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Challenge, change, andcontinuity: Irish immigrantwomen on the kern countyfrontier, 1860–1880Erin Miller aa University of Wisconsin , MadisonPublished online: 12 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Erin Miller (2001) Challenge, change, and continuity: Irishimmigrant women on the kern county frontier, 1860–1880, Women's Studies: Aninter-disciplinary journal, 30:6, 763-777, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2001.9979414

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Women's Studies, 30:763-777, 2001Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis0049-7878/01 $12.00+ .00

Challenge, Change,and Continuity: Irish ImmigrantWomen on the Kern CountyFrontier, 1860-1880

ERIN MILLER

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Throughout the midnineteenth century (1845-1877), approxi-mately two and a half million Irish immigrated to America,escaping starvation, continuing oppression, and death (Fitzpartick3). They came seeking employment, opportunity, and life. ' Womenconsistently constituted 50 percent or more of the Irish who ar-rived in the United States. Hasia R. Diner, in Erin's Daughters inAmerica: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century(1983), and Janet A. Nolan, in Ourselves Alone: Women's Emi-gration from Ireland, 1885-1920 (1989), examine the fates of Irishwomen who journeyed to the United States. Other publicationshave explored the lives of Irish women as maids and servants,nuns and wives, in both eastern urban areas and in the westerncities of Butte, Montana, and San Francisco, California.2 Publica-tions pertaining to Irish-born women in California focus largelyon those who resided in northern California and achieved a cer-tain degree of notoriety, wealth, and social power.

In this article, the writer seeks to explore the lives of approxi-mately 12 less notable women.3 Public documents, including cen-sus records, birth and death records, deeds, and wills, as well asother records, are used to establish socioeconomic, marital, andparental status. This endeavor has a number of limitations. Al-though the seemingly paltry amount of information available about

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these women makes it nearly impossible to present in-depth biog-raphies, the information available enables one to see who thesewomen were, whom they married, and what their level of inde-pendence was. Most importantly, one is able to discern bothmarked differences and similarities of the lives of these Irish-bornwomen and their kinswomen in the eastern United States andIreland.

The purpose of this article is to place the lives of Irish-bornwomen who lived in Kern County, California, between 1860 and1880 in the context of the historiography of nineteenth-centuryIreland, the emigrant and the immigrant experience, IrishAmerica, and women on the frontier.4 How did their lives com-pare to those of Irish women elsewhere in the United States, towomen who remained in Ireland, and to other women on thefrontier? Understanding where these women immigrants fromIreland settled will help the reader appreciate the juxtaposition.

The California state legislature created Kern County in 1866as a result of the area's increasingly productive gold mining dis-tricts (Burmeister 169—171). Kern County, formed from territo-ries that had previously been allocated to Tulare and Los AngelesCounties, is located in the southern portion of the San JoaquínValley, surrounded by the Sierra Nevada and Tehachapi moun-tain ranges (Boyd 188). The area in which these immigrants settleddiffered greatly from Ireland. The excruciatingly hot and dry cli-mate of the summer with temperatures ranging up to one hun-dred and twelve degrees presented a seemingly hostile, primitive,and barren environment, made more difficult by the absence ofthe women's families.

Women from Ireland who settled in this remote area of Califor-nia came for various reasons. The 30 women from Ireland foundin the censuses of 1860, 1870, and 1880 emigrated during the timeof the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845-1851) and over the nexttwo decades. However, the research here focuses largely on the 12adult women from Ireland listed in the 1870 Kern County Cen-sus.5 In August of 1854, Eliza Nary, one of the earliest to appear,arrived at the newly established Fort Tejon (1854) with her hus-

