Frontier Fur: Gay, Footloose, and Free in the 1830-40s

If you've been pining for an elaborate gay Circuit Party for outdoorsy dudes in an idyllic setting like the Platte River, you're exactly 170 years too late. Restless and oppressed in his native Perthshire, Scotland in the early 1830s, William Drummond Stewart set off for manly adventures in the Rocky Mountains and found plenty of men who were just his type. He liked it so much he extended his brief excursion more than a decade. Before the frontier was settled, men could live together freely in a world without women and with no questions asked. There was no need to hide because there was no one to hide from. Stewart took many lovers and enjoyed a long relationship with a French Canadian - Cree Indian trapper named Antoine Clement. And, yes, they really did party. In 1843, Stewart "organized, fully outfitted and recruited dozens of willing participants to engage in a spectacular and bedazzling Renaissance-themed costume party," says the Billings Gazette. Stewart's biographer William Benemann calls it "one last all-male hurrah before the wagon trains and the families and the plows changed everything forever."

Benemann is a Berkeley Law School Library archivist by day and spends his weekends and vacations in other libraries to track down source material for his gay history books. His newest is Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade [Kindle].

Previously he won a Stonewall award for Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships covering roughly one hundred years from the 1770s to the 1870s. Benemann's debut was A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849-1850.

Decades before Stewart, there was Lewis & Clark. Brian Hall's novel I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company recreates Merriweather Lewis's struggle as a gay man exploring.

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