Colorado frontier settlers prized sharp dealing yet kept property and women safe.

Evidence

This is not Arcadia. “Smartness,” which consists in over-reaching your neighbor in every fashion which is not illegal, is the quality which is held in the greatest repute, and Mammon is the divinity. From a generation brought up to worship the one and admire the other little can be hoped. In districts distant as this is from “Church Ordinances,” there are three ways in which Sunday is spent: one, to make it a day for visiting, hunting, and fishing; another, to spend it in sleeping and abstinence from work; and the third, to continue all the usual occupations, consequently harvesting and felling and hauling timber are to be seen in progress. Last Sunday a man came here and put up a door, and said he didn’t believe in the Bible or in a God, and he wasn’t going to sacrifice his children’s bread to old-fashioned prejudices. There is a manifest indifference to the higher obligations of the law, “judgment, mercy and faith”; but in the main the settlers are steady, there are few flagrant breaches of morals, industry is the rule, life and property are far safer than in England or Scotland, and the law of universal respect to women is still in full force. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 196

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the immodesty/moral-panic thread: the contrast between ‘indifference to higher obligations’ and ‘universal respect to women’ complicates how frontier moral codes worked.

Related

• Frontier mining settlements were morally steady and safer than British cities. (similarity 0.83)
• Colorado settler life combined brutality with safety and greed with generosity (similarity 0.82)
• Pioneer settlements prized sharp dealing over neighborly virtue (similarity 0.80)
• Contrary to traveller talk, Colorado settlers welcomed her warmly (similarity 0.79)