Yiddish and Cherokee is an unusual combination of languages, but my grandparents, Abe and Goldie Winnerman spoke both. It was the result of living in Cherokee Indian Territory beginning in 1900 where they opened the New York General Store in what would become Oklahoma. After statehood in 1907, they remained in business in Stilwell until 1917. 

My impression had always been that they were quite unique. Then in 2005 in Santa Fe, I happened upon an exhibit called “Jewish Pioneers in New Mexico 1812-1917.” It was fascinating to see a photo of a covered wagon with the back modified to serve as a traveling bimah, to read diaries of Jewish frontier life and to learn that Jews were miners, cattle ranchers and explorers.

Until 1984 the question of what part Jews had played in settling the West was usually met with another question: Where there any? Then Harriet and Fred Rochlin of Los Angeles published “Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West.” They had begun work on the volume in the 1960s as they investigated their family’s genealogy.

“It just became a part of my being, spilling over to Jews on the frontier,” Harriet told me recently. “When our research was completed, we had documented how Jewish pioneers had been involved throughout the settlement of the West.

Early Jewish frontier settlers

Lewis Polock was the first Jew known to have lived on the Pacific Coast. Born in Philadelphia in 1819, he arrived in San Francisco in 1837 in search of adventure, and he succeeded. In 1847 he was with American troops outside Mexico City during the Mexican American War, and their victorious Battle of Chapultepec.

Bernard Lutz immigrated from Prussia in 1842, and was involved in the capture of Santa Fe at the time it was the Mexican territorial capitol in 1846. Later he started a trading post in what would become New Mexico, and helped negotiate peace treaties with several Apache Indian chiefs.

During 1849 Jews joined other Americans in the rush to the West to prospect for gold. While several became involved mining a claim, a more frequent outcome was livelihood as peddlers or merchants supplying the miners. Levi Strauss is an example. He began his path to prosperity by turning heavy blue cloth into work clothes for miners.

For some Jews the lure of free land under the Homestead Act of 1862 provided new opportunities out West. Charles Cohen recognized that luxuriant grasses and plentiful water in southeastern Utah would nourish cattle needed to supply food to the growing population. When the Union Pacific Railroad reached his county, Cohen was already an established rancher and farmer.

In 1886, the acclaimed American Western artist Charles M. Russell was managing a herd of thousands of cattle for Louis Kaufman. During a disastrous spell of winter weather Kaufman inquired about the livestock. The grim answer arrived in the form of a Russell painting titled “Waiting for a Chinook,” meaning a warm wind that would melt the snow. The scene, which depicts a thin, starving steer being circled by coyotes, helped establish Russell’s career and remains one of his most noted works.

Solomon Carvalho, a Sephardic Jewish oil painter and photographer, spent the years 1853-54 on an historic and treacherous expedition. He documented an unexplored portion of the Far West with Colonel John C. Fremont, a celebrated American soldier and explorer.

By responding to the allure of adventure and uncertainty of the early frontier, newly arrived Jews were thrust into a life where Jewish traditions were difficult to uphold. Nonetheless, most were determined to maintain their heritage.

Circumcisions had to wait for a circuit riding mohel. Dr. John Elsner was one such gentleman who had arrived in America from Vienna. From 1887 until 1905, his well-kept records revealed 169 circumcisions performed throughout Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Nebraska.

Looking for nice Jewish girls

When children became older, families in isolated towns frequently moved to a city where there was a Jewish community. My grandparents moved the family to St. Louis when my dad was 12 in the hopes their children would marry Jews, and they all did.

A few arrived on the frontier with wives, like my grandparents who had married almost immediately in 1900, the year Goldie immigrated. But that was not the case for many Jewish frontiersmen who ventured West as bachelors, where prospective single Jewish women were almost nonexistent. Once they established a profession, knowledge of an eligible prospect for marriage often resulted in a trip to New York or even Europe to meet the possible bride and convince her to return as a frontier wife.

In 2006 I visited Acoma, N.M., which is situated on a high mesa an hour west of Albuquerque. The pueblo is thought to have been continuously inhabited since at least 1200. During the tour, the story of Solomon Bibo was told.

Bibo arrived in New York in 1869 and headed to New Mexico to work as a wagon driver, as he had done in Prussia. He ingraciated himself to the Chief of the Acoma pueblo, and eventually married the Chief’s granddaughter. Later he became the first non-Indian governor of a North American Indian tribe. His children were raised as Jews.

Another mixed union took place between Wyatt Earp and Josie Marcus, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Prussia. They had been together as common-law partners for 47 years when he died in 1922. Marcus had his remains buried in her family plot at the Hills of Eternity, a Jewish cemetery in Colma, Calif.

In communities where there were other Jews, organized religion was practiced amidst a society that knew little about them. In 1865, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News reported: “Today is some sort of a holiday to those of the Jewish persuasion, unknown to us Gentiles. Business houses kept by that class in town are closed.”

Once Jews had become established in a community, it was not uncommon for them to be elected to public positions of leadership. Rochlin’s book lists 27 Jewish frontier mayors she discovered in towns such as Butte, Mont.; Deadwood, S.D.; Roswell, N.M. and Tucson, Ariz.

It wasn’t always easy but traditions did prevail

Some frontier Jews, in the absence of any organized Jewish religious education, went so far as to attend church services, thereby reassuring Christian neighbors of their piety. My grandparents sent my dad and his brother and sisters to Ft. Smith, Ark. to attend a Christian Sunday School.

“Your grandmother thought any religion was better than none,” he would say, showing a pin he received for perfect attendance.

Rochlin says that the first known High Holy Days observance in the Far West was held by Lewis Franklin, an Orthodox Jew from Liverpool, England. In September, 1849, in San Francisco 30 worshipers responded to a newspaper announcement he had placed. Ten days later on Yom Kipper, 50 people attended, and the next year a hall had to be rented.

A Jewish census of sorts was undertaken by Israel Benjamin in 1860. Traveling by steamship and stagecoach, he found 5,000 Jews in San Francisco, 500 in Sacramento, and 100 in Los Angeles.

Fenced off sections of local cemeteries was a common final resting place for frontier Jews. I had discovered such a plot in 2001 at Boot Hill, the famous 1879 cemetery in Tombstone, Ariz. where some of the West’s most notorious characters died violently and lay buried in the boots they were wearing.

A handout explained that decades after the cemetery closed in the 1880s, the Jewish gravestones disappeared, and the section was forgotten by most. Then, almost a century later in 1982, an Arizona historian with knowledge of the plot invited Israel Rubin from Maryland to see the site. Accompanying them was Judge C. Lawrence Huerta, a full-blooded Yaqui Indian from Tucson.

As Rubin recited the kaddush, Huerta was so moved that he vowed to restore the graveyard in honor of the Jewish pioneers. A memorial placed in February 1984 reads: “Dedicated to the Jewish Pioneers and Their Indian Friends.” Inscribed into the sides of the memorial are the Star of David and an Indian sun-symbol meaning “those who vanished.”

In August, Dave Askey, the present-day owner of Boot Hill, reported stones left at the 4-foot high memorial were several layers deep on top, and were piled half way up all four sides.

In life, as in death, pioneer Jews were everywhere on the American frontier.

Harriet Rochlin continues to write and speak about pioneer Jews online at: rochlin-roots-west.com.