Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy on the Gilded Age Frontier

In Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent Maura Jane Farrelly explores the history of the Gilded Age United States, using the lives of three people from prominent East Coast families who moved to Wyoming to start over as her guide. Robert Ray Hamilton was a state lawmaker from New York and the great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton. John Dudley Sargent came from a long line of Brahmin families in New England that included several colonial governors and the famous painter John Singer Sargent. Edith Drake Sargent was the eccentric and musical daughter of a New York banker who had made a fortune selling short.

All three experienced some form of humiliation after newspapers speculated on their possible shameful secrets: bigamy, blackmail, murder, incest, baby-selling, mental illness, and more. All three fled to Wyoming, believing distance and remoteness would hide their shame. But by the 1890s the West was no longer a place where anyone could hide. Just as many today are learning that the internet has opened up a vast wilderness of information to exploration and settlement--enabling our mistakes and transgressions to follow us for years--so, too, did Hamilton and the Sargents learn that technology and the growing power of celebrity journalism made it difficult for anyone in the West to leave a scandal-ridden past behind. Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent is a story about the early demise of our right to be forgotten.

Maura Jane Farrelly is an associate professor of American studies at Brandeis University. She has worked as a reporter in Atlanta, Washington, DC, and New York. Her books include Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity and Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860.