Researching Historical Fiction: Making a Living in 1850s Oregon

Making a living was important to pioneers on the frontier, just as it has been at all periods of American history. I wrote last month about farming in the 1850s. Land was free for white males in Oregon to claim, so if a man was willing to clear the land and work it, he could support himself and a family with farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering what the land produced naturally.

A model for my schoolteacher character

What about other occupations? What about women and nonwhites? How did they support themselves? I’ve been exploring these questions as I draft my current work-in-progress.

One of the main characters in this novel is a single woman. She arrives in Oregon in late 1850 expecting to have a home with her brother, who had emigrated to Oregon a few years earlier. Unfortunately, her brother’s circumstances make such a living arrangement undesirable. So she decides she must earn her own keep in Oregon. She finds a position as a teacher, and then later as a housekeeper. She is fortunate to be provided housing where she teaches, but not her food.

But can she support herself with these occupations?

Teacher’s pay for women in the 1850s was typically lower than for male teachers. I found one source indicating that in Maine in 1852, for example, men made about $17.33/month (exclusive of board), while women made about $1.54/week (or $6.62/month, again exclusive of board).  These Maine reports were for teachers in established schools. I can only think that a woman running a winter-only rural school in Oregon for a handful of students would have made less than $6/month.

An 1850s teacher – she had a better classroom than my character

When my character shifts to housekeeping, she works for a family headed by a single male who is raising younger siblings. (See any potential plot developments there?) Rather than live with the family in a cabin that is already too small for them, she continues to live where she taught school. But since she is no longer teaching, she pays rent to the landowner, and she needs to pay for her food and other living expenses.

Female household servants (the closest I’ve found to housekeeper duties) in the U.S. in 1850 earned roughly $6/week, or about $26/month (though it surprised me that household servants made more than teachers—I’m still not sure this is correct. I’m assuming the servants’ wages did not include their room and board.)

But there were significant variances by region of the country. California wages in 1850 were higher than many other locations, because of the impact of the Gold Rush on the availability of labor. I doubt the Oregon Territory had very high wages.

Just to put these numbers in perspective, $1.00 in 1850 was equivalent in purchasing power to $32.33 in 2018. So to get an idea of how much people made, we have to do some math:

• $6/month x 12 months = $72 annual income, which would be worth $2,327.76 today
• $6/week x 52 weeks = $312 annual income, which would be worth $10,086.96 today

An annual income of just over $10,000 does not go very far today, and I’m assuming $312 wouldn’t permit much discretionary spending in 1850. Most people would have had to supplement their income with gardening, hunting, raising chickens, and finding other sources of food and goods to barter.

Moreover, cash was often hard to come on the frontier. Most people had very little coinage or paper money. Much of the commerce was done by barter or by credits and debits on an account with a local storekeeper. My schoolteacher character is paid primarily with in-kind goods by her students’ parents. And when she is working as a housekeeper, she eats many meals with the family she works for, even if she goes home every night.

I think I’ve created a reasonably accurate world in my novels. But tracking down these types of details is one of the challenges of writing historical fiction.

What details do you want to know about when you’re reading novels about times and places other than your own?