off, I have no idea.”
After quitting the stagecoach business in 1868, Parkhurst opened a stage station and saloon. Eventually she sold it and took up a life as a farmer and lumberjack. At some point, physical ailments including rheumatism and mouth cancer caused her to give up that work as well, and she died on Dec. 29, 1879, two days after her 67th birthday, in a cabin on a ranch in Watsonville, Calif., where she is buried. When a coroner came to examine the body, he broke the news of her secret double life to an astonished world.
Since her death, Parkhurst’s fame has only grown.
Parkhurst, who has been credited with becoming the first woman to register to vote for an American president (in 1867, 53 years before ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution), has been the subject of countless storybooks, newspaper articles, history books and at least two novels — Kondazian’s 2012 tome, and Charley’s Choice, written by Fern Hill in 2008.
Even today, the Wells Fargo Museum on San Francisco’s Montgomery Street has a corner dedicated to Parkhurst, and there are plaques erected to her throughout California’s historical stagecoach trails. She has an entry on Wikipedia, one of more than 10,000 mentions of her that show up in a Google search for her name. Parkhurst is even the subject of academic papers on the transgendered community, though no one knows for sure whether she identified as a man, or merely disguised herself as a means of achieving more personal freedom.
Ed Ashey, of the Lebanon Historical Society, speculated that Parkhurst assumed the identity as a safety measure.
“Being taken away from her family, maybe she was attacked somehow, or bullied or something like that,” he said. “Maybe she decided, if she was the top bully, people wouldn’t bully her.”
Hill and Kondazian had similar ideas.
“Young orphan girls had little to hope for,” wrote Hill in an email. “They were taught to become mothers, maids, or if smart, maybe a teacher or a store clerk, not a very exciting future for anyone with a spark of adventure in her soul.”
Kondazian put it more bluntly.
“Women had three choices,” she said. “You could be a wife. You could be a teacher, if you could read. You could be a prostitute. That was about it.”
Kondazian said Parkhurst must have seized upon an opportunity to have a life that was bigger, and more free, than societal gender roles would have allowed her.
“I think it was a choice to live freely as a free spirit, not a sexual choice,” she said.
Hill said Parkhurst’s first experience with gender-ambiguous clothing could have happened at the orphanage.
“During that time period, orphans very often were dressed alike; short hair, pants and shirt for interchangeability of clothes, as orphanages were often run by the church and did not have a lot of money to spend on wardrobes or toys and the like,” Hill said. “Very young girls, those prior to puberty, very often wore the same clothes as the boys. There was little love expressed to orphans, which tended to make them more independent and self-sufficient as well.”
That still leaves unanswered the question of how Parkhurst — who was not an orphan — came to be in an orphanage in the first place.
A Family of Distinction
Parkhurst had deep roots in the Upper Valley — her grandfathers both served as officers in the Revolutionary War, and came to the region to settle the land, according to the 1995 genealogical book George Parkhurst Increasings: for Nine Generations, Volume One.
Charley Parkhurst’s mother was born Mary Morehouse, daughter of a Revolutionary War captain named David Morehouse, who today lies buried with his family in the Broad Brook Cemetery in Sharon.
On her father’s side, Parkhurst’s grandfather came to Sharon in 1769 as one of its original settlers. He owned about 1,000 acres of land on the White River, along the border between Sharon and Royalton. He served as a lieutenant in the Revolutionary War, was one of 13 men who took the Vermont Freeman’s Oath in Sharon in 1778, and represented Sharon in the Statehouse in 1780, 1793 and 1796. He and his family are also buried at Broad Brook.
Ebenezer’s son, and Charley Parkhurst’s father, also named Ebenezer Parkhurst, owned a large farm that adjoined his father’s land.
Ebenezer and Charley Parkhurst’s mother, Mary Morehouse, were married in 1807, when he was 26 and she was 21. In 1811, Ebenezer and Mary had their first and only son, Charles D. Parkhurst.
In late spring of 1812, when Mary became pregnant with another child, a daughter they would name Charlotte, they seemed poised to bring her into a comfortable life in a large, well-off and well-established family.
How then did it transpire that such a daughter ended up in an orphanage, on her way to a new life in the West? There are no definitive answers, but there are clues.
It was two days after Christmas — Dec. 27, 1812 — when cruel circumstances began to tear the family apart. That date marks both the birth of Charlotte “Charley” Parkhurst, and the death of her mother Mary, who was 25 at the time and likely died during childbirth.
About 10 weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2013, young Charles Parkhurst died of unknown causes at just 14 months of age.
Ebenezer Parkhurst may have sent his daughter away during this period, either of his own free will, or because of some deficiency in his role as a single parent, possibly a contributing factor in Charles’ death, caused the community to pressure him into relinquishing his infant girl.
Or it’s possible that she stayed in his care for the next few years, until another major transition came to the family.
On May 15, 1817, when Parkhurst was a 4-year-old girl, her father married a second wife, 17-year-old Lucy Cushing, in Bethel. The two would go on to have eight children together. Around the same time as the marriage, Ebenezer Parkhurst sold his farm and moved to Bethel, where he opened a general mercantile store. He eventually went on to become a judge in Windsor County, and served as sheriff from 1827 until about 1835, when he and his family moved to Michigan.
The New York Times obituary from 1880 said Parkhurst had grown up in an orphanage in Lebanon, but Ashey said he hasn’t been able to find any evidence that such an orphanage existed.
It’s possible, he said, that she lived with what we would today call a foster family.
“They had different families that would take care of orphans or the elderly, and they’d pay them like 50 cents a week for their care,” he said, a system with little oversight that was fraught with potential for abuse. “There are still horror stories of foster families.”
Mary Ayer, of the Sharon Historical Society, said many of the historical records from that time period have been lost to fire, and that she could find nothing about Parkhurst in the surviving documents.
Kondazian said that she doesn’t think the orphanage was in the Lebanon area at all.
Whenever Ebenezer Parkhurst gave up his daughter, she said, he had incentives to take her farther afield.
“Probably, he took her to Boston because the better orphanages were there,” she said. “Probably he didn’t want anyone to know that he did that.”
That idea is supported by Charley Parkhurst’s first known connection outside the orphanage — as a young teen learning to work with horses at a livery stable in Worcester, which is about 140 miles from Lebanon, but only 45 miles from Boston.
Ashey said assuming a male identity would have benefited a young person who was trying to leave her old life behind.
“If she was picked up as a female runaway, she would have been returned, but a young boy, they’d take him in, work him, that kind of thing,” he said.
Kondazian said it’s possible that she adopted the name “Charley” as a tribute to her dead brother, Charles.
Parkhurst’s removal from her biological family seems to have been complete. There are no reports that she ever returned to the Upper Valley, where many members of her extended family still lived. By the time her death became national news in 1880, her father and her father’s wife were both dead.
It’s unclear whether her siblings ever knew she even existed. But there are signs that, if they did, they had no interest in coming forward.
“The New York Times asked if any relatives would come to claim her body or say a word,” said Kondazian.
“Nobody did.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.