A teenage bride faces the American West

With A Doll in One Pocket and a Pistol in the Other, (Memoir of Rebecca Cohen Mayer, 1837-1930); annotated by Kay Goldman, Create Space, ISBN 1453777776, 144 pages including index, 2010, No price listed.

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – There is more than one way to read a work like this.  You can do it straight through, as the author and publisher evidently intended that you do, or you can read the diary first and then go back to the beginning of the book for Kay Goldman’s enjoyable scholarly essay.   I chose the latter method, so that I could encounter Rebecca Cohen Mayer’s remembrances almost as Goldman had, and once having done that, see how Goldman turned Mayer’s writing into a scholarly dissertation.

As I did so, I was reminded of the work that Sylvia Arden had done in 1974 on Diary of a San Diego Girl, 1856 that had been left behind by Victoria Jacobs, a Jewish girl living in frontier San Diego.  An important difference was that Jacobs’ diary covered only a short period, was confined to San Diego, and concerned itself with the minutiae of the day, whereas Mayer’s missive covered a long life time and was highly episodic.

Mayer left out many important aspects of her biography – including interactions with some members of her family – in favor of retelling memorable episodes from her life in Germany, the United States, Texas during the Confederacy, Mexico, and England.   Mayer was far more selective than Jacobs, a function perhaps of the fact that she compiled the work over a lifetime and had many chances to edit, rewrite and redact it.  Moreover, Jacobs’ diary ended when she was about to be married; Mayer’s began at about the same age –15—just after she was wed to the merchant Henry Mayer, who was 20 years her senior.

Perhaps because in writing my own book about a Jewish pioneer (Louis Rose: San Diego’s First Jewish Settler and Entrepreneur), I particularly had enjoyed researching the chapter describing his migration across the country, I found myself drawn to Mayer’s account of her experiences on the Santa Fe Trail.   Mayer faced adversity with a spirit of adventure.  The young wife of the seasoned organizer of the expedition, she encountered boat disasters, trail hands, Indians, Mexicans, majestic scenery, river crossings, and animals with fascination and remarkable equanimity.

One gets some of the flavor of this journey from her entry for September 2, 1852, somewhere in Kansas, when she wrote: “… Henry ordered one of our Mexicans to bring in a buffalo calf alive and have it at our next halting place for me to see. It was such a nice one I was sorry it had to be killed, but we all enjoyed eating the choice tender meat.  While there is so much meat to be had, we only kill calves and young cows and of many we eat only the tongue and the marrow out of the leg bones.  The air being very dry here, meat keeps a long time without spoiling. We hang a quantity of it behind our wagons to dry and this lasts us for some time after we have left this part of our journey.  Naturally keeping it in that manner, it will become coated with sand. A little thing like that doesn’t bother us.”

Later, when her husband ordered antelopes, “with large, beautiful eyes” shot for their meat,  Mayer cried, prompting Henry Mayer to vow to not have any other animals shown to her alive “as I have wanted to make a pet out of everyone brought in so far.”

Animals that are killed in the hunt are not kosher, nor for that matter was the Mayers’ campfire combination of pork and beans.  In her annotation,  Goldman observed: “It is obvious that neither Rebecca nor Henry kept Kosher, the Jewish dietary rules that prohibited eating pork, shellfish and mixing meat and milk.”

Goldman, of course, was correct. While it was not impossible to maintain a Kosher diet on the frontier – one could have limited oneself to vegetables and fish—it was not common.   Jews of the frontier typically were people who had moved away from the Jewish community or kehilla  There was no minyan of 10 men with whom to pray, and resting on the Sabbath –especially during an overland transit—was all but impossible.  Jews typically arrived independently in western towns, and only after enough of them had been drawn to the same place, did they start meeting together or setting aside land for Jewish cemeteries.

If you would like to experience a frontier woman’s highly selective self-portrait, which allows you to imagine what it might have been like if you were born more than a century ago, this diary, available via Amazon, is a layered introduction.   Should you desire to delve more deeply into Mayer’s story, numerous footnotes as well as Mayer’s introductory essay will provide you with fine academic background.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World