Frontier Comrades

Jim Wilke is a former curator of technology at the Autry Museum of the American West and is a consulting historian on railroad and Western history for numerous organizations. He is the coauthor of Stagecoach! The Romantic Western Vehicle.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. William Stewart and the Great West 2. Charley Parkhurst and the Gold Rush Scene 3. Mrs. Noonan and the Seventh Cavalry 4. William Breakenridge and the Human Borderlands 5. The “Lady Lovers” of Victorian Aspen 6. An Anonymous Logger in the Industrial Frontier Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

“Frontier Comrades places the life stories of six LGBTQ individuals squarely at the center of the history of the American frontier, bringing to life the times and places where these different individuals found opportunities in the West to live on their own terms.”-Carolyn Brucken, senior curator at the Autry Museum of the American West “Jim Wilke’s vividly drawn histories evoke sexual and cultural borderlands. . . . Readers will encounter here a West that is both familiar from countless frontier narratives and yet unfamiliar in its well-documented accounts of LGBTQ stories. Together these portraits reinstate complexity and humanity to storied times and places-gay, lesbian, and transgender lives that were there all along.”-Josh Garrett-Davis, H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History at the Huntington “With careful storytelling Jim Wilke’s Frontier Comrades follows the complex lives of gay, queer, and transgender individuals who inhabited the borderlands of the U.S. West. With engaging prose this work helps paint a much more detailed portrait of desire and identity in American history than previously seen.”-Rebecca Scofield, author of Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West