Wealthy consumptives traveled the frontier with elaborate mobile camps and servants.

Evidence

The house was the most pretentious I have yet seen, being papered and carpeted, and there were two “hired girls.” There was a lady there from Laramie, who kindly offered to receive me into her room, a very tall, elegant person, remarkable as being the first woman who had settled in the Rocky Mountains. She had been trying the “camp cure” for three months, and was then on her way home. She had a wagon with beds, tent, tent floor, cooking-stove, and every camp luxury, a light buggy, a man to manage everything, and a most superior “hired girl.” She was consumptive and frail in strength, but a very attractive person, and her stories of the perils and limitations of her early life at Fort Laramie were very interesting. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 160

Categorization

• FICTION: A frail, elegant woman hauling a full domestic establishment across the Rockies for a ‘camp cure’ is a ready-made character and image for a frontier story.
• STORYSTEM: Could anchor a story about the first woman to settle the Rockies and what ‘settling’ actually cost her.
• XREF: connects to: Frontier opportunity rhetoric masked elite capture of land and wealth — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 175; Frontier cabins housed a motley mix of invalids, prospectors, and aristocrats — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 289

Broader Connections

• Frontier opportunity rhetoric masked elite capture of land and wealth #complicates (0.90) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 175
• Frontier cabins housed a motley mix of invalids, prospectors, and aristocrats #expands (0.85) — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 289