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female detectives

Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher; or, A Son’s Vengeance

August 1, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Cover illustration for SANTA FE SAL
Sal confronts a roomful of barroom rowdies.

Detective stories and Westerns were two of the most popular genres appearing in 19th-century dime novels and story papers, so it’s not surprising that they were frequently combined to enhance appeal. E.L. or Edward Wheeler was a prolific writer of dime novels who contributed several entries into the history of the girl detective, as you may remember from New York Nell, the first character whose exploits were reported in this blog. But whereas New York Nell is a good example of the urban detective, Santa Fe Sal is a Western figure.

The story is set in the Buckshot mining camp in Arizona. It opens in a barroom where a local tough proposes to bully a blind, elderly organ grinder into rolling dice for his organ, which is his sole means of livelihood. In the fashion of all Western heroes, Santa Fe Sal bursts onto the scene to see justice done:

   “I’ll see that you ain’t cheated, old man!” cried a ringing voice — a voice that was so strange to the crowd that they wheeled about, simultaneously.

   They beheld, standing near at hand, a girl of beauteous face and figure — a girl with midnight eyes and flowing dark-brown hair — a girl attired in [a] stylish, elegant-fitting gray suit of male attire, including patent-leather shoes, and a jaunty white slouch sombrero. She stood there smiling, while she twirled a light cane in her white hand. (2)

The strangeness of this apparition no doubt constituted a large part of its appeal to the reader.

Like New York Nell, Santa Fe Sal appears cross-dressed, the cane a superfluous ornament quickly abandoned by the narrator as an unworthy weapon. Later the villain will try to stir the crowd against her by referencing her male attire:

“She is evidently a desperate character; the very fact that she sports around in men’s clothing is against her, and casts a reproach on the fair reputation of your wives and daughters. I say the woman ought to be strung up without mercy!”

When another woman tries to shame Sal for her clothing, the detective nonchalantly cites economic practicality as her motive: “I’m bobbin’ around all over, and the petticoats I’d have to buy, through gittin’ ‘em tore, would bankrupt me.” Like other girl detectives, and detectives in general, Sal is also a master of disguise and enters one scene as Howlin’ Hank from Hardpan, whose true identity is exposed when an irate gambler makes to cut off Hank’s whiskers, only to have them come off in his hand. Disguise serves deception, another trait that was considered decidedly unladylike.

Like many early girl detectives, Sal invades forbidden space, the all-male space of the saloon; in contrast, the more conventional heroine of the story, the saloonkeeper’s daughter, says that she has tried to talk her father out of “that low business” and declares, “I never enter the saloon” (5). Although we hear of wives and daughters in the camp, its public spaces are dominated by men.

Sal violates feminine norms in other ways, as well. She is a practitioner of that Western art that so captivated Mark Twain: the art of the boast. Here’s her introduction:

“Who am I?” was the pert reply. “Well, if you want to know, I’m an angel without wings — a regular la-lah, you bet! I hail from Texas-way, an’ down there I’m known as Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher. Are you happy to meet me?”

After praising her own marksmanship with a gun, she introduces herself again:

“Down whar I cum from they call me Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher, ‘cause when I git inter a soiree, an’ hev a six-inch bowie, I kin carve the hull crowd, in no time!”

These are remarkable statements for a woman on many counts. They violate feminine ideals of modesty, certainly. They demonstrate an enjoyment of fame and a comfort with publicity that was supposed to be anathema to the Angel in the House, the 19th-century feminine ideal that Sal may be referencing here. And if they paint her as a woman of action, they also evince Sal’s fluency in slang, language that carried a heavy weight of social disapproval when used by men, much less by women. Indeed, she has the nerve to chastise the villain for his own language, which includes the words “thunderation” and “the deuce”: “You’r’ a reg’lar old hoss on expletives, ain’t ye? (5).”

In spite of her sobriquet, Sal’s first weapons are a pair of revolvers, as depicted in the cover illustration. On the second full page of the story, she kills a man, one of a threatening mob, who disregards her warning to stay back. Nor does she show any remorse, saying, “That man earned his fate! . . . And if any of the rest of you want a funeral just notify me” (3). When she is later called a “murderess,” she objects: “I put a pill in that feller’s cabeza, ‘ca’se I’d told him if he come for me he was a dead man. He came, and you bet he went, quicker’n he came” (5). But eventually Sal feels forced to draw her knife and justify her moniker, addressing an angry mob:

“Ef you’re bound to crowd on me, all I ask is that you leave yer shootin’-irons alone, and draw yer carvin’ tools, an’ meet me more on terms of equality. I’d ruther not have any scrimmage with you at all, fer some one’s bound to get dissected, but ef yer bound ter all pit yerselves ag’in’ one lone girl, you’ll be pretty apt to find Santa Fe Sal right to home, and the latch-string out!”

This speech so shames her would-be attackers that they back off and we never get to see a demonstration of Sal’s carving skills.

SPOILER ALERT. It may not surprise you to learn that Wheeler’s imagination only extends so far in the matter of gender-bending. Sal’s male client tells her at one point:

“This is no life for one to lead who is so beautiful and accomplished as yourself. If I live, we will take little Bertie and go to my home in the East, where your sole business will be to act as his governess.”

