Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman

ISBN-13: 9781613739556

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Chicago Review Press - Incorporated

Publication Date: 05-07-2019

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

Cathryn J. Prince is the author of American Daredevil, Death in the Baltic, and Shot from the Sky. She has worked as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Switzerland and in New York, where she reported on the United Nations, and is a frequent contributor to The Times of Israel.

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CHAPTER 1

MOUNTAINEERING FOR LADIES

SWEAT CASCADED DOWN Fanny Bullock Workman's back. Underneath her woolen jacket, her once crisp white shirt, buttoned to the neck, was plastered to her skin. Her heavy skirt was sodden around the hem, and her legs, clad in wool stockings, itched from the heat. On the way to the summit she had noticed how the dust glittered on her hobnailed boots, how the green leaves drooped motionless in the humid air, and how the sedges and mosses carpeted the spaces between the trees. Now, as she caught her breath, her eyes crinkled upward. She could hear her husband's footfalls growing louder as he neared, but for just a moment she owned the view from atop Mount Washington.

It was a clear day in the summer of 1881, and from the summit of the 6,288-foot-high peak in New Hampshire's White Mountains, the earth and sky melded into a misty blue line. Certainly, she thought, few had ever stood here before this panoramic view. All thirty-three peaks in the Presidential Range, including Mount Adams, Mount Jefferson, and Mount Madison, jutted upward. To the east lay the Atlantic Ocean, and if she turned ever so slightly she could see across Vermont to New York's Adirondack Mountains in the west. To the north lay Canada, and to the south was Massachusetts.

The sight perfectly matched the description in Among the Clouds, Mount Washington's famous daily newspaper, the only newspaper printed on the summit of any mountain in the world — and it was printed twice daily.

For Fanny and William Hunter Workman (or Hunter, as she called him) climbing brought a certain sense of liberation. The newly married couple, like so many in their social milieu, enjoyed escaping the cities and towns. As Charles Dudley Warner wrote in his book In the Wilderness, "The real enjoyment of camping and tramping in the woods lies in a return to primitive conditions of lodging, dress, and food, in as total an escape as may be from the requirements of civilization."

This was not Workman's first time up the mountain. Many climbers found the rocky terrain too daunting and turned back before reaching the midway point. But not Workman. Marching over the permafrost, a pleasant loamy fragrance in the air, all the way to the top of the tallest mountain in the northeast exhilarated the twenty-two-year-old Yankee. More than that, she was drawn to the peak's mercurial moodiness, although today the sun shone like a brass button. She was grateful to be spared dense fog, driving rain, or worse — hurricane-force winds sometimes whipped through unannounced and every so often blew someone straight off the mountainside into one of the ravines below. The peak deserves its reputation as one of the more dangerous mountains to climb in America — it has claimed the lives of nearly 150 climbers in the past century and a half.

Yet now, as Workman stood on the craggy peak, leaning on her rough-hewn walking stick for balance, her legs pleasantly fatigued from the exercise, she considered where she had come from and where she wanted to go.

* * *

On January 8, 1859, Alexander Hamilton Bullock and Elvira Hazard welcomed a baby girl into their most patrician household. Fanny joined an older brother, Augustus George, born in 1847, and a sister, Isabel, born in 1849. Both the Bullocks and the Hazards traced their lineage back to the Pilgrims. Fanny's great-grandfather had been a sea captain, and her maternal grandfather, Colonel Augustus George Hazard, had founded the Hazard Powder Company in Connecticut. Through that business, combined with his vast landholdings, Hazard had amassed a sizable fortune and thus secured his family's financial future.

Elvira Hazard, born in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1824, was one of eight children. A family genealogy described her as someone who was "generous, sympathetic and kind, her hand never wearied in the well doing, scattering its bounties into the homes of the poor, and uplifting the fallen." She married Alexander Bullock at age twenty. He was born in Royalston, Massachusetts, and after graduating from Amherst College, he pursued a law degree at Harvard University and got his start in politics at an early age. He edited a weekly Whig newspaper and served in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the state senate. Along with his take-charge attitude, financial discipline, and views on equality, Alexander's younger daughter also inherited her father's strong jaw and sober-looking mouth. From her mother, Elvira, Fanny inherited an unflappable demeanor, which as she grew older was often mistaken for aloofness.

Life inside the Bullock family home, a handsome brownstone on 48 Elm Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, was always loud and never still. In spite of the age gap between the children, Fanny was never indulged as the baby of the family. Rather, the trio related like beloved cousins. A keen reader as a young girl, Fanny also loved escaping outdoors to tramp over nearby hills, explore the brooks, and wander through unkempt fields.

In 1866, when she was seven, her father, then the Republican mayor of Worcester, was elected governor of Massachusetts. During his three terms in office and under his financial discipline, another quality Fanny inherited and would later put to good use when leading expeditions, the state paid off its wartime financial responsibilities.

