Emy DiGrappa (00:00):

Hello, my name is Emmy DiGrappa. Each week, we bring you stories, asking our guests the question why. We learn about passion, purpose and the human experience. Brought to you by Wyoming Humanities, with the generous support of the Wyoming Community Foundation, this is What's Your Why?

Emy DiGrappa (00:32):

Today. We are talking to Sherry Smith, author and historian of the American West and Native American history. Welcome, Sherry.

Sherry Smith (00:41):

Hi, thanks. Good to be here.

Emy DiGrappa (00:42):

Sherry, you have such an interesting background, and I think it's amazing that you've studied not just the American West, but also Native American history. And how did you become passionate about both those subjects?

Sherry Smith (00:58):

Well, though I live in Wyoming now, I grew up in Indiana. So the Northwest part of Indiana actually, which is heavily industrial and urban, and it's tucked in between Chicago, with all of its cultural treasures and a place called the Indiana Dunes, which is a wonderful natural place. And in fact, part of it is now a national park.

Sherry Smith (01:20):

So far from the West, however, I encountered both in the Indiana Dunes, a fellow, a man who became kind of a surrogate grandfather, who had grown up in South Dakota. And we had a little cabin on Lake Michigan and he had one above us, on the sand dune and his cabin was full of artifacts. I mean, things that he had acquired as a young man in South Dakota, he had friends among the Dakota tribe, near where his ranch was.

Sherry Smith (01:51):

And so as a child, as a five-year-old, I entered into his cabinet and discovered this whole world of Western and Native America. And then on the other hand, Chicago had wonderful museums as well. So I was inundated with a realization that Indiana wasn't the only place in the world, and that the American West was not that far away, and was absolutely beguiled by this man and by his stories, by the things that he had in his cabin. And so I have to say that my interest in the West must have come from that as a child.

Sherry Smith (02:30):

And then I went to college, first of all, at Purdue University, and there were two wonderful historians there, Don Parman and Don Berthrong, who had specialized in Native American history, and so I took classes from them. And then finally, I think any of us who grew up in the 50s and 60s, which I did, were aware that issues of race were current and important and you on everybody's minds.

Sherry Smith (02:59):

And so, I was interested in African American history as well as Native American history. And so I think it's just a combination of those sort of things that led me to study the West, study Native America. And of course, I hoped to ultimately live in the West, which I was lucky enough to be able to do.

Emy DiGrappa (03:21):

And what was your journey to Wyoming?

Sherry Smith (03:24):

Well, I skipped over Wyoming. I went from Indiana out to Seattle Washington to do graduate work at the University of Washington. But this is how often in people's lives, a personal matter leads to professional development. And in this case, I had a boyfriend who was going to school at Colorado State. And so once it got to the point where I was working on my dissertation, I could live wherever I wanted to. So I came to be in Colorado with this boyfriend, but I also needed to have work. And I was lucky enough to be hired by the Wyoming Historic Preservation, not the board, but the state's Historic Preservation Office, which was in Cheyenne.

Sherry Smith (04:05):

So I was commuting up to Cheyenne from Fort Collins, where I was living, and was hired by the Wyoming SHPO, as it's called, to find the Bozeman Trail, which was a historic trail that crossed the Northeast quarter of Wyoming. It was kind of forged. Well, frankly, it was following well-trodden Native American trails starting from, well, the cutoff from Anglo American perspective, was around Fort Fetterman, which eventually was put there, and went up in the North-Westerly direction, heading toward the Montana Gold Fields, again from an Anglo perspective, but along the base of the Bighorn Mountains.

Sherry Smith (04:47):

And so I was hired because I knew something about the history of Wyoming and the West, and in particular, the Indian Wars as they call them, that took place in that area. But my job was not only to write the history, but actually to go out in the field and find areas where you could still see traces of that historic trail. So it was a Native American trail, but then Anglo miners were following the same trail in the 1860s.

