Charley's Choice

Charley's Choice: The Life and Times of Charley Parkhurst (2008) is a fictional biography of the 19th-century cross-dresser and stage-coach driver Charley Parkhurst by American author Fern J. Hill. Parkhurst was born a woman but lived as a man, successfully concealing her birth gender until after her death. During her lifetime, Parkhurst was famous as one of the most skilled of the California stagecoach drivers, figures revered for their “masculine” qualities of courage and dexterity. Hill’s “biography” is based on the scant facts that are known of Parkhurst’s life, using them as the basis for a rich narrative told from Parkhurst’s perspective.

Orphaned as a baby, Charlotte grows up in a New Hampshire orphanage. As a little girl, she spends her days getting into scrapes with her best friend Fish. Charlotte loves horses. Whenever she gets a chance, she posts Fish to keep look-out while she sneaks into the orphanage stables to mount and ride the horses.

Charlotte admires the drivers of the stagecoaches that pass the orphanage: these tough men control large teams of up to six horses at high speeds. As she approaches adolescence, Charlotte begins to dream of one day driving a stagecoach herself.



When she reveals this ambition to Fish, however, he tells her that she can’t, because she’s a girl. There and then, Charlotte decides to live as a man.

Realizing she must escape the world where she is known to reinvent herself, Charlotte steals a set of boy’s clothing and breaks out of the orphanage, setting off for Massachusetts alone. She begins calling herself “Charley” and carrying herself like a boy. Misadventures along the way show her that she has led a sheltered life until now, but do not weaken her resolve to make her own way in the world.

In Massachusetts, unable to find work, she goes hungry, until she is found by the kindly Ebenezer “Eb” Birch. Taking Charley for a boy, Eb adopts her and brings her to live at his livery stable. Spotting that she has a sure touch with the horses, Eb begins training her to work as a stable hand.



Charley becomes close to Eb and his wife, Tilly. Childless, the couple soon begins to treat Charley as a son. When Charley is taken ill, Tilly discovers in the course of nursing her that Charley is really a girl. Tilly and Eb keep Charley’s secret, and Eb continues to train her. When she is fully grown, Eb teaches her to drive the stagecoach, managing teams of first two, then four, and eventually six horses.

Charley begins working as a stagecoach driver, traveling all over the eastern and southern United States. She proves herself in this hazardous profession, surviving robberies, falls, and snakebite while handling powerful teams of horses with great skill. She is accepted and even admired by the other drivers.

Charley grows close to one young driver, and he discovers her biological gender. They begin a brief affair. Worried about being exposed, Charley cuts off the affair, but she realizes the danger is not over when she discovers she is pregnant. She wrestles with the decision to attempt to induce a miscarriage or to give her baby up. For the first time, she feels that men and women are fundamentally different: “Men protect and women preserve what’s important to them.”



When the pregnancy begins to show, Charley hides out in Georgia, where her daughter, Mattie, is born. Charley knows she cannot give Mattie up, and she begins making plans to pass herself off as Mattie’s father, until the baby takes ill and dies.

Charley drowns her grief in drink, but she also seeks solace in the only other thing that comforts her: driving stagecoaches. Although she has a full-blown drinking problem, she always makes sure she is sober to drive.

In 1851, in part to escape her grief, Charley decides to head west to California, sailing from Boston to Panama, traveling overland to the Pacific coast and taking a ship up to San Francisco. On the ship, Charley meets John Morton, the owner of a drayage business, who recruits Charley to drive his coach.



Soon after arriving in California, a horse kicks Charley while she is shoeing it. She loses an eye, gaining the nickname “One-Eyed Charley.” After a decade of tough riding and drink, Charley is to all appearances a man’s man. She wears a patch over her eye, chews tobacco, and swears in a gruff voice. From time to time, people comment on the fact that she is clean-shaven, which is unusual at the time, especially for “men” of her profession. She votes in the 1868 election, though women are forbidden from voting at the time.

Stagecoach driving in northern California is a perilous job. Dirt tracks follow hairpin bends across a vertiginous landscape. Heavy rains make the tracks impassable. There are snakes, pumas, bears, and bandits. Stagecoach drivers who can take their passengers and cargo through these dangers are revered, and Charley becomes one of the most revered drivers of all.

Charley cements her reputation when her coach is held up by a bandit known as Sugarfoot. Held at gunpoint, Charley hands over the coach’s strongbox containing all the passengers’ valuables. As Sugarfoot leaves with his haul, Charley warns him that she will “break even” with him. The next time Sugarfoot stops Charley’s coach, she shoots him dead.



When the railroad arrives in California, Charley sees that the golden era of stagecoaches is over. However, she has done well over the years, and she retires in modest comfort to Watsonville, California, where she keeps a smallholding, raising chickens and cutting timber. She looks back over her life, confirming to herself that, despite tough times, her “choice” to live as a man has been the right one.