Rebel Women of the West Coast: Their Triumphs, Tragedies and Lasting Legacies

Prologue

Assistant Secretary of State Dixy Lee Ray opened the clippings file. In the spring of 1975, news stories didn’t make for happy reading. On its relentless drive to the Vietnamese capital, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), the North Vietnamese Army had overrun Hué, Chu Lai and Da Nang, all in the previous few days. Most American forces had already pulled out; only Marines and civilians were left and—what was this?

A small item, easily overlooked: the North Vietnamese were closing in on the little town of Da Lat and a South Vietnamese nuclear facility the US had helped build. A few minutes later, Dixy had shoved aside everything she had on her agenda. The danger was clear: a working nuclear facility could fall into the hands of the enemy. However, this issue was outside her jurisdiction. Dutifully, she called an appropriate contact at the Department of Energy, but the person was out of touch, skiing in Colorado.

To hell with protocol! Dixy called the Department of Defense directly, urging the military to fly in, snatch the plant’s fuel rods and destroy the installation. Soon the mission was accomplished, without casualties. But what if she hadn’t bothered to read the bulletins?

This seat-of-your-pants stuff was driving her crazy, and it was more evidence that she was working with a bunch of sycophantic, platitude-mumbling bureaucrats in what she called the most unmanaged department in the federal government.

Rebel scientist Dixy Lee Ray was sick of it.

Introduction

Rebel: a person who resists any authority, control or tradition.

Traditional beliefs, along with social norms and conventional wisdom, change over time, often as a result of the actions of people we still call rebels. Here are amazing stories of singularly courageous women—driven, obsessed, sometimes desperate women whose nonconformist beliefs, attitudes and, most of all, actions, made them rebels in society’s eyes. If their attitudes and behaviour seem less rebellious to us than they did to their contemporaries, it is because these women did rebel and effected the changes we take for granted.

I always tell girls that they can do anything they want to if they only want to enough, Atomic Energy Commissioner Dixy Lee Ray once counselled. If that sounds easy, thank women such as Dixy, who in the early 1950s was the University of Washington’s first and only female faculty member in zoology or botany. To surmount chauvinistic attitudes, a young woman who wanted a career outside of teaching, nursing or secretarial work needed more than desire. She needed to have nerves of steel and a will of iron.

Unorthodox male behaviour was, and still is, tolerated and even lauded as get-up-and-go, grit, perseverance and novel thinking. Not so in women. Female perseverance is still too often regarded as stubbornness, and novel thinking is judged irrational, an attitude carried over from an era when intelligent women knew that their place was at home with their children. Their place was not in managerial offices, university lecture halls, broadcast studios, polling booths, government assemblies or operating theatres. In Rebel Women of the West Coast, you will meet women who asked only for equality and respect in all of these forbidden places.

In June 2009, an Alberta Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) blogged his female staff and constituents, Men are attracted to smiles, so smile and don’t give me that ‘treated equal’ stuff; if you want equal it comes in little packages at Starbucks.

There is little likelihood that the need for rebel women will disappear any time soon.

CHAPTER

1

Rebels of the Trail

What moves people to give up their livelihood, abandon habit, leave homes and loved ones and travel to far-off, hostile lands?

The reasons that compelled thousands of 19th-century Americans and British colonials to venture into the western wilderness of North America varied, depending on the time and place. A.L. Fortune, one of a tiny number of Canadians making a journey across most of the continent, explained that for many miles deep Ontario’s habitable lands were occupied, and he felt, her sons would year after year follow me and others to the west not finding scope near home to satisfy their longings.

Thomas McMicking, leader of one Canadian exodus, saw his decision as a part of a larger destiny. Both their present communities and any future settlements they might create shall become one and the same country. All it took for Fortune, McMicking and their companions to make the final decision was a compelling event. By spring 1858, they had it: gold had been discovered in New Caledonia (British Columbia).