Sherry Smith (05:18):

And so that's what I did. That's how I came to first work in Wyoming. Although, to be honest, I was still living in Colorado. And that was just the most amazing experience for me, to be out in the Powder River Basin, using diaries, historical maps. But also, the help of a man at the Bureau of Land Management, who was very useful to me, in showing me aerial photos of the Powder River Basin, where you could actually see from above, traces of the trail. And then finally, speaking to ranchers, who also knew about this trail in areas where you could see it on the land that was either theirs, or that they were releasing most of it from the BLM.

Sherry Smith (06:00):

So that was my immersion into Wyoming when I was still a graduate student, and this was in the early 80s. Interestingly enough, the reason why there was money to do this project, was because the Office of Surface Mining needed to adhere to historic preservation requirements that they were planning, of course, to develop for energy resources, this property. So it was kind of compelled by the federal government to make sure that they were not doing great harm to historic resources that this job happened in the first place.

Sherry Smith (06:33):

So that's how I came to be in Wyoming. And if I can just add one interesting component of this story, that turned out to demonstrate to me that I was not the first person in my family to come to Wyoming after all, it was in the context of this job. And I had known that my great grandfather was in the army in the 1870s, and that there was a diary that a distant cousin had. And I did know that he was in the fourth cavalry.

Sherry Smith (07:06):

And in the process of doing research on the army use of the Bozeman Trail, I discovered that in the fall of 1876, which was after the Custer Disaster at Little Bighorn, the fourth cavalry, which had been in Texas, was brought up to Wyoming to punish the Indians who had participated in the Battle at Little Bighorn. And so, I suddenly realized that my great grandfather had been on this trail in 1876. And so I began urging my father, because it was his family, it was a Smith, to help contact the cousin to see if in fact the diary that she had, was the diary of that expedition. And it turned out that it was.

Sherry Smith (07:55):

And so I was able to read it and ultimately it became my first book, called Sagebrush Soldier. And he was a common man; can't ask for a better name than Smith to represent the common man. He was an enlisted man. He had worked for the railroads, but I think he lost his job in the Panic of 1873, so he ended up in the army. He was literate, but a terrible speller. But he kept this diary and it is a pretty interesting view of what it was like to be a common cavalryman during an expedition in 1876.

Sherry Smith (08:35):

And as it turned out, they did have a battle. It was up in the Bighorn Mountains. They found a camp of Cheyenne people, and some of them had participated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. And so the cavalry did charge into that battle site at dawn in November, November 25th, 1876. And he includes in his diary, his own experience in that episode as well.

Sherry Smith (09:04):

So it was a shock and a surprise to me to learn that I was not the first Smith to come to Wyoming, that my great grandfather had been here many years before, in the very same place that I was hired to find. And so, he did not stay. He went back, he was actually happy to get out of there. In fact, he wrote in his diary, a number of soldiers died in that battle. Nothing like the number of Cheyenne, of course, who suffered because when the army left, before they left, they burned the village down. So these people lost everything. It was a horrific experience for them in cold November Wyoming weather.

Sherry Smith (09:45):

He did not ponder that for very long, but he did talk about the soldiers that they buried there. And he said, "I would not like to be buried here where no white man will ever come back again." That was an interesting, at least to me, discovery that I had had family history in Wyoming that I never knew about.

Emy DiGrappa (10:04):

Do you think that, speaking of family history, do you think that people's interest in knowing their genealogy has changed so much? I mean, I think with all the new programs they have to trace your roots, I think people are more interested in, "Where does my family come from?"

Sherry Smith (10:24):

Yes, I agree. I just love that television show, Finding Your Roots, because I think every family does have stories, that are compelling, that place your own experience in the larger context of American history. And I'm not saying it necessarily shape exactly who you are, but I think it's really important to have some sense of your own family's historical context.

Sherry Smith (10:49):

And the reason why this fellow's story I think had been buried, was because eventually what he did, was he deserted from the army, and then he went back. He was from the Chicago area actually, from Northern Illinois anyway. And when he went back, his mother made him turn himself in. And so he did, and he was charged with desertion and sent to prison for a while. And is also the kind of family stories that you will sometimes uncover in the course of looking at your family history; stories that people probably went to their graves thinking had been kept secret. And unfortunately, I discovered that this has happened.