The modern reader may well wonder if little Bertie is quite prepared to learn shooting and knife fighting at the hands of his new governess, not to mention why the speaker believes that this vision of domestic life would appeal to Sal the Slasher. Our skepticism is further aroused when the narrator observes:

He spoke earnestly and kindly, but not passionately, yearningly, as a lover might have spoken.

So imagine our surprise when Sal blushes and considers the proposal in language devoid of slang:

“I wonder if I ought to take advantage of it, and give up this wild, roving existence? He is a true gentleman, and offers me a home, and — and maybe —”

    The color came faster into her cheeks, and her eyes glowed bright as the stars that twinkled in the blue dome above. (12)

Yes, reader, she marries him, in a single sentence that strips her of her colorful sobriquet: “And Santa Fe Sal (otherwise Sara Wilmot) came with him, and became his wife” (15). This event marks the end of “the detective firm of Santa Fe Sal & Green” (15). A disappointment, surely, but perhaps we ought to acknowledge that a writer as prolific as Wheeler knew his audience and presumed that they wanted the ending that readers are said to have wanted from many generations of storytellers: a wedding.

Santa Fe Sal is not available in full text online.

 

 

Josie O’Gorman, Secret Agent

February 4, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Dorothy of Oz fame wasn’t the only adventurous girl hero created by L. Frank Baum. Often writing under pseudonyms, Baum loved to put girls and young women at the heart of a mystery. Writing as Edith Van Dyne, Baum published four novels in the Mary Louise series beginning in 1916; a fifth book was completed after Baum’s death by Emma Speed Sampson, who continued the series with three additional books. The series was intended to focus on the titular character, Mary Louise, but for many the true center of interest was the detective Josie O’Gorman, which Sampson and the publishers recognized by giving Josie her own book, Josie O’Gorman, in 1919. Josie is one of the candidates for the title of first modern girl detective, in part because her books were written for girls, not adults (though sadly, not illustrated).

In the first book, Mary Louise, 15-year-old Mary Louise Burrows discovers that her mother and her adored Gran’pa Jim, with whom she and her mother live since her father’s death, have disappeared in the middle of the night, and that he is wanted by the government for giving state secrets to the enemy. Before this happens, her grandfather has told her to write to him care of his attorney. After a brief interrogation by a blustering Secret Service agent, she leaves school and travels on her own to see the attorney, an old family friend named Conant, but she is followed. The detective who follows her turns out to be the famed John O’Gorman of the Secret Service, who speaks kindly to her, pays for a hotel room, and treats her to breakfast, telling her that she reminds him of his own daughter.

The Conants invite Mary Louise to spend the summer with them at Hillcrest Lodge, their rented summer place, which they hope will be remote enough to discourage the government’s unwanted attentions. Their new neighbor is a fashionable single woman, accompanied by a secretary, whom Mary Louise and her new friend Irene Conant come to know and like. When a dull-witted Irish girl shows up at the door claiming to have been offered employment by the house’s owners, the Conants hire her for the summer. In fact, the plan to avoid government agents fails because the woman neighbor and her secretary are crack Secret Service agents, and the dull-witted Irish girl is none other than Josie O’Gorman, John O’Gorman’s daughter, who has been trained in detective work from her infancy. It is Josie who brings back Gran’pa Jim and establishes his innocence to the astonishment of the two women agents. They have heard of Josie, but never met her: “Everyone who knew O’Gorman had often heard of his daughter Josie, of whom he was accustomed to speak with infinite pride. He always said he was training her to follow his own profession and that when the education was complete Josie O’Gorman would make a name for herself in the detective service” (1st World Library edition, p. 181).

In subsequent books in the series, Mary Louise continues to encounter various mysteries that need solving, and to engage Josie, now a good friend, to solve them. In fact, after the death of her father, Josie moves to the same town to be close to Mary Louise, even though her increasingly busy detective career often takes her away. We learn more about her training, carefully supervised by her father, and her passion for her work: “Josie O’Gorman loved mysteries for their own sake. She loved them because they required solutions, and to solve a mystery is not only interesting but requires a definite amount of talent” (Mary Louise Solves a Mystery, 1917, Echo Library Edition, p. 74). Published during the war years and soon after, these books are often patriotic, even jingoistic.

Nancy Drew and my own girl detective, Dizzy Lark, are direct descendants of Josie O’Gorman, and students of girl detectives will be interested in both similarities and differences. Most notably, Baum does not make Josie beautiful, like Titian-haired Nancy Drew: “Josie O’Gorman was small and ‘pudgy’—her own expression—red-haired and freckle-faced and snub-nosed. Her eyes redeemed much of this personal handicap, for they were big and blue as turquoises and as merry and innocent in expression as the eyes of a child” (Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls, 1918, Biblio Bazaar edition, p. 52). Like girl detectives who came before her, Josie is a master of disguise, with a talent for deception not generally encouraged in girls and young women. And Mary Louise and her friends are referred to as “chums” (Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls, 1918, Biblio Bazaar edition, p. 40, for example)—a word that I will always associate with Nancy, George, and Bess.

 

Some of the Mary Louise books are available from Project Gutenberg:

Mary Louise, 1916

Mary Louise in the Country, 1916

Mary Louise Solves a Mystery, 1917

Mary Louise Adopts a Soldier, 1919 (with Emma Speed Sampson)

Josie O’Gorman, 1919 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Mary Louise at Dorfield, 1920 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Mary Louise Stands the Test, 1921 (Emma Speed Sampson)

 

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