Actively opposed to the expansion of slavery before he became governor, during his tenure Bullock became involved in the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, an organization committed to populating Kansas with abolitionists. In a March 8, 1869, letter to William Lloyd Garrison, who was the editor of the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator, Bullock opined on equality; he thought all members of society should be treated equally. Thanks in part to her father's views, Fanny grew up believing women deserved to be considered and treated as equal to men. Although women were still expected to marry and have children, there were changes afoot. Before Fanny was born, Worcester had hosted the first National Woman's Rights Convention in 1850. In 1870 the Utah Territory granted woman suffrage, a sign that things could change. (The territory rescinded the vote in 1887.) Also in 1870, the Grimké sisters and forty-two other women tried to vote in Massachusetts. Their ballots were cast but ignored. Still, the events signaled change to come.

Over at Worcester's Free Church, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson urged women to engage in physical activity, such as hiking and skating. The progressive thinker would later write an essay, "Saints, and Their Bodies," in which he deemed "physical health ... a necessary condition of all permanent success."

The city had long been a well of resistance. Settled in 1673 by Daniel Gookin, Worcester had been an outpost during the American Revolution. Its courthouse was besieged during the 1786 Shays's Rebellion, and in 1854 a small riot erupted when US Marshal Asa Butman arrived to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Local citizens kicked and threw rocks at him, chasing him back to Boston.

Alexander Bullock's election as governor bumped the family into a new level of society. Previously, governesses had been given responsibility for educating Fanny, a precocious child with a penchant for testing authority. In keeping with others in their social set, her parents sent their youngest daughter, when she was not quite twelve, to the elite Misses Graham's Boarding and Day School for Girls in New York City. Founded in 1816, the school on Riverside Drive was the city's oldest private school for girls. It counted Julia Ward Howe, Mabel Osgood Wright, and Emily Price Post among its alumnae. There the teachers guided young Fanny in the social graces and cultural rites befitting a young woman of the upper crust. She learned to sketch and paint, how to thread a needle for embroidery, and how to sit ramrod straight, feet planted firmly on the ground, during piano lessons. She also learned she was not fond of this life.

Then, in 1876, as was the custom for wealthy young women, Fanny's parents sent her abroad, to Paris and Dresden, where her education and etiquette were polished until they shone like sterling silver, and where they hoped she might acquire a European husband. The seventeen-year-old had her own ideas, and landing a husband was not one of them. Rather than gush over gentleman callers or agonize over whether she'd perfected the French knot or split stitch, she filled the pages of her slim black leather journal with musings, excerpts from books, and quotations from philosophers and authors. She kept a running list of every book she longed to read, including Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History, and James Bryce's The American Commonwealth. In what appears to be the first inkling that Fanny had designs on loftier matters, she also added a list of mountain climbing books under the heading "Alpine Books Worth Reading." Among those noted were William Martin Conway's Climbing and Exploration in the Karakoram-Himalayas and Edward Whymper's Chamonix and the Range of Mont Blanc: A Guide.

In 1879, three years after she penned her last entry in the journal, Fanny returned stateside. The twenty-year-old woman with wiry brunette hair now spoke French and German fluently, was well schooled in the art of conversation, and knew her way around the Dutch Masters and historical landmarks.

She knew walking through the door on Elm Street meant walking back into a life where silver trays sat on foyer tables waiting to be filled with the calling cards of her wealthy acquaintances, while destitute people begged for alms in the city streets; where corsets restricted her every movement; and where she always had to sit perched on the edge of her chair because of the bustle. Walking through the door on Elm Street meant returning to a life where women sipped cooled sherry and expected to bear children and mind a household. She wanted none of it.

As a means of temporary escape, Fanny sometimes hiked in the hills near Worcester. She soon returned to writing as another outlet. One of her earliest efforts was a short story titled "A Vacation Episode," in which the protagonist, a beautiful and aristocratic young English woman, tires of studying and flees across the Channel all the way to Switzerland's Bernese Alps. In the village of Grindelwald, the gateway to the Jungfrau, she finds her destiny. Rather than wed a rich European, as her parents hoped she would, the unnamed heroine falls in love with an American and becomes a superior alpinist. Though fiction, the short story reads as a thinly veiled account of Fanny's own wanderlust and deep desire to live by her own set of rules.

Observing their daughter after she had spent all those years in Europe without landing a marriage proposal, Fanny's parents worried their youngest child had returned home reluctant to step into the life expected for her. They needn't have worried. Soon enough their gray-eyed and brown-haired daughter caught the eye of Dr. William Hunter Workman, a well-respected Harvard Medical School–trained physician who was eleven years her senior. The youngest of nine children born to William Workman and Sarah Paine Hemenway, Hunter, too, had spent time overseas burnishing his education. He had attended the universities of Vienna, Heidelberg, and Munich. His father had also studied at Harvard University and, before he moved to Worcester with his wife and children, had practiced medicine in Shrewsbury.

