Getting a Manicure in the Wild West?

I have no idea what the answer is, but I'm going to lurk this thread. Methinks the responses will be very interesting.

Well for one thing the word "manicure" was used differently back then. It referred mainly to a person who performed manicures, rather than the procedure itself. Many chiropodists doubled as manicures/pedicures. Like a lot of things back then, it was passed off as a medicinal procedure that could improve the "health" of your hands and feet (hence the "cure" part), but people were drawn to it mostly for cosmetic reasons, obviously. It was an easy skill to learn, and anyone could hang out a shingle, so your manicure could be literally anyone-- a barber, a doctor, or maybe just a private citizen with very European tastes. It was considered extremely decadent and vain, and any man who went to the manicure regularly would've been seen as a real hoity-toity "dude."

The 1870's is a little early for manicures to be a "thing" in America, but you're close enough to get away with it (I found one ad in a paper from 1880 that advertised a certain doctor as "America's first manicure", so I'm using him as a starting line. But who knows if he was really the first. He charged a dollar, BTW).

Barbers did manicures and pedicures in some areas. In many cities, the various bath houses and brothels had women who would maintain nails. A lot depends on the size of the city and the actual years involved. Keep in mind the "Wild West" existed for only about 12 years, though you could stretch that from the end of the Civil War to about WWI in some areas. On the other hand, the various gold towns and mining or hunting camps, as well as army outposts, existed much longer and started much earlier.

Also keep in mind that the "west" was a large, nebulous area. Do you mean San Franciso, Dodge City, Abilene or St. Louis? All were "out west" and quite a bit of the first part of the "wild west" era was in Missouri, Iowa and eastern South Dakota. Of course, dandys weren't common in farming, cattle or small mining towns, but rather hugged the Mississipi and Missouri rivers or the west coast in San Franciso or Seattle. You did get mining company presidents and cattle barons, though many of them had no pretense of grooming, that was a trait imported from the East or Europe.

In your 1870's Nevada mining town, there was likely a barber, bath house and several brothels, plus a hotel. All of them could provide grooming services, provided the town was large enough and stable enough. Many Nevada mining towns had a boom of about five years and then vanished from the landscape. In that time period, there was no viable way of keeping a mine going long enough to sustain much more. Put your town in the Tahoe area and add in other industry and you have a better chance of realistically having the social class that dandys and other fancy men would be in.

Jeff

I've got a book from the 1880s that tells all about how to dress like a gentleman. I'm sure if you hunt around you could find a similar work. Gold and silver rush towns, if they lasted long enough, would get some high class businesses. And some of the gamblers were quite the dandies.

As you're in Colorado, I'd try some of the historical societies.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

As a backup, I would imagine that he would have a book-sized grooming kit, such as I've seen in antique stores. (I think I've also seen a slightly more basic one that belonged to my grandfather.)

I'd guess a complete one would contain mirror, razors (plural), strop, shaving brush, shaving soap, pomade, cologne in a crystal bottle. hair scissors, comb, moustache scissors, moustache comb, moustache wax, boar's bristle hairbrush, toothpick, toothbrush, and manicure tools.
The case would probably be leather, held closed with a loop and stud, with baize lining, with a fitted spot for each item.

Most of the tools would be made of silver and monogrammed, if his purse ran to such. The toothbrush would probably be ivory with boar's bristle. I have read somewhere (Robertson Davies?) that the toothpick was often made from the penis bone of a raccoon.

jclarkdawe said:

I've got a book from the 1880s that tells all about how to dress like a gentleman. I'm sure if you hunt around you could find a similar work.

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To build on this, if you go to Google Books, set the search range to 19th century, and search manicure, you'll get hits for old books and magazine articles describing the process in detail--also ads for manicure sets that should tell you what was in them.

Wow. This thread was interesting. Not so much about the manicures & wild west (although that '12 years' was in interesting factiod) but for the recommendations about how to approach the question.

This has been an interesting thread indeed.
Re: grooming & other trends coming over from Europe - what's a good way to see what made it over in this time period?

CWatts said:

This has been an interesting thread indeed.
Re: grooming & other trends coming over from Europe - what's a good way to see what made it over in this time period?

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Playing amateur detective with old books and newspapers is one way to do it. Sometimes you get lucky and discover a definite starting place for something ("Hey, there's this brand new thing from England called a bicycle!", that kind of thing). Other times you just see how far back references to something go, and when the trail goes cold you just assume that's where it started. But sometimes it's hard to tell. I'm sure the idea of fingernail maintenance goes back a long way, but the specific art of manicuring (by that name) seems to have been adopted by Americans in the late 1870's. What was it called before then? I don't know. Maybe it had no name and just fell under the umbrella of good grooming. I'm assuming that before manicurists came along, a person's fingernails were their own responsibility.

snafu1056 said:

. I'm assuming that before manicurists came along, a person's fingernails were their own responsibility.

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I've no definite knowledge but I'm unconvinced about that - ladies maids did their mistresses hair and cared for their clothes, so why not their nails? By the same token gentlemen's gentlemen - they must have done haircuts and shaving (though have no reference for that). However there were definitely professional hairdressers for ladies at the time of the ladies maid - they came in to do the fancy stuff - the massive Georgian piled up hairdo with powder on for special parties - so could extrapolate to other grooming specialists.
Another word used around manicure is beautician - suspect that is too modern - but wondering if you need to find other variants on words for personal grooming that may have fallen out of use. (So another vote for talk to re-enactors.)

Oh yeah, rich people lived in another world. I'm sure ladies of wealth had access to all sorts of specialists, just like they do today. I was talking about what the average American had access to or was aware of.