Sherry Smith (11:29):

But I do think that people's histories, both the good and the bad, are extremely wonderful and important for people to understand. And I do also agree that the internet and an ancestry.com, there's all kinds of ways now that are much easier to research your family history, than when I was doing this work, which was in the 1980s and you had to go through the census on microfilm and it was a lot more onerous in those days, but now there's wonderful ways to find out your family history, and I encourage everybody to do it. But be prepared that you might find some things that you're not necessarily happy about.

Emy DiGrappa (12:08):

Well, my mom and dad actually did do that. And so that has been interesting to learn just their bloodlines. That's been very interesting.

Sherry Smith (12:19):

Yeah.

Emy DiGrappa (12:19):

So what was the year that you ended up moving to Wyoming?

Sherry Smith (12:24):

So that was in, let's see, I started that job in the fall of 1980, and the job lasted about a year. And I could have stayed on, but then an opportunity arose for me to teach at the University of Colorado. It was a sabbatical replacement one year position to teach Native American history. And I was really torn, because I so loved this work; being out in the field and really getting to know the West and Wyoming in my bones and discovering my own family connection. All of that was wonderful. I loved the people that I worked with.

Sherry Smith (13:00):

But I had been trained really to be a teacher and a scholar. And so I thought, "Well, I probably should go this route at this particular time." So I ended up leaving the SHPO and going to work at the Department of History at the University of Colorado. And so I sort of came to that fork in the road and I opted for the academic route.

Emy DiGrappa (13:23):

And so, when did you return?

Sherry Smith (13:26):

I returned a couple of years later. It's been very difficult for a long time, for people to get professorships in history. A lot of us baby boomers were getting PhDs, and just at the time when the numbers of positions were actually decreasing. So for a couple of years, I had these one year sabbatical replacement jobs.

Sherry Smith (13:49):

So after the Colorado stint, a man named Peter Iverson at the University of Wyoming was going on leave. So I came up to Laramie and I taught at Laramie. It was a two year period that I was in Laramie. So that's where I met Robert Writer who is also a historian and we eventually married. So I was here then, and that was the mid 80s.

Sherry Smith (14:13):

And then, finally what happened was we wanted to both be professors, but actually live together. And so we took a shared position at the University of Texas El Paso. And when we did that, Bob said, "Okay, I'm okay with Texas during the academic year, but I want to be able to come back to Wyoming in the summers."

Sherry Smith (14:39):

And that moment coincided with the death of his parents, who had left just enough money to allow us to get a toehold into Jackson Hole. So we bought some property and built a small cabin in Jackson Hole in the 80s, when it was still possible for middle class people to do so. And so really since the late 80s, we have had this place ever since. And we now consider it our primary home.

Emy DiGrappa (15:10):

That's a good story. You've taken quite a journey to come back round to be here.

Sherry Smith (15:14):

Yeah.

Emy DiGrappa (15:16):

And I love your fascination with history. How can we really impart that love of history to our young people, to really want to know, not just their roots, but the history of our country?

Sherry Smith (15:33):

Boy, I wish I had the answer to that. All I can say is that in my case, I think I was born with it. I do recall as a child, listening to my relatives telling stories about their own personal experiences and their family history. I was just always interested in it and I don't really know why. I now look at the children in our family, grandchildren, and so forth, who don't seem to have that interest when around the dinner table or after we're done eating, and we're sitting around talking about the past, they tend to get up and leave the table.

Sherry Smith (16:10):

So I don't know. I really wish I ... All I can say is that, I think parents should let their children know stories. I mean, I think they should talk about their stories, but also for me, I think listening to what was going on in the world. I mean, we think that now things are really fraught and difficult, but they were pretty difficult in the 60s as well. And so I was aware of what was going on, but I also understood that you couldn't really understand what was going on unless you had some sense of historical perspective.

Sherry Smith (16:44):

So I do think parents and teachers can do their best to make history relevant to students, not only in terms of their own personal family history, but the larger world in which they live. But the best way probably to hook them, is with story, with stories that are intriguing and interesting and age appropriate.

