Part of a series of articles titled Women's History in the Pacific West - Columbia-Pacific Northwest Collection.
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Article
Margaret Frink
United States: Ledyard Frink, 1897.
Margaret Frink, who joined the Californian Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century, provides a glimpse of what life was like on the journey west through her meticulously kept diary. Americans on the East Coast and in the Midwest were keenly interested in stories about the Gold Rush. Personal letters of travelers were widely shared, and middle-class women and men penned accounts. Frink’s own description of daily life in 1850 was ultimately published after her death under the title Journal of the Adventures of a Party of California Gold-seekers. Her published diary and its treatment of western landmarks, like the City of Rocks, exemplify the “tender violence” of Anglo-American cultural production and the ways that such writings contributed to the erasure of Native nations in Anglo-American imaginations during the Gold Rush era.1
On April 25, 1817, Margaret Ann was born to Joseph and Mary Alsip in Frederick, Maryland.2 At twenty-two, she married Ledyard Frink, and the couple eventually settled in Martinsville, Indiana.3 When gold was discovered in California in January 1848, the news flew around the world enticing tens of thousands of Americans to travel west in hopes of striking it rich.4 The Frinks caught “gold fever” in December 1849 and made plans to move to California the following spring. Leaving Indiana on March 30, 1850, Margaret and Ledyard Frink traveled by wagon 2,418 miles to arrive in Sacramento, California on September 7, 1850, two days before California was admitted to the Union as the 31st state.5
According to the diary, the Frinks arrived on Wednesday, July 17 at the City of Rocks in Idaho. She described the place as “a stone village composed of huge, isolated rocks of various and singular shapes, some resembling cottages, others steeples and domes.” Perhaps for this reason, she preferred to call it “Pyramid City.” The couple spent little time at the City of Rocks, merely passing through in the middle of their day. However, it made enough of an impression for Margaret to call it “a sublime, strange, and wonderful scene – one of nature’s most interesting works.”6 While the City of Rocks acted as a noteworthy guidepost for Anglo-American colonizers on their westward march, it had been part of the homelands of multiple Native tribes, including Shoshone and Paiute peoples, for much longer.7 This longer Indigenous history and contemporary reality was not part of publications like Margaret Frink’s.
Like many gold-seekers who made their way to California, the Frinks found more stability and profit in catering to the residents of Sacramento than in searching for gold themselves. The couple went into the hotel business, where they became famous for serving free fresh milk.8 As Margaret explained, the milk “was a great attraction to men, many of whom had not tasted milk for one or two years.”9 When Margaret was writing her diary, she likely expected to revisit many of those landscapes on her trip back East laden with gold. However, the couple’s success in the hotel business, made possible by Margaret’s labor cooking and managing staff, prompted the Frinks to settle permanently in California.10 Margaret died on January 16, 1893 in Oakland, California at the age of 75.11
Published by her husband in 1897, Margaret Frink’s diary contributed to the triumphant narrative of US conquest of the American West. The diary’s focus on the couple’s challenges and feats during their journey and their ultimate success as hoteliers in California obscures the simultaneous dislocation and genocide of California Indians that made the Frinks’ achievements possible. Through her writing, Margaret Frink contributed to a cultural claiming of the American West for Anglo-Americans, including the City of Rocks.
Further reading:
- Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
- Limerick, Patricia Nelson. Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1987.
1 - Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Wexler develops the idea of “tender violence” in the context of photographs taken at the turn of the twentieth century by middle-class white women, who used their perceived innocence “to construct images of war as peace” [6]. These Anglo-American women supported the US imperial project through the sentimentality in their photographs. Here, Frink’s diary operates in a similar fashion; her words romanticized western expansion while ignoring the acts of violence perpetrated on and within the conquered landscapes.
2 - Janet Nadol, “Margaret Ann Alsip Frink,” Find A Grave, June 6, 2017, accessed September 1, 2020, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/180104069/margaret-ann-frink; “Mrs Ledyard Frink in the California, Pioneer and Immigrant Files, 1790-1950,” Sacramento Country, California, Pioneer Index File (1906-1934), A-Z, California History Room, Microfilm 734, roll number 43, database on-line, Ancestry.com, California State Library, Sacramento, CA.
3 - Margaret A. Frink, Journal of the Adventures of a Party of California Gold-seekers (Ledyard Frink, 1897), 5, original from Princeton University, digitized March 31, 2010, https://books.google.com/books?id=LmVNAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.
4 - “The California Gold Rush,” California National Historic Trail, National Park Service, accessed September 14, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/cali/learn/historyculture/california-gold-rush.htm.
5 - Frink, Journal of the Adventures, 119.
6 - Frink, Journal of the Adventures, 76.
7 - “History & Culture,” City of Rocks, National Park Service, last updated January 29, 2020, accessed September 17, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/ciro/learn/historyculture/index.htm.
8 - Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012); “Ledyard Frink in the 1850 United States Federal Census,” Sacramento, California, roll 35, pp 163B, database on-line, Ancestry.com, Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, national Archives, Washington, D.C.
9 - Frink, Journal of the Adventures, 126.
10 - Frink, Journal of the Adventures, 124-127.
11 - Nadol, “Margaret Ann Alsip Frink,” Find A Grave.
Acknowledgements:
This project was made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.This project was conducted in Partnership with the University of California Davis History Department through the Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, CA# P20AC00946
Last updated: February 22, 2022