Something We Were Never Meant to See
Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1941. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. [Library of Congress]
I wrote my new book, Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy on the Gilded Age Frontier, because of a photograph my mother found in her parents’ house after my grandmother died. A lone woman in silhouette stands outside a rough-hewn log cabin, playing a violin in the shadow of the Teton Mountains. A Victrola is situated in the grass in front of her, suggesting the music she’s creating is not without accompaniment. Her hair is piled on top of her head. She wears a loose Garibaldi blouse, popularized in the 1860s by the leader of the Italian unification movement, and a slim, high-waisted skirt known as a “Rainy Daisy” that debuted in the 1890s. It had a higher-than-usual hemline, so that active women could wear it while hiking or playing tennis and not have to worry about tripping over themselves or having the skirt get wet. On the back of the photograph, in her tight script, my grandmother had written the name “Edith Sargent.”
Curious about who this woman was, I did what all good scholars do when faced with a question about the past: I hopped on Google. After narrowing my search, combining Edith’s name with words like “violin” and “Wyoming,” I finally discovered a letter to the editor in the online archives of the New York Times. It was written in August 1913 by a woman named Edith Sargent who took great exception to the way the Times had covered the death of her husband.
According to the newspaper, John Dudley Sargent had been a “recluse.” He’d killed himself earlier that summer in the valley between the Gros Ventre and Teton Mountains known then as Jackson’s Hole. “I am here to state as a loyal, loving wife that the man was incapable of committing murder,” Edith angrily told the newspaper’s editor. “He was never unbalanced except by melancholia, which does not prompt people to murder their chums.”
In its coverage of John Dudley Sargent’s death, the Times had resurrected rumors about his relationship with a man named Robert Ray Hamilton. “The stories to which Mrs. Sargent objects originated among ranchers in Jackson’s Hole who did not like Sargent and Hamilton,” the paper explained in an effort to give Edith’s letter some context. “The stories had to do with the death of Hamilton and the first wife of Sargent. They were to the effect that Sargent knew more about Hamilton’s death in October 1890 than was ever brought out by official investigators.”
The Times reminded its readers that Robert Ray Hamilton had been a state lawmaker from the Murray Hill district of Manhattan before he died. He was “the son of Gen. Schuyler Hamilton of this city,” it noted — meaning he was the great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first treasury secretary. Ray Hamilton had also been “the central figure in a scandal in 1889,” the Times recalled, “in which a woman by the name of Eva Mann and a purchased baby figured.”
Thus began my journey down the rabbit hole and into the den of other people’s secrets that became the setting for my book. The secrets I uncovered soon involved more than just murder, suicide, baby-selling, and a founding father’s family. They also involved bigamy, blackmail, debt, rape, incest, guillotining, corpse-skinning, child abuse, mental illness, and (not to be outdone by any of that) elk-poaching.
Suffice to say there were days when I found myself wondering whether this story was one I had any right to pursue and tell.
The older I get, the more comfortable I become with the reality that people are complicated, and that the most interesting people often have secrets, lives that are characterized to a greater or lesser degree by mystery or deliberate obfuscation. Teaching and writing about history has also helped me come to terms with this truth. Historians will rarely admit it, but archival research is often voyeuristic. Almost all of us go into an archive hoping to find something we were never meant to see, something that was meant for some other set of eyes and is available to us now only because the person who created it or for whom it was intended is no longer alive to protect it from the prying eyes of others.
Exposed secrets are usually humiliating, and humiliation is what drove Robert Ray Hamilton, John Dudley Sargent, and Edith Sargent — independently from one another — to leave their lives in the eastern United States and settle in Wyoming, a wild and isolated region along the last remnants of America’s frontier. Ray hoped to free himself from a messy marriage that had attracted quite a bit of press attention in New York City. Jack was tired of being passed around by wealthy family members in New England who were more interested in business and philanthropy than they were in raising him. Edith went west after a reporter for the Boston Globe discovered she’d had a romantic relationship with an infamous criminal in Paris who’d generated headlines all around the world.
When they settled in Wyoming, Ray, Jack, and Edith were doing what generations of Americans before them had done, starting with those Puritans who left England in 1630 and founded the city of Boston along the shores of Massachusetts Bay: they were moving west, to what they believed to be an unsettled and uncivilized part of the world, because they hoped that doing so would make it possible for the humiliations and persecutions of their old lives to be forgotten.
In the case of Ray, Jack, and Edith, however, the strategy did not work. They were not forgotten — not in their own time and, to some extent, not even in ours. Ray is memorialized on a plaque at Riverside Drive and 76th Street in Manhattan that reduces his life and career to the scandal over his marriage. Jack is the subject of a folk opera called Marymere, which was showcased at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January 2020, shortly before all live performances were shut down because of Covid-19. Just about any travel guide to Grand Teton National Park will tell you that Signal Mountain within the park was named for the “signal” fire set by the search party that found Ray Hamilton’s body in the Snake River in 1890. And a historical marker on what used to be John Dudley Sargent’s homestead — now a biological research center in the middle of Grand Teton National Park — calls Jack the “undesirable offspring” of a prominent East Coast family (the same family that produced the portrait painter John Singer Sargent). It also echoes the newspaper coverage Edith found so objectionable when it informs visitors Jack was “suspected of murdering his first wife and his partner, Hamilton.”