Sherry Smith (17:04):

But in the end, some people never get interested in history. I certainly had many students who have reluctantly sat through my classes. My husband, Bob Ryder says that he thinks that many people don't really appreciate history until they have one of their own. As they get older, they have a greater appreciation for the importance of the past.

Sherry Smith (17:26):

But, yeah, I personally think it's critically important to us as a community, as human beings, as a nation, to have some comprehension of what has happened before, that helps us understand what we're going through now, and provides not necessarily answers, but at least the perspective that can make the answers that we come up with, grounded in an understanding of how we got there in the first place.

Sherry Smith (17:55):

What do you think? I mean, do you find people are interested in history; younger people today?

Emy DiGrappa (18:01):

Well, I think it goes up and down. And I think I'll meet some students that really love history, because they like to contemplate what is happening today versus what happened yesterday and how did it change? And especially now, with our country in turmoil, I think more and more younger people are looking back. Like, "How did it get this way? How are we this deep into this kind of unrest? And what do I need to know?" I have seen that happen.

Emy DiGrappa (18:41):

But I think it is true about storytelling around the dinner table. My mom and dad were really good about that. And so it was really fun to listen to their stories and listen to what they went through and what it was like, and who my great grandparents were and where they came from. But they really imparted that in us. And so I think it is upon your parents to sit down and talk about it like it is a journey, and it becomes fascinating.

Sherry Smith (19:16):

Right. I mean, this is, I guess, kind of how nerdy my family must've been, but I can recall around the dinner table, my parents having debates about history. And of course, for them it wasn't necessarily history, it was more something that they had lived through. But I remember my mother absolutely loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and my father was a little more skeptical about him.

Sherry Smith (19:38):

And they would periodically have this debate among themselves, whether he knew before it happened, that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor. And my mother insisting, "Oh no, he would never have allowed that to happen." And my father, not so sure. So I do think that family context can be a factor here. But I'm sure there are many other people who don't necessarily have that, and still understand the value of history.

Sherry Smith (20:05):

I'm terrible at math and science, right? And that's equally important. I mean, I can not understand geology at all, even though I've tried.

Emy DiGrappa (20:13):

That's funny.

Sherry Smith (20:14):

I guess that some people have an aptitude for history and others have aptitude for geology and maybe some of it just comes down to that as well.

Emy DiGrappa (20:23):

Well, that's true; whatever your passion is. I want to talk about the book that you just recently wrote, Bohemians West: Free Love, Family and Radicals in Twentieth Century America. That is a very big name and it says a lot just in the name. And just kind of reading excerpts out of your book, it talks about the story of a relationship that's happening, that you're following in this book. And just early 20th century American radicalism in the American West.

Emy DiGrappa (21:00):

And so I wanted you to talk a little bit about, what was your inspiration to write this book, and how it became important for you to write it?

Sherry Smith (21:10):

Well, it goes back actually, quite a ways back to graduate school, where I went to have a discussion with my dissertation director about what I was going to write about. And this was in the early days actually of women's history. And so I thought it would be really interesting to do something about women reformers in the late 19th century, who were drawn to issues dealing with Native Americans and were active in the Reform Movement, which now of course, we consider their ideas to be quite detrimental.

Sherry Smith (21:42):

But anyway, I said to him, "I'd like to do something with women reformers and Native American policy." And he just sort of blanched and I knew, "Okay, he's not going to go for this." And so he said to me, "I think you should write about army officers and what their reflections were about Indians, about fighting them," and this kind of thing. I thought, "Ugh. I know nothing about the military." This was by the way, before I had the Bozeman Trail job and knew about my family history here. But as a dutiful student, I thought, "Well, I better do what he wants me to do." So that's what I did.

Sherry Smith (22:16):

And in the course of doing that work, I read many diaries, and letters, and journals and books that army officers and their wives, I did get women in there, and also, what they wrote about not only Native American men, but what they wrote about Native American women, so it was sneaking a little women's history in there.