In the early 1800s, there were few women on the trail. When missionary Mary Walker ventured west before the fabled Oregon Trail existed, it was because she felt compelled to convert western Natives to Christianity. But she had to marry in order to do so. In British territory, wives were persuaded to stay home to raise children and were separated from their wandering husbands for months, years or sometimes forever. Not Catherine Schubert, who fought to accompany her husband. Thousands of women would set out later, but when Mary and Catherine left civilization behind, they were the true rebels of the trail.

Missionary Mary Walker

Mary Richardson was puzzled. Elkanah Walker, the tall and rather awkward gentleman introduced to her earlier that day by her family’s minister, was back again. Perhaps, she guessed, he had returned to arrange details of the evening church meeting her devout Presbyterian family was hosting. Her parents invited Walker to stay the night.

Early the next morning, Mary found the man sitting alone, reading his Bible. Nervous Mary and intense Elkanah began to talk. He said he was hoping for African missionary work. Mary had also asked for placement on the dark continent, but because she was single, the church’s board of foreign missions had turned her down. It was a bitter disappointment for someone who had decided to become a missionary when she was 10.

I am going to surprise you, Walker blurted. I may as well do my errand first as last. As I have no one engaged to go with me, he rushed on, I have come with the intention of offering myself to you.

This man—a mere stranger a few hours before—was proposing marriage! And that is how Mary Richardson Walker made the most important decision of her life. But the significance of her decision didn’t lie in marriage to a man she hardly knew; that was commonplace for early 19th-century women. It was accepting the condition built into that marriage: travel to a wild, little-known territory thousands of miles away. Knowing that Mary had been rejected as a missionary, the foreign missions secretary had suggested Walker meet her. A letter to Mary from a church lecturer suggested that here was a way for her to reach her personal goal and fulfill her obligation to the Lord: marry this man and do God’s work with him, wherever that might take her. Had Mary lived the narrow, prescribed existence of most women of her time, she might have remained oblivious to the board’s machinations. However, because perceptive Mary was worldly as well as spiritual, she suspected she was being manipulated. She was correct.

While deeply religious, Mary’s parents nevertheless had enrolled their daughter in progressive schools that offered more than basic literacy, an unusual decision in the 1830s. Consequently, as a young girl, Mary became fascinated with science and had harboured the unorthodox idea of becoming a woman doctor. However, while attending a Methodist revival meeting one night, young Mary experienced a blissful religious transformation. The fervour of that moment shaped her life and became the source of inner conflict that agonized her almost daily.

Years later, on the day of Elkanah’s proposal, Mary admitted in her diary that, The hand of Providence appeared so plain that I could not but feel that there was something like duty about it. Which would win: religious duty or her heart’s desire? By evening, Mary determined that duty must prove the path of peace.

Mary and Elkanah were married on March 5, 1838. They set off just days later to bring salvation to the Natives, travelling from Maine by buggy, stagecoach, train, steamboat and, finally, on horseback, not to Africa (tribal conflict made it too dangerous), but through Indian country to the Columbia River, as their US passports put it. (Passports were necessary because the Walkers’ destination lay outside the frontier boundaries of the US.)

The Walkers were bound for Marcus Whitman’s recently established Presbyterian mission, located in an enormous swath of wilderness called Oregon Territory, which extended up the west coast to the Queen Charlotte Islands, directly east to the Rockies and south to the border of Mexico’s Spanish California. This wilderness belonged to no nation. There was no discernible path to follow. It would be two more years before the first wagon would roll over the future Oregon Trail.

The Walkers set off on horseback from Missouri with three other missionary couples, including the Grays, newly- weds like themselves. For all their pious intent, the missionaries’ personalities clashed repeatedly. Less than four days out, some of the company feel disposed to murmur against Moses, Mary recorded. Moses was William Gray, the group’s self-appointed leader, who had already visited Oregon Territory. A month later, Mary wrote sadly, We have a strange company of Missionaries. Scarcely one who is not intolerable on some account.

These ill-tempered missionaries