Both the Bullock and the Workman families belonged to the Union Church. Fanny's father, as Massachusetts governor, had appointed Hunter a trustee of the Worcester Lunatic Asylum. He held the position while also working as a surgeon and pathologist at Memorial Hospital, which had been founded with funds from industrialist Ichabod Washburn and was first known as the Washburn Dispensary. Finding Hunter Workman's character and credentials exemplary, the Bullocks approved the match.

After a brief courtship, the couple pledged their troth, and Elvira Hazard Bullock ordered twelve hundred engraved invitations sent to members of the bench, the bar, the pulpit, and the medical profession. On June 16, 1881, shortly before seven o'clock in the evening, the denizens of Worcester society entered through the heavy wooden door of the Gothic-style brownstone church on Irving and Pleasant Streets. Above them, watchful gargoyles perched on the iron cross–topped spire.

An announcement in the New York Times called the occasion "the great society event of the season, which has been anticipated for months. ... The church was crowded with distinguished and fashionable people." The paper described the weather as "auspicious" and "so cool that while light silks and other summer materials were appropriate, and most generally worn, there were colored velvets, worn by numerous stately matrons, without personal discomfort."

The justice of the peace ushered guests to their seats. Potted palms and ferns lined the aisle, which was tiled in black and white squares. The last of the evening light filtered through the red-and-blue stained-glass windows. Quiet organ music signaled the start of the ceremony. Draped in blue brocade and Satin de Lyon, the bridesmaids preceded Fanny down the aisle. Bonnets adorned with pink roses perched upon their heads. A vision of maternal pride, Elvira wore a gown cut from heliotrope satin and brocade with black point lace trimming and diamond adornments. Fanny's older sister, Isabel, beamed in white Satin de Lyon with pearl ornaments. Lush floral bouquets dressed the altar and "were in harmony with the rich and becoming costumes worn by the ladies present."

The music transitioned to Wagner's "Bridal Chorus" from Lohengrin. Heads turned to see the bride, elegant in white satin and silver brocade with point lace, one hand resting lightly on her father's crooked elbow. The diamond ornaments sewn onto her gown shimmered. Fanny Bullock took a deep breath and walked toward Hunter. One satin-slippered step after another, she could see, like the aisle before her, her life mapped out. A predictable life.

The prominent New Englanders sitting in the wooden pews might have seen a young woman ready to assume the roles of wife, hostess, and mother. They might have seen a woman ready to marry a doctor who grew prized dahlias and sweet onions. The notes of the wedding march reached a crescendo as Fanny reached Hunter's side. "In the presence of a brilliant assemblage of friends," the couple silently pledged to lead a different sort of life. In William Hunter Workman she had indeed found a wealthy husband who could keep her in comfort for all of her days, yet it wasn't comfort she sought. She wanted, nay, she demanded, a partnership of equals.

A coupé drawn by her own horses, each bedecked with white satin rosettes and ribbons, had carried the bride to church. Now she and her new husband climbed back into the carriage to ride the short distance to her parents' spacious home, where a table groaned under the weight of bridal gifts "profuse and costly." The food was plentiful and the toasts many, and yet, as warm and sparkling as the evening was, the new couple welcomed the moment the last guest left.

With this marriage Fanny Bullock Workman cast off the chains of Victorian womanhood.

* * *

Nearly three years after they exchanged vows, on March 23, 1884, Fanny gave birth to their daughter, Rachel, in the upstairs bedroom of their house with bow-front windows. Joyous as the occasion was, the baby's birth curbed neither Fanny's nor her husband's wish to travel beyond Worcester, a city that felt increasingly provincial. Athletic and sharp, Workman couldn't abide her mother's friends and peers who, by the spoonful, swallowed the prevailing wisdom of the time: that motherhood sanctified a woman and that it was the only goal she should aspire to. Well, that and homemaking. Of course, if a woman had free time, engaging in a bit of philanthropy or joining a civic club would not be untoward. Climbing and exploring was not on the list.

The young mother knew she was a privileged woman. She knew her grandfather had left her mother means, and she knew that as an upper-class woman she had access to everything — schools, health, and leisure. Yet she wanted more than material comfort. She wanted independence and adventure. Refusing to obey the ossified characterizations of womanhood, Workman was becoming a modern woman of her day. She was formidable. She was independent. She believed in women's suffrage and wished to be judged on her merits, not her marriage. Without realizing it, she was becoming what would in another decade or so be called a "New Woman."

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Excerpted from "Queen of the Mountaineers"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Cathryn J. Prince.
Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

1 Mountaineering for Ladies 1

2 No Time for Tea 19

3 The Wheels Go Round 41

4 Steadfast in Skirts 67

5 The Glass Jar 87

6 Into the Death Zone 113

7 Camp America 139

8 Pinnacle Peak 159

9 A Record Disputed 179

10 Climbers in Controversy 195

11 A Plucky Performance 209

12 Votes for Women 223

Epilogue 249

Acknowledgments 253

Notes 255

Bibliography 275

Index 293