The young women knew of Mrs. Nash’s experience as a midwife, so they went desperately to her door. They were immediately impressed by the woman’s home. “We found the little place shining,” Libbie said. “The bed was hung with pink cambric, and on some shelves she showed us silk and woollen stuffs for gowns; bits of carpet were on the floor, and the dresser, improvised out of a packing-box, shone with polished tins. Outside we were presented to some chickens, which were riches indeed out there in that Nova Zemblian climate. She was very gentle with our friend when we told our errand, and gave her needful advice in her broken Mexican tongue.”
Annie feared Mrs. Nash, “for the woman was a Mexican. ... She was tall, angular, awkward, and seemingly coarse,” Libbie said, “but I knew her to be tender-hearted.” Though reluctant at first, Mrs. Nash finally agreed to help the expectant mother, provided she could go home in the evenings to make dinner for her “manny manny.”
Anxious Annie was soon won over by Mrs. Nash’s clear competence and kindness. As Libbie wrote, “Occasionally she [Mrs. Nash] came to the bed, and in her harsh voice asked, ‘Are you comph?’—meaning comfortable. The gentle, dexterous manner in which she lifted and cared for the little woman [Annie] quieted her dread of this great giraffe. By degrees I was promoted to the duty of bathing and dressing the little new-comer, the young mother giving directions from the pillow. When ‘Old Nash’ was no longer absolutely necessary she went back to her husband—a richer woman by much gratitude and a great deal of money.”
By most records and written accounts, there was not a single birth at Fort Lincoln that went unattended by Mrs. Nash. She was the most sought-after midwife for miles.
In 1876, Mrs. Nash’s John marched with General George Custer into the disastrous Battle of Little Bighorn. George died (possibly from a blow delivered by Buffalo Calf Road Woman), but John returned to tell the tale. The defeat of “Custer’s Last Stand” only galvanized the United States’ military to meet the indigenous tribes with more exterminatory violence; John was frequently deployed to relocate or suppress tribes across the spreading nation. While he was absent on one of these campaigns in 1878, Mrs. Nash fell ill.
“Her past life of hardship and exposure told on her in time, and she became ailing and rheumatic,” said Libbie. In her final moments, she entreated those around her to bury her just as she was, in the very dress she wore. Her caregivers did not fulfill that promise. Instead, they performed the usual death rites of cleaning and preparing the body, which revealed Mrs. Nash’s biological sex to all of Fort Lincoln—and to the world.
A fellow soldier, John Burkman, wrote to a friend that “we was flabbergasted.”
A singular dispatch titled “Turns Out To Be A Man” appeared in papers all across the United States, and even as far reaching as Scotland and Australia. It was translated into German for newspapers there. “Mrs. Sergeant Noonan who Died at Fort Lincoln,” read the subhead in the Green Bay Press-Gazette on Saturday, Nov. 2, 1878. “Mrs. Noonan was a laundress at the post, and a most popular midwife. ... Her husband is a member of the Seventh Cavalry, now in the field. There is no explanation for their unnatural union except that the supposed Mexican woman was worth $100,000, and was able to buy her husband’s silence. She had been with the Seventh Cavalry nine years.”
There’s no explanation—nor evidence—for the idea that John’s “silence” had been bought, yet this assertion was reprinted widely. Additional stories often painted Mrs. Nash as an outsider, or a person viewed with suspicion by the other residents of Fort Lincoln. But, as we’ve read, “old manuscripts that contain eyewitness accounts…reveal a somewhat different story,” noted Peter Boag, Washington State University History of the American West professor, in The Trouble with Cross-Dressers: Researching and Writing the History of Sexual and Gender Transgressiveness in the Nineteenth-Century American West. “They describe Nash as a highly respected member of the Fort Lincoln community, well integrated into daily life there, and accepted as a woman. Moreover, Seventh Cavalry people prized Nash for her culinary creations, depended on her decorating talents for post soirees, and relied on her skills as a midwife. Officers’ wives, furthermore, took advantage of her for her ability to carefully launder delicate fabrics.”
As the title of Peter’s article indicates, cross-dressing was not uncommon in the American West. The true gender identity of these individuals is uncertain and the use of modern labels can be presumptuous and misguided. People such as Mrs. Nash, however, challenge the binary notion that all frontiers-era “cross-dressers” were men pretending to be women, or women pretending to be men. “Old Nash’s story,” commented Peter in Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History, “suggests that something more akin to gender and sex feelings and identities must have been at work in the lives of at least some western cross-dressers.”