Meanwhile, Edith herself is a bit of a cult figure in Jackson Hole. I had no idea who she was when my mother showed me her picture, but many long-time residents of Jackson, Wyoming, would have recognized her instantly. The Chamber of Commerce there has used her image to promote tourism in the region (that is almost certainly the disappointingly mundane reason my grandmother had the photograph on the cover of this book in her possession). Edith Sargent is a character in a musical titled Petticoat Rules, which has been staged several times over the last twenty years by the Off the Square Theater Company in Jackson. And graduate students working at the biological research center on what used to be Jack Sargent’s homestead have a tradition of grabbing bear spray and heading out into the woods to find Edith’s “violin tree,” a now-dead white bark pine that Edith is said to have climbed — sometimes naked — during the years she lived on the homestead so that she could privately play her violin and “gobble peanuts,” according to one particularly amusing version of the story.
Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent is about more than just secrets and the efforts of people to have their humiliations be forgotten. It’s also a history of Gilded Age America, East and West — one where the routes traveled are determined by the lives of three people who were shaped in big and small ways by the history being discussed.
To understand Ray, Jack, and Edith and the secrets that defined them, we have to interrogate the world they inhabited, the history that shaped them and the developments they witnessed and participated in that shape the lives of Americans today. All of our lives are a bit like a room that has been illuminated with a seemingly simple flick of the switch — which is to say there is nothing “simple” about our lives at all. There is a massive and complicated grid behind many of the decisions we make, and as with electricity, the source of our decisions sometimes lies very far away from us.
Ray, Jack, and Edith were early casualties of a revolution in transportation and communication technology that now touches the lives of many of us. The internet has opened up a vast wilderness of ideas and information to exploration and settlement. In so doing it has given our past actions an artificial kind of permanence, empowering strangers to discover those actions anew, years and sometimes even decades after we have moved on from them. In this sense, the internet has closed a kind of “frontier” that many of us didn’t know was there — and mattered — until it was gone.
The year Ray fled his scandal-laden life in New York and joined Jack and his first wife, Addie, on their homestead in Wyoming was the year the frontier famously “closed.” After reviewing population data from the 1890 census, Robert Porter, head of the U.S. Census Bureau, announced his agency would no longer be using “westward expansion” as a rubric for tracking population growth. His reason was that there was no unsettled space left in the continental United States for the country’s population to expand west into. “At present, the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement,” Porter wrote — almost as if he were staring directly at the remote valley in northwestern Wyoming where Jack and his family had moved just a few years earlier — “that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line” left in the United States. All previous understandings of the population’s “westward movement can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.”
Porter’s announcement prompted a young historian from the University of Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner to formulate an argument about the development of American cultural identity known as the “Frontier Thesis.” The rugged, isolated, and untamed nature of life on the frontier, Turner argued in 1893, had shaped the character of America’s people. Even when it was just an idea — a place people thought they might someday visit or move to, though they never did — the frontier shaped Americans’ understanding of themselves; it turned them into fiercely independent people who believed it was their right to control their own destinies. The West was a place where Americans could go to reinvent themselves, a region wild enough to be unencumbered by the traditions, institutions, and reputations that always make it difficult for anyone to start over. Put differently, the frontier made it possible for Americans to be forgotten.
Turner’s Frontier Thesis continues to animate our cultural conceptions of the American West, even as Turner, himself, has been rightly criticized for ignoring the role of the federal government in promoting the settlement of the West, exaggerating the extent to which individuals relied upon only themselves for their survival, and failing to adequately consider the experiences of women, Indigenous Americans, and racial and ethnic minorities. Turner’s Frontier Thesis remains powerful not because it was a thoroughgoing explanation of every component of American cultural identity, but because the young historian was right to recognize that something significant was happening in his country at the dawn of the twentieth century. Something was being lost.
It wasn’t just that population density in the West had risen to greater than two settled people per square mile, which was what the Census Bureau meant when it said the frontier had closed. It was also that the region was accessible now by train and telegraph. A journey from New York to Idaho that used to take two to three months could, by 1890, be done in three to four days. Messages that used to take weeks to be delivered could now be conveyed in a matter of minutes. Many of the people using telegraph services in the West were reporters for the Associated Press, a wire service that aimed to spread news and information about any part of the country to any part of the country, using a network of newspapers that all subscribed to its reports. The first AP journalist killed in the line of duty was a reporter who covered the Battle of Little Bighorn in southeastern Montana, three years before Jack Sargent moved to the Wyoming Territory and worked for the Union Pacific Railroad in Cheyenne.
Civil service reforms implemented by Congress in the 1880s made the delivery system adopted by the U.S. Postal Service more efficient and reliable. By 1895 there were more than 1,200 post offices in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, four times as many as there had been twenty years earlier. Jack Sargent’s first wife, Addie, planned on opening a post office at their ranch shortly before she died unexpectedly in 1897. She was going to call it “Hamilton P.O.,” according to her husband, in memory of Ray. Once a letter made it to the post office in Cheyenne, it could be delivered to New York in just fifty-four hours. That’s about as long as it takes a letter to go from Cheyenne to New York today.
Word traveled fast after the closing of the frontier. This truth was one that Ray, Jack, and Edith were all forced to confront in various ways. It’s the reason newspapers were able to remind readers of their humiliating stories years and even decades after those humiliations first happened. And it is the reason Ray, Jack, and Edith were never entirely forgotten.
Adapted from Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy on the Gilded Age Frontier by Maura Jane Farrelly by permission of the University of Nebraska Press and imprint Bison Books. © 2024 by Maura Jane Farrelly.