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band, William, a private in the Company A Dragoons.6 Elizaworked as the company laundress and earned $2.00 per monthper soldier. William worked as Fort Tejon's baker. At the time ofhis discharge the couple served at Fort Crook, which is farthernorth. By 1885, the Narys owned over 300 acres of land in centralCalifornia. Facing potentially far greater uncertainty, BridgetMartin arrived in the Havilah mining district of Kern Countywith her miner husband, Nelson Martin, in the late 1860s. Ac-cording to the Kern County Census of 1870, the Martins pos-sessed no assets. Unlike Bridget and Eliza, six other Irish bornwomen, including Mary Burke, settled on their husbands' farmsor ranches. Mary Corbet's husband, John, ran a local grocery.The husbands of eight other women from Ireland ran other typesof businesses or provided services.7 These positions included team-sters, engineers, water masters, saloon owners, and others. Thegrowth of California brought with it the development of the rail-road in the 1870s. A number of Irishmen, many of whom broughttheir wives and children, came to the area to work for the rail-road.8 The Census of Kern County in 1880 shows that the rail-road provided five couples from Ireland with their livelihoods (U.S.Census Bureau,passim). To comprehend fully the meaning of theirnew lives in Kern County, it would be beneficial to explore thelikely reasons for their leaving Ireland and to investigate the typeof lives they led there.

Conditions in Ireland resulted in an exodus of emigrants. TheGreat Famine pressed many men, women, and children into leav-ing Ireland on "coffin ships," which carried them, for the mostpart, to English-speaking areas of the world (McCaffrey 57, Diner2). Prior to the infestation of the deadly fungus, Phytophthorainfestans (believed to be from South America), which devastatedthe potato yields, the potato had provided sustenance for the poorof Ireland, enabling them to marry young and have large families(Connell cited in McCaffrey 56). The poorest classes, the cottierclass and landless laborers, suffered the brunt of the Famine andturned to emigration as a means of survival (Miller 280). Morepeople fled Ireland than the estimated one and half million who

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perished.9 Families had increasingly subdivided their land, andwhen the Famine struck, it became clear that the structure of theIrish-Catholic family had to change in order to avoid such catas-trophes in the future (Inglis 164). This was especially clear to thoseof the middle class, who suffered far less and whose farms grewwith the demise of the small landowner.

Middle-class economic ideology, glaring memories of the Fam-ine, and the practice of an increasingly puritanical Catholicismcontinued to create a steady stream of emigrants, particularlyamong women (Diner 4). Cardinal Paul Cullen's endeavors to in-stitute Mtramontanism in Ireland worked in tandem with the con-sequences of the Famine to create a society that postponed mar-riage, practiced gender segregation, and demanded chastity (Diner4).10Marriage changed from commitment based on mutual admi-ration to commitment based on mutual benefit to both parties'families (Diner 10-11).11 Invariably, the expectations, roles, andrelationships between women and men underwent a certain de-gree of transformation as well (Diner 3). Most historians concedethat these social changes commenced before the Famine, but be-came more rapidly universalized afterwards (Diner 7). The in-creased likelihood of remaining single served as an impetus to leaveIreland.12

Female Irish emigrant patterns deviate markedly from those ofother European women emigrants, who usually traveled toAmerica with their husbands (Fitzpatrick 7). Many of the Irishwomen, however, departed unmarried and in greater or equalproportions to Irish men (Byron 70, Diner 31, Nolan 3). Femaleemigrants constituted 50.13% of Irish emigrants in the years 1852—1855 (Jordan 153). This pattern of emigration from Ireland con-tinued through the year 1921 (Miller 407). In the latter half of thenineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, other Europeanwomen emigrated at a far lower percentage than men (Nolan 2).13

While Irish-born women in the 1870 census of Kern County rep-resented 12 percent of the total Irish-born population, 16 womenborn in various areas of Europe, including Prussia, France, En-gland, Austria, Switzerland, and others, also lived in Kern County.

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They constituted 13 percent of the total European-born popula-tion (Ninth Federal United States Census passim). Many of thewomen immigrants from Ireland settled in eastern, urban areas ofthe United States. Lawrence J. McCaffrey estimates, that in 1870,roughly 70 percent of the American Irish lived in eastern andmidwestern urban, industrialized areas (Fitzpatrick 32—33,McCaffrey, Diaspora 67).