Many modern trans writers see themselves in Mrs. Nash’s story and claim her as one of their own. “She remains a strong challenge to the flimsy historical theory that all gender non-conformity in the Old West was driven by money rather than authentic gender dysphoria,” wrote Kimberly Kaye in “The trans midwife who cared for General Custer’s army” for LGBTQNation. “Mrs. Nash is a reminder that trans people have always existed—and have even thrived when given the space to do so.”
Mrs. Nash’s beloved John Noonan fared poorly as the invasive international news of her death spread. At Fort Lincoln, his grief was met with ridicule and bullying. Fellow soldier Burkman told this story of one interaction: “Noonan walked in. His face was gaunt and sorta set. The carpenter looked up. ‘Hello Noonan!’ he says. ‘Say, you and Mrs. Noonan never had no children, did you?’ We all started laughin’ and then we stopped sudden. Noonan was standin’, lookin’ at us…like an animal that’s been hurt.” Some stories say he argued back, insisting that he and his wife had been planning to have children. By Burkman’s account, John shot himself then and there, in front of them all. Others assert that it was when he was alone in the stables later that night. Certain, however, is that John, then just in his early 30s, died by his own hand barely a month after Mrs. Nash’s death.
Most attribute his suicide to something akin to shame. As Libbie wrote, “After enduring the gibes and scoffs of his comrades for a few days, life became unbearable to the handsome soldier who had played the part of husband in order to gain possession of his wife’s savings and vary the plain fare of the soldier with good suppers.”
Just as personal accounts skewered the idea that Mrs. Nash was an outsider, so do they call into question this rather mercenary view of her marriage with John Noonan. “Although Old Nash’s first two husbands may have married her for that reason—for according to reports they certain ended up stealing from and abandoning her—evidence suggests that more than just money registered in ‘manny manny’ when he looked into his wife’s eyes,” Peter wrote in Sexuality, Gender, and Identity in Great Plains History and Myth. “[O]ne might wonder why ‘manny manny’ did not simply desert rather than take the extreme measures he did. That would also seem the reasonable solution if the handsome soldier was, as [Libbie] declares, only after Old Nash’s money, like her former two husbands who did defect. There is one other probable reason for the tragic ending to this story: ‘manny manny’ took his life because he was grief-stricken over the loss of a partner he loved greatly.”
Regardless of the form their companionship took, this author would add that Mrs. Nash’s death, instead of being treated as a loss, was seemingly turned into a worldwide joke with which John was expected to laugh along. His apparent inability to join in the dehumanizing response to his wife’s death hints at some sincere feeling. Peter noted that people like Libbie may have just been unable to understand that “deep and abiding love may very well have played a role” in their relationship. Indeed, despite the assumptions that John had married Mrs. Nash for money, she had made arrangements before her death that all her wealth should be donated to the Catholic Church.
John was buried in what would come to be called Custer National Cemetery in Big Horn County, Montana. A simple white stone marks his grave, etched with his name. Mrs. Nash is buried in the same cemetery, though nowhere near John. She appears in the cemetery’s registers as John Noonan’s spouse, “Unknown Noonan.”
New mother “Miss Annie” read that same salacious passage that went around the world. Libbie recorded her response. “When our friend, whom the old creature had so carefully nursed, read the newspaper paragraph describing the death, her only comment was a reference to the Mexican’s oft-repeated question to her, ‘Poor old thing, I hope she is ‘comph’ at last.’”
Sources:
Gutenberg Project: Boots and Saddles by Elizabeth B. Custer
The Trouble with Cross-Dressers: Researching and Writing the History of Sexual and Gender Transgressiveness in the Nineteenth-Century American West by Peter Boag
Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History by Peter Boag
Sexuality, Gender, and Identity in Great Plains History and Myth by Peter Boag
LGBTQNation: The trans midwife who cared for General Custer’s army
Midwestern Scout: The Mysterious Mrs. Nash
True West Magazine: Noonan’s Last Stand
Green Bay Press-Gazette: November 2, 1878
Wikipedia: Elizabeth Custer, Fort Abraham Lincoln
The National Police Gazette:Feb. 15, 1879
Find a Grave: Sgt. John Noonan, Unknown Noonan