Esther Hobart Morris

CHRISTINE PETERSON For the Star-Tribune

In the heart of the unruly West, in a bustling mining town where most people were men and most business was conducted over whiskey and beer in saloons, ruled the country’s first female justice of the peace.

She was an abolitionist and su ragist, a mother and a wife. She was strong, opinionated and, according to one newspaper, “the terror of all rogues.”

She was just what the state’s acting governor was looking for to test Wyoming’s groundbreaking law giving women the right to vote and participate in politics.

And for her service, Esther Hobart Morris has assumed her place in history as a leader of women’s rights not just in Wyoming, but across the country. Her likeness is displayed in Cheyenne and Washington D.C. Her name is associated with other trailblazing women like Nellie Tayloe Ross, the nation’s first female governor, Estelle Reel, the first woman elected to statewide o ce in Wyoming, and Sandra Day O’Connor, the nation’s first female supreme court justice.

While debate remains over her role in Wyoming’s women’s su rage movement, historians say her documented accomplishments stand on their own.

“She showed that women could do this,” said Renee Laegreid, professor of the American West at the University of Wyoming. “The world wouldn’t go to hell in a handbasket if women became involved in politics.”   

Born in 1814 in New York, Morris was orphaned at 11, but later apprenticed to a seamstress and became a successful women’s hat maker and purveyor of women’s clothes.

She married a civil engineer in her late 20s, and shortly after they had a child, she was widowed. When Morris moved to Illinois to settle her late husband’s estate, she realized she could not assume the property he left her. Women, she was told, were not allowed to own or inherit property.

In 1850, she married again, this time to John Morris, a local merchant. They had twin boys, and in 1869, she followed her husband to South Pass City in the brand new Wyoming Territory, where he planned to run a saloon.

Esther Hobart Morris’ family had ties to the abolition movement in the East and women’s su rage, said Laegreid, and she maintained those connections through letters shipped back home by rail.

Groundbreaking JUSTICE Esther Hobart Morris, the country’s first female justice of the peace, paved the way for women in politics

COURTESY OF THE WESTERN HISTORY CENTER AT CASPER COLLEGE Esther Hobart Morris of South Pass City became the country’s first female justice of the peace in 1870. Her first case was to prosecute her predecessor, who refused to relinquish his docket and records in protest of a woman filling the position.

“When she moved, she was an important person in the town,” Laegreid said. “She and her husband were well established, and she wasn’t shy about her opinions. She never had been.”

From there, versions of history seem to di er. Some accounts written long after Morris’ death say that Morris had a hand in securing the votes needed to pass women’s su rage. The most likely story is that the movement to allow women to vote in Wyoming was already well underway for reasons noble and otherwise, said Tom Rea, historian and editor of wyohistory.org, a project of the Wyoming State Historical Society.

Regardless, about a week after women were granted the right to vote, also giving them the right to serve on juries, run for public o ce and become judges, Morris heard her call.   

South Pass City, with its dozen saloons, two breweries, handful of brothels and thousands of desperate men scouring every crevasse and ravine for gold, doesn’t sound like a progressive haven waiting for the country’s first female justice of the peace.

But Morris was the right person at the right time. In early 1870, a district court judge encouraged Morris to fulfill the final eight and a half months left vacant when the previous justice of the peace resigned. The appointment was contested and ultimately approved by Edward Lee, the territory’s acting governor.

“Lee wanted to put her in a place that said, ‘Yes, you have political rights and we will enforce them right now,’” Laegreid said. “The two of them knew each other, and he probably knew she had the personality and the ability to take on that role and stand up to the predominantly male mining camp. He wasn’t going to put anyone in there that wouldn’t succeed.”

And by all accounts, she did succeed.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper wrote several months into Morris’ tenure that she gave “infinite delight to all lovers of peace and virtue.” The paper’s first assessment of her, however, was a detailed account of her wardrobe — “a calico gown, worsted breakfast-shawl, green ribbons in her hair, and a green neck-tie,” — which Laegreid says may well have been embellished to ease concerns that a professional woman might no longer be domestic.

Morris sent thieves to jail, delivered severe punishment for drunkenness and brought domestic abusers to justice.

She wrote in a letter that she “labored more in faith and hope,” but that she also deemed her work had “been satisfactory.” Most knew her as fair and honest.

And when the time came to run for public o ce again, Morris declined.

“To put yourself back in the 19th century, she made a point, and then it was time to go back home and fulfill her domestic responsibilities,” Laegreid said. “It was one thing in that age for a male judge to throw people in jail, it’s another thing for a woman to do it, and there were some men who did not want to see her back in that role.”

One of those men was her husband, who forcefully disapproved of her appointment. At one point, he disrupted her courtroom — so much she had him thrown in jail.

Of the nearly 30 cases she presided over, none were overturned by higher courts.

Morris left the bench, and later South Pass City and her husband. She went on to support women’s su rage movements across the country.

She spent much of the end of her life in Cheyenne, honored two decades later at Wyoming’s statehood celebration.

Morris died at 87. But her legacy, the truth of a mother, wife and businessowner who moved to a tough mining town and pioneered the path to law and politics for all woman, remains today carved on statues, taught in lessons and scrawled in history books across the nation.