Natalie Merchant's song "Gold Rush Brides" recalls the beauty and majesty of the early American West but emphasizes that it was the men who enjoyed the freedom of the Wild West. The women had to undergo horrendous struggle and hardship as "homestead wives" and "gold rush brides" ("10000 Maniacs Gold Rush Brides Lyrics"). As the song lyrics indicate, women in the West suffered through yellow fever, childbirth, the deaths of their husbands, and even madness, and although the land out West was free, it cost the women their lives ("10000 Maniacs Gold Rush Brides Lyrics").
One of the points that the song makes is that the Old American West offered much opportunity but that the opportunity came at a heavy price. The West was for all intents and purposes an uncivilized wilderness lacking the comforts and amenities of the civilized East. Thus, when rough winters came, there was not enough food or sufficient shelter, and people were assailed by disease and Indians; they had to be tough and persistent and stick together (Pierlioni E.1).
Dominant cultural understandings of the Wild West portray a vision of a land that lent itself to settlement and a simple context of cowboys versus Indians that American westerns reduced all their plot lines to. The song, however, points up the far more complex reality that people of the Wild West had to live in-one fraught with risk, hardship, and tragedy where there was not always a happy ending but people continued to press on through sheer grit (Pierlioni E.1).
"10000 Maniacs Gold Rush Brides Lyrics." MusicSongLyrics.com. Pierlioni, Allen. The Sacramento Bee, January 16, 2008, E.1. ProQuest. ...