Sherry Smith (22:33):

But in the course of doing that, I probably looked at, I don't know, 150 different officers' personal reflections on what they were about. And I ran across one man in particular, who was a West Point graduate named Charles Erskine Scott Wood. And he really stood out, because he was so different in his point of view. He was a reluctant soldier. His father made him go to West Point. What he really wanted to be, was a poet, but he ended up in the army and he was fighting the Nez Perce in 1877.

Sherry Smith (23:04):

And as he was going along in this expedition, he was writing in his diary, things like thoughts on the Indian, as a man and a brother. And at the end of the whole thing, when Chief Joseph surrendered, Wood was there, he befriended him. He eventually sent his son not to West Point, but to live for several summers with Chief Joseph.

Sherry Smith (23:28):

So I became intrigued with this fellow, who was really quite advanced, from our perspective, in his ideas about Native American people and quite critical of what we would call the invasion of Indian country, by Anglo American people. So his letters, diaries and things, we're at the Huntington Library and in San Marino, California. And it's a huge collection of Wood papers there. And I discovered box after box, after box letters that he had written to and received from this woman named, Sara Bard Field. And I thought, "What is this about?"

Sherry Smith (24:05):

So I didn't have time to dip into it then, but I eventually wrote a whole chapter about Wood in a later book called, Reimagining Indians. And while I was at the Huntington, then I looked at these letters, and I discovered that this was a relationship, a love relationship, that had begun in 1910, when the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow introduced them in Portland, Oregon. Darrow knew Sara because Sara's sister was one of his mistresses. And he knew Wood, I guess, because they were lawyers who shared and progressive values and points of view.

Sherry Smith (24:39):

So anyway, I thought, "Wow, someday I'd really like to come back and do something with this story." So it took me a long time actually, to have the time because it took so long to read those letters. Although, I had a one year fellowship at the Huntington, which gave me the opportunity to read the letters that they wrote, not only to each other, but that they wrote to their spouses, to each other's spouses, to their children, to their many very famous friends, about this relationship.

Sherry Smith (25:05):

And it just seemed to me a story that, well, for one thing, they wanted told. People have asked me, "Why are these letters even there?" And they're there because Wood told Sara to save every single letter. He saw them as pioneers in free love and thought someday somebody will be interested in telling their story. And so I turned out to be that person who found them and who found the story and decided to commit the time it took to research it and to write it.

Sherry Smith (25:35):

It's a long way from where I started, writing about the army and the West, and I end up writing about these political radicals. They were very involved in labor issues and free speech, anti-war. And Sara was extremely involved in the particular push for the 19th Amendment, so she was very involved in the Suffrage Movement. But that's how I got there.

Sherry Smith (25:58):

From the army connection the arc goes another direction. Wood was an unusual army officer, who resigned and became a lawyer and the free love advocate and so forth.

Emy DiGrappa (26:10):

So define free love for me please.

Sherry Smith (26:11):

So what they meant by free love, was that love is something that just comes and it can go. It does not need to be sanctioned by either the church or the state. So they had both married, they were both married when they met. But Wood, in particular, believed that more harm than good came from these marriages, where it was extremely difficult to divorce. He had fallen out of love with wife, they had children. He loved her as a human being, but he did not want to be restrained by this formal marriage anymore. And he never wanted to marry again, and wanted to be free to express himself as an individual and as a man, in his relationships with other women.

Sherry Smith (27:01):

And so Sara did not come to this relationship with the commitment to free love, but she accepted it when she did divorce her husband. This was an agonizing experience, she had small children. There was a 30 year age difference between the two of them, but she never wanted to marry Wood. Eventually, they were able to live together, and that's what they thought was the best thing, that marriage, the formally constructed sanctioned by church or state marriage, was an inhibition on people's lives and individual freedom, which was one of the values that they most valued, and so that's how they defined it.

Sherry Smith (27:44):

Now, then the other part of this, "Well, what does this mean in terms of, can you have multiple partners?" So that becomes, of course, a conflict and a debate between the two of them; whether free love still met you should still be monogamous, or whether free love meant you could be free to have as many partners as you.