Not surprisingly, therefore, the historiography of Irish immi-grants in nineteenth-century America focuses largely upon theexperiences of the Irish in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Butte(Montana), and San Francisco. The more widely read accountsseem to be those examining the eastern cities. These histories of-ten depict a people fleeing a homeland rife with starvation, agrar-ian violence, and political strife only to find religious bigotry andclass prejudice in the United States (Miller 323-325). Yet womenfrom Ireland endured less of this discrimination than men, andthose who ventured west seemed to have fared even better.

The lives of Irish women in Boston and other big eastern citiesseem to have differed profoundly from their kinswomen in KernCounty, California. At the time of these censuses (1850-1880),those in the East often remained single and worked as servants(McCaffrey Textures 12-16). If married, women were not usuallyallowed to continue as servants and lost their board within thesecure homes of the middle and upper classes that preferred un-wed servants (McCaffrey Textures 12-16). Once married, wivesbecame dependent on husbands and remained in the home, at-tempting to raise children who would, hopefully, ascend the socialladder (Diner 69, McCaffrey Textures 12-16). Many Irish men inthe eastern cities struggled to earn a living amid the resentment ofworking class Protestants and a society that appeared physicallythreatened by their "pugnaciousness."14 Alcohol often served asan escape from bigotry and joblessness for many of the Irishmen(Diner 69, McCaffrey Textures 12-16).14 While the political, eco-nomic, and cultural infrastructures of the cities acted as aggres-sive oppressors of Irish men, the same factors sheltered the womenin the homes of the Protestant middle and upper classes. Remain-

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ing single proved to be a more appealing option for young womenwho had suffered enough uncertainty in their own homeland(Diner 69, McCaffrey Textures 13-16).

Females who made the arduous trip to the Kern County areausually arrived married. Ninety-seven Irish-born adults lived inthis area in 1870, and 12 of them were women.15 Compared toBoston, New York, and San Francisco, where women often con-stituted more than half of the Irish population, Kern County hadrelatively few Irish women, only 12 percent (Ninth Federal UnitedStates Census passim, World Immigration Series).16 Also strikingis the difference in conjugal status. In many other areas whereIrish women outnumbered their male counterparts, nearly 40percent of women between 30 and 39 years might remain unwed(Diner 47-48).

All 12 of these frontier women in 1870 had husbands.17 Fourmarried Irish-born men. Bridget Martin's husband, a miner, wasthe only husband who possessed no wealth. Mary andjohn Corbethad $3,000 worth of real estate, but this belonged to the 43-year-old wife rather than her 33-year-old grocer husband (Ninth Fed-eral United States Census passim). Kern County land indenturerecords from November 1872 show that Mary Corbet owned aparcel of land with revenue-producing tenements located betweenthe town's butcher shop and saloon in Havilah (State of Califor-nia, Deed of Property 1—2). Mary McKurk's husband, Andrew,held over $6,500 worth of farming real estate and assets. Age 28in 1870, Mary had seven children ranging in age from six monthsto 12 years. All of the children were born in California. Two Irish-born women wed men from Prussia; one owned a farm, and theother raised livestock. Their husbands' combined wealth totaledover $7,400. Another, Margaret Western, married an engineerfrom London. The remaining women married men born in theUnited States. This should not be interpreted merely as womenhaving the choice of the wealthiest men, but also as an explana-tion of the economic condition of most men, who presumably couldnot afford to support a wife and family.18 The marital status ofthese 12 women is most likely due to the fact that Kern County

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had just been established and offered little infrastructure and pro-tection for single women.19 In addition to the harsh climate de-scribed earlier, the desert and rocky terrain created additionalhardship.

