Ria Brodell

Joe Monahan lived in and around the Owyhee Mountains of southwestern Idaho for nearly forty years.

He was around fifteen years old when he moved to the mining town of Silver City, Idaho in 1867, working first in a livery, then a sawmill and eventually mining. He did well for himself, accumulating around $3,000 dollars. Unfortunately, he placed his trust in a mining superintendent that ended up stealing his savings. This led Monahan to take up odd jobs and sell milk and eggs from his cow and chickens until he could save enough to start over. In 1883 he moved to Succor Creek.

In Succor Creek he lived in what most considered poor conditions. His home was described as little more than a dirt floor chicken coop or dugout. He had forty acres, one cow, one horse and he saved his earnings carefully. Soon he was doing well for himself.

Though he was small in stature, beardless, and soft spoken with small hands and feet, he was an accomplished horseman and could handle a revolver and a Winchester rifle with ease. He also served several times as a juror and voted in every election. Monahan was a very private person, and his neighbors hardly knew anything about him. But he was a well-liked member of the community and the cowboys of the area “treated him with the greatest respect, and he was always welcome to eat and sleep at their camp.”

In the fall of 1903, when ordinarily he would have been driving his small band of horses and herd of cattle to their winter-feeding grounds on the Roswell Bench and into the Boise Valley, he found himself falling ill. He sought help at the neighboring ranch of the Malloy’s. He had often stopped off at the Malloy ranch during his fall cattle drive. This year however, he was never able to recuperate, eventually succumbing to his illness and dying on January 5, 1904. He was roughly fifty-three years old.

When neighbors were preparing the body for burial, they discovered what some had always suspected- the body was female. Unsure what to do, they quickly buried Monahan without ceremony. “Not a word was spoken, not a word read, not a prayer offered,” a dismayed friend wrote of Monahan’s funeral, lamenting that no one could know why Monahan lived the way he lived and that, “’Little Joe’ never did anyone harm.”

Another friend, a cowboy named William Schnabel, sought to find more information about Monahan’s family, hoping to pass his modest estate on to his next of kin. He remembered letters Monahan had addressed to Buffalo, New York and reached out to Buffalo’s chief of police. The letter began, “Dear Sir, there died near here a little man, who has been known by all frontiersmen, such as miners and cowboys, as “Joe Monahan.” Upon receiving the letter, the police turned it over to the local paper who in turn published it on page one in the next edition. This led Mrs. Katherine Walter to come forward with the explanation that she was “Johanna Monahan’s” foster mother. She had taken Monahan in when they were eight years old. According to Walter, Monahan always dressed in boy’s clothes and earned a living by selling papers and running errands. At age fourteen Monahan had headed West to the gold-rush. Correspondence found with Monahan’s belongings after his death show this part of his history to be true.

After those first reports in the newspapers, facts quickly become obscured. Historian Peter Boag writes, “The mass-circulation press, most notably the American Journal Examiner, fictionalized his womanhood, femininity, and heterosexuality. Later, storytellers, playwrights, and filmmakers have uncritically accepted what period newspapers reported.” (96) Even his name was changed from Joe to Jo. Fictionalizing accounts of lives like Monahan’s was common in newspapers and novels at the turn of the twentieth century - much like the stories of Sammy Williams and Mr. and Mrs. How (footnote BH). Heterosexualizing or feminizing these lives helped to assuage societies anxiety around any sexuality or gender that seemed unaligned with what was acceptable. Newspapers profited off the young-woman-spurned-by-love trope. Unfortunately, that storyline lives on, most notably in the 1993 film The Ballad of Little Jo which relied on those fictional and sensationalized accounts of Monahan’s life to tell, yet another, story of a woman spurned by love. 


Sources:


Boag, Peter. “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History.” The Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2005): 477–97.

Boag, Peter. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. United Kingdom: University of California Press, 2011.

“Masqueraded Many Years as a Cowboy.” Buffalo Evening News (Buffalo, NY), January 11, 1904: 1.

Skidmore, Emily. True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. United States: NYU Press, 2019.

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