Emy DiGrappa (28:03):

And what did they decide?

Sherry Smith (28:06):

Well, she certainly believed that monogamy was the best and highest way of going about this. He did not agree, but neither was he ... I would not call him promiscuous. I think important to mention, by the way, that by the time they met, he was 58 and she was 28. So he may have been slowing down a little bit, but because they lived apart, when she left her husband, she ended up living in California and he remained back in Portland. And so, because they were apart, he was not going to deny himself relationships with other women. But I would not call him promiscuous, but he had other affairs with a couple of women along the way, until they finally did live together. At which point, as far as I know anyway, they were monogamous from that point forward.

Sherry Smith (29:02):

Several times, she was letting him know through letters, that there were men that were interested in her. And I cannot say for sure that she never consummated any of them, but I kind of doubt it.

Emy DiGrappa (29:13):

Yeah.

Sherry Smith (29:13):

But while they were apart, it was a constant issue between the two of them.

Emy DiGrappa (29:19):

What do people take away after reading your book? What is the main lesson learned or something that you opened someone eyes to see?

Sherry Smith (29:30):

This is a story very much about an unusual couple. It's also unusually well-documented. And so I think that is the appeal to me, was how these were two individuals, who were trying to carve out a new way of living, a new way of experiencing commitment and love, that was really radical for their times, and maybe would still be considered so today, although I think more and more people do live without being formally married, for sure, now than then, 100 years ago.

Sherry Smith (30:07):

And so for me, it is how they think about this, how they struggle with the choices that they are making. Because they were not thoughtless people. They were not careless people. They were really quite, I think, well-meaning. Often, of course, they fell short of their ideals. They talk a lot about being honest and truthful, but of course, both of them were engaged in deceit for a period of time when they were still married, particularly Sara, to a Baptist minister.

Sherry Smith (30:38):

So I think the value of it comes in looking at how people who were thoughtful, were trying to reconceptualize concepts of marriage and family. And what I found and I tell people about this, they have immediate reactions, even though they don't know anything other than what I tell them, but I get really strong and quite negative reactions to both the man and the woman. And interestingly enough, women are more critical of Sara, and men are more critical of Erskine, as he was called.

Sherry Smith (31:09):

I think there's something about this story that is both compelling, but off-putting to people, but it also makes you think about the decisions that you have made and the choices that we all make. And no choice is perfect, and you're always giving up something in exchange for something else.

Sherry Smith (31:27):

And so for me, it isn't about some broad, although I do want to put them in their context of radicalism, because I think that has a big part of what their lives were about and impacted their personal relationship. In the end, I think the story is most compelling as an example of an effort to try to do something radically new, and to look at how they explain themselves, and then reflect on your own lives. So it's really a very intimate story that I think people can identify with or have strong reactions against, but that it speaks to things that many of us, we live every day in relationships, whether it's formal marriage or not, in relationships with children, and the decisions that you make about your own personal happiness and the impact on your kids.

Sherry Smith (32:18):

So these are issues that are still very relevant today. And however one feels about the choices that this couple made, I think it is worth spending some time with them, just to look at how they did it and to think about where you are.

Sherry Smith (32:37):

So it's kind of a different kind of history, than the one that has to deal with broader developments and whether it's Indian policy or other things. So, it's really a very personal kind of story that I think people can find interesting.

Emy DiGrappa (32:53):

I'm excited to read it. Thank you so much. And thank you for talking to me today.

Sherry Smith (32:56):

Oh, thanks. This went really fast and I appreciate your interest and the chance to talk to you about this, about Wyoming, about my first book and about my last book, my most recent book, I should say. So thanks so much, Emy.

Emy DiGrappa (33:09):

Oh, thank you, Sherry.

Emy DiGrappa (33:17):

Thank you for joining us for this episode of What's Your Why? Brought to you by Wyoming Humanities, with support from Wyoming Community Foundation and generous supporters like you. To learn more, good to thinkWY.org, subscribe and never miss a show.

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