By 1880 Kern County's population had begun to grow andshowed a slight change in demographics. The number of singleIrish-born women increased by three (Tenth Federal United StatesCensus passim). Consistent with the earlier censuses, most Irishwomen who married had husbands with wealth or who had pro-fessional jobs. Interestingly, none of the Irish-born women in 1860and 1870 had children born in Ireland. By the 1880 census eightIrish-born women and their husbands had arrived in Kern Countywith their children, who were also born in Ireland. Mary, age 33,and Daniel Burke, age 32, along with their four children ages 8—16, were all born in Ireland (Tenth Federal United States Census

passim). Ann Leary, a forty-year-old widow, brought all four ofher children with her. She owned and ran a saloon (Tenth FederalUnited States Census passim). Three young women born inAmerica to parents from Ireland worked in a saloon.

The absence of single women from Ireland in Kern Countymay have protected them from the fates of non-Irish-born 18-year-old Nellie Gleason, 33-year-old Margaret Ralph, and 23-year-old Anne Carr, all of whom worked as prostitutes (Tenth FederalUnited States Census passim). Had the number of single womenborn in Ireland been greater, there might have been some work-ing as prostitutes as well. Although these three women were bornin California, New York, and Maryland to Irish-born parents, theyoffer an opportunity to compare the lives of prostitutes on thewestern frontier with those in Ireland. Maria Luddy provides adetailed examination of Irish prostitution in Women and Philan-thropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Luddy passim). As Luddyillustrates, the 1841 Irish census only listed six prostitutes, but,"behind the cloak of sexual morality lay an abundance of womenwho engaged in prostitution . . . " (Luddy 97). Prostitutes in Ire-land often came from the ranks of disgraced unwed mothers. Theyranged in age from 20 to 30 and came from poor and uneducated

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families (Nolan 28, Luddy 100). The 1860 and 1870 Censuses ofthe Kern County area do not enumerate any women working asprostitutes.20 On the western frontier women often prostitutedthemselves to gain economic independence or to seek adventure,a husband, and, eventually, a "respectable" life.21 Prostitutes inKern County and Ireland serviced customers in saloons,dancehalls, brothels, and outdoors (Luddy 98-104, Myres 256).Living situations varied; some of the most deplorable conditionsexisted in parts of Ireland. Approximately 30 prostitutes lived inthe woods near Cobh in County Cork.22 Other women traveledthe same route as the soldiers, "sleeping under forts, and behindthe barracks" (Curtis qtd. in Luddy 103). As in most professions,the degree of success and income varied, but in both countries thelower ranks of these women frequently suffered the scorn of thepublic and the abuse of their clients, law enforcement, and, insome cases, the religious, not to mention the toll that disease musthave taken (Luddy 98-104, Myres 254-257). Nevertheless, on thefrontier, males vastly outnumbered women, and "prostitution anddrinking were not only tolerated but were integral parts of theservice structure of the community" (Griswold 14).23

Most women on the frontier, however, worked on their fami-lies' farms or in some domestic capacity. Like many women in theWest, Irish-born women sought to balance the demands of thefarm, the ranch, or the business with domestic work and the re-sponsibilities of childrearing (Armitage and Jameson 150). Forexample, Mary McKurk's husband, Andrew, owned a large farm.In addition to running the home in 1880, without a servant orhousekeeper, Mary was raising her seven children between theages of six months and 12 years. Ellen Adams had five children.Undoubtedly, Ellen's life held particular challenges. She marrieda much older man who worked as a cow laborer (Ninth FederalUnited States Censuspassim). The Cult of True Womanhood thatplaced women within the private sphere and men within the pub-lic may have taken hold in the East, but work roles in the Westprevented this (Armitage and Jameson 150, Myres 239). Only verywell-to-do women could afford to be "economically useless"

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(Armitage and Jameson 150). Families in the West existed as "in-terdependent economic units" (Armitage and Jameson 150, Myres241). In addition to raising their children, wives cultivated gar-dens and tended to the smaller farm animals. Sandra L. Myres,professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington andauthor and editor of numerous books and articles on the Ameri-can West, contends that work duties seldom fell into gender spheres;men and women completed the labors necessary to survive as afamily, gaining mutual respect for one another's efforts, althoughsome degree of traditional beliefs in defined, traditional roles re-mained (Myres 172, 241).

