Cleaveland, Agnes Morley

Excerpt from No Life for a Lady

Originally published in 1941

In the 1800s cattle drives were considered men's work. But that didn't mean that women didn't play an important role in the cattle boom of the late nineteenth century. In fact, some of the infamous female figures in the West were as romanticized as their male counterparts. Horse thief and cattle rustler Belle Starr was widely known as the female Jesse James, and Calamity Jane was as celebrated as Wild Bill Hickok for her exploits with a gun. In the rowdy cattle towns that popped up across Kansas, dance hall girls and prostitutes were very colorful figures. However, most women—like most cowboys—led more ordinary lives than the legends indicate. Ranchers' wives worked alongside their husbands to build the ranches that were the bases for cattle drives. On small farms and ranches in the Far West, women often had to do much of the same work as men, as well as cook and take care of the children.

Agnes Morley Cleaveland was not a cowboy, but she was as close as a woman came to being a real cowgirl. Born Agnes Morley in 1874 to a renowned railroad engineer who owned plots of land throughout the West, Miss Agnes, as she was known on the ranch, grew up in the high desert country of southwestern New Mexico, near the village of Magdalena. Her parents worried about bringing up their daughter in the rough and turbulent atmosphere of the West, but, as her father said to her mother, "Well, Ada, we've put our hands to this plow. We can't turn around in the middle of the furrow. I've got to build the Santa Fe [railroad]." Cleaveland was sent east during the school year to attend boarding schools, but she returned every summer to the family ranch in Datil Canyon. It was there that she learned to ride and tend cattle.

When their parents passed away, Agnes and her brother Ray were left in charge of the ranch, which they ran together until Agnes married and moved to California in 1899. Cleaveland recorded her memories of growing up on and running the ranch in No Life for a Lady, a detailed account of a woman's life in one of the most remote and desolate parts of the American West. Though her stories are not quite as colorful or as dramatic as those told by Teddy Blue Abbott and Nat Love, they also speak of ceaseless labor, dangerous exploits—and romance. Cleaveland's account makes it clear that while women may have been protected by the cowboy's code of chivalry (a code of bravery, courtesy, honor, and gallantry toward women), women did plenty of hard work themselves and played an important part in the taming of the West.

Things to remember while reading the excerpt from No Life for a Lady:

• No Life for a Lady is a very rare account of a woman's experiences as a cowgirl. Little is known about how many women may have had such experiences.
• Women often found success and independence opening businesses—laundries, restaurants, and so on—in the small towns that sprang up throughout the West.
• In the early mining settlements in California and Colorado men outnumbered women nine or ten to one.

What happened next . . .

After her parents died, Agnes Morley Cleaveland ran the family ranch with her younger brother, Ray Morley, until she married and moved away to California with her husband. Cleaveland became a part-time journalist, but she returned frequently to the New Mexico ranching land that she described so lovingly in her book. Ray Morley became one of the biggest ranchers in Catron County, New Mexico, buying up adjacent ranch land and tending large herds of cattle. After New Mexico became a state in 1912, the federal government contained much of the Morley land within the boundaries of what is now the Cibola National Forest. Unhappy at having to obey rangers' requests that he take down his barbed-wire fence, Morley waged a long and losing battle against the Forest Service. Morley eventually sold the ranch land.

Did you know . . .

• New Mexico did not become a state until 1912.
• In 1836 Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, two Protestant missionaries, became the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains.
• Women won the right to vote in four western states before 1900, well before women in eastern states did.

For More Information

Armitage, Susan and Elizabeth Jameson, eds. The Women's West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.

Armitage, Susan, Ruth B. Moynihan, and Christine Fischer Dichamp, eds. So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Brown, Dee. The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West. New York: Bantam Books, 1974.

Cleaveland, Agnes Morley. No Life for a Lady. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Frontier Women. New York: Hill & Wang, 1979.

Levy, JoAnn. They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1990.

Myres, Sandra L. Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800–1915. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

Reiter, Joan Swallow, et al. The Old West: The Women. New York: Time-Life Books, 1978.

Schlissel, Lillian. Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

Stratton, Joanna L. Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.

West, Elliott. Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.