Work on the frontier must have been at least as demanding aswork in Ireland, perhaps more so, since Irish women in KernCounty had no extended family present to help. Nevertheless, thefrontier and the United States undoubtedly provided a greaterdeal of liberty to women from Ireland. By 1850, 17 states, follow-ing Mississippi's initiation of property right reforms for wives in1839, made it legal for married women to own property (Myres258). As previously mentioned, Mary Corbet had assets indepen-dent of her husband totaling $3,000 in 1870. In Ireland all moneyand property fell under the direct control and discretion of thehusband (Hackey, Hernin, and McCaffrey 129-133), although thiswas to change with the introduction of the married woman's prop-erty acts. An interesting example of what a wife might do with herown property occurred on November 11, 1872, in Kern County,California. Mary Corbet gave a parcel of land and its tenementsto Catherine Irving, her sister, "for and in consideration of thelove and affection [and] for the better maintenance, support, pro-tection and livelihood . . . [and] . . . as her separate property andfree from the management and control of her husband, (RobertIrving) the rents, issues and profits to be applied to her sole andseparate use" (State of California, Deed of Property 1-2). Thelegal ability to inherit land and wealth must have contributed toCatherine Irving's sense of independence.

Perhaps Dr. Hugh Quigley, writing in 1878 about the Irish inCalifornia, can offer some explanation as to why these families

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chose to settle in the area of Kern County rather than in the al-ready prosperous and largely Irish settlements in San Franciscoand Sacramento.24 Fertile land available for purchase in these ar-eas quickly diminished. Quigley maintains that many non-Irishmigrants returned to the east coast when they learned affordableland ceased to be available in California. If they would have toreside in a city, they would rather return to the east. The Irish,however, Quigley asserts, remained. Those who had some moneyavailable to purchase land in the more southern reaches of Cali-fornia journeyed there. Others remained in the north of Califor-nia and further populated the urban Irish communities in SanFrancisco, Santa Clara, and Sacramento. Whether in northernor southern California, most Irish settled permanently in the state.

Several of the Irish-born women noted in the census records,who settled in the area of Kern County between 1860-1880, re-mained there until their death. Death records show that MaryBurke died at age 56 of pneumonia and heart failure in 1903 inthe city of Bakersfield (State of California, Certificate of Deathpassim). Catherine Irving remained in Havilah throughout hertime in California until she died on July 7,1902, of paralysis (Stateof California, Certificate of Death passim). Annie Fickert, whoarrived in Kern County in the late 1860s with her husband Louis,a Prussian farmer, lived in the area for 43 years and died inTehachapi in November of 1905 of heart failure (State of Califor-nia, Certificate of Death passim).

Women who emigrated from Ireland in the midnineteenth-century were confronted with a variety of challenges. Upon arriv-ing in the United States, opportunities for employment as domes-tics, which provided the most comfortable and stable lifestyle, andas laborers were far more plentiful (McCaffrey, Textures 12-16).Nevertheless, the potential for "good" marriages still remainedrelatively low. Prejudice and an absence of job skills made it diffi-cult for many men from Ireland to obtain profitable work. Thiscontributed to their propensity for drink and made many Irishmenundesirable partners in the minds of women from Ireland, who

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could obtain more stability alone (McCaffrey, Textures 12-16,Fitzpatrick 11, 13). It could be argued that those women who trav-eled to California, whether as laundresses and wives of lowly mili-tary privates, such as Eliza Nary, or as spouses of wealthy stockraisers, experienced lives defined by challenge and change.

This writer aspires to continue investigating these women inorder to provide a more complete account of their lives in Califor-nia. Future investigation will involve tracing the women to theirhome counties in Ireland and comparing their lives to others fromtheir families and counties. Inquiry into the descendants of Irish-born women in Kern County may uncover valuable personal cor-respondence and documentation. The present information makesit possible to glean how the lives of Irish-born women in KernCounty (1860-1880) compared with the lives of their kinswomenstill in Ireland and in the East. In doing so, it is hoped that thewriter has illustrated the vastly different obstacles and freedomsencountered by Irish women in Kern County, thus indicating whythey stayed and why more research needs to be done.

NOTES

1. Statistics are gleaned from Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland andthe Irish Exodus to North America, 291-347.

2. For additional reading see the following: John Francis Delury, Irish National-ism in Sacramento, 1850-1890 (Sacramento, CA: Sacramento County His-torical Society, 1990); P. J. Dowling, California, the Irish Dream, 2nd ed. (SanFrancisco, CA: Golden Gate Publishers, 1989); James P. Walsh, The San Fran-cisco Irish, 1850-1976 (San Francisco, CA: The Society, 1978); R. A. Burchell,The San Francisco Irish 1848-1880 (Berkeley: University of California P, 1980);David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Alin-ing Town, 1875-1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois P, 1989); and George E.Pozzetta, ed., Ethnicity and Gender: The Immigrant Woman (New York: Gar-land, 1991).

3. I began and carried out an extensive amount of this research while I was anundergraduate.

4. For the purpose of this essay, when women and men are referred to in thecontext of the Kern County area they are all natives of Ireland, unless other-wise stated.

5. Adult refers to those women over eighteen years of age. The focus is upon the

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1870 census, because it is the first census that specifically addresses the popu-lation of Kern County, founded in 1866.

6. As George R. Stammejohan states, the correct spelling of Nery's name is Nary.The name evolved within the army records. The information pertaining toWilliam and Eliza Nary is gleaned from the following: George R.Stammerjohan, "The Post Bakery and Its Bakers: The Fort Tejon ReaderNumber 2," 38-45. The more general background on the establishment ofFort Tejon can be found in the following: Stammerjohan, "Fort Tejon StateHistoric Park: 'A Short Interpretive History.'" After appropriating Indian landin California, the United States government instituted the reservation system,which resulted in the first reservation, Sebastian Military Reserve (Tejon Res-ervation), being established in present day Kern County. The government es-tablished Fort Tejon to maintain order. This included minimizing Indian-Angloviolence and its more extensive counterpart Anglo-Indian violence in the areaof the first ever reservation, The Sebastian Military Reserve. Ibid., 1-20.

7. Information on the employment status of husbands of Irish-born women canbe found in the following: U. S. Census Bureau, Eighth Federal United StatesCensus: Tulare County, passim, U. S. Census Bureau, Tenth Federal UnitedStates Census: Kern County, passim,

8. For information on the arrival and development of the railroad in Kern Countysee the following: Erle Heath, "From Trail to Rail," in Inside Historic Kern:Selections from the Kern County Quarterly, 1949-1981, eds. W. Harland Boyd,John Ludeke, and Marjorie Rump, 60-66.

9. Malnutrition and various diseases caused the death of many whose starvingbodies could not fight against infection. Thomas E. Hachey, Joseph M. Hernon,Jr., and Lawrence J . MaCaffrey, The Irish Experience, 92.

10. The role of Cardinal Cullen and the effects of the "devotional revolution" canbe more thoroughly explored in the following: Emmet Larkin, "The Devo-tional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75," The American Historical Review (June1972): 625-652 and Hachey, Hernon, and McCaffrey, 69, 85, 95-96, 99, 103-105, and 124. For an interesting depiction of single men and the "bachelordrinking group" see the following: Inglis, 170-175. Ultramontanism encom-passed the opinion of the Catholic hierarchy that the authority at national anddiocesan levels was subordinate to that of papal authority. Ultramontanismresulted in more commonly ministered and preached Catholicism and pro-vided the impetus of modernization within the Irish-Catholic society. ThomasO'Connor, "Ultramontanism," in The Oxford Companion to Irish History,ed. S. J. Connolly, 564.

11. These marriages also became increasingly dependent upon the help of a "match-maker."

12. In an effort to avoid subdivision and ensure economic prosperity, a large por-tion of Ireland's population began the practice of granting their land to onlyone son. They did not, however, practice primogeniture. This practice resultedin a tremendous number of unmarried men and women. Without land a mancould not provide for his family. Many parents did not reveal which son wouldinherit the land until later in life, therefore, many of the men remained inIreland, single and celibate, as Irish women emigrated. Inglis, 164-165. As acolony, Ireland lacked large-scale industry to provide work for the displaced

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men and women from rural areas. Diner, 8 and Janet A. Nolan, OurselvesAlone: Women's Emigration from Ireland 1885-1920, 46.

13. For the years 1899-1910, female emigration from other European countriesoccurred in the following proportions to males: 1). Other British Isles 37%; 2).Scandinavian 38%; 3). Italian 21%. The group that came closest to the propor-tion of Irish women was Jewish at 43%.

14. The Irish in America: Long Journey Home, prod, and dir. Mark Zwonitzer, 1hr. 45 min., Walt Disney Studios, 1998, videocassette.

15. Adult is defined as any individual who is not listed directly on the census assomeone's child. Ninth Federal United States Census: Kern County, passim.

16. Hasia Diner also discusses the male to female ratio in eastern and midwesterncities (4).

17. Fifteen of the European-born women were also married. That is ninety-fourpercent. Ninth Federal United States Census: Kern County, passim.

18. The creation of Kern County in 1860, which the state cut out of Tulare andLos Angeles Counties, also attributes to the lack of single women. Those whoappear in the 1860 censuses of Tulare and Los Angeles as single might havelived in areas not allocated to Kern County in 1870.

19. It should be noted, however, that in the 1860 Census of Tulare County thatCatherine Lynch, a 24-year-old single woman from Ireland, worked as a ser-vant. A 79-year-old woman, Elizabeth Stevenson from Ireland, rented a roomin a home.

20. The first census in California took place in 1860. Eighth Federal United StatesCensus: Tulare County, passim and Ninth Federal United States Census: KernCounty, passim.

21. The average age of prostitutes in Kansas was 23.1 years, and women over 30continued to work. Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Ex-perience 1800-1915, 254-257.

22. It is important to note that many of these women followed their common-lawhusbands and were not prostitutes at all. Luddy, 103.

23. For additional information regarding western prostitution see the following:Eds. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, The Women's West, 179, 187-188, and 193-204 and Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, Pioneer Women: TheLives of Women on the Frontier, 113-117.

24. Quigley provides an extensive examination of the role of the Irish in industry,society, politics, agriculture, and the general shaping of society in California.Hugh Quigley, The Irish Race in California, and on the Pacific Coast, passim.

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Burmeister, Eugene. Kern County One Hundred Years Ago. In Inside HistoricKern: Selections from the Kern County Historical Society's Quarterly, 1949-1981, Eds. W. Harland Boyd,John Ludeke, Marjorie Rump. Bakersfield, CA:Kern County Historical Society, 1982.

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Quigley, Hugh. The Irish Race in California and on the Pacific Coast. San Fran-cisco: A. Roman, 1878.

State of California, Certificate of Death for Mary Burke. Kern County, CA 21December 1903.

State of California, Certificate of Death for Catherine Irving. Kern County, CA28 July 1902.

State of California, Certificate of Death for Annie Fickert. Kern County, CA 23November 1905.

State of California. Deed between Mary Corbet and Catherine Irving. Bakers-field, CA: 11 November 1872.

U.S. Census Bureau, Ninth Federal United States Census: Kern County, 1870.Washington: D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1870.

U.S. Census Bureau, Tenth Federal United States Census: Kern County, 1880.Washington: D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1880.

U.S. Census Bureau, Eighth Federal United States Census: Tulare County, 1860.Washington: D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1860.

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Curtis, Dr. Select Committee, Q. 11,256, 11,257, 1882. Quoted in Maria Luddy,Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Cambridge: Univer-sity of Cambridge, 1995, p. 103.

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