For over 30 years during the mid-20th century, a group of women who lived in eastern Oregon went on an annual 10-day horseback ride through the Wallowa Mountains. The women called themselves the Hen Party, and they were led by Jean Birnie, a local woman known for her horse-riding skills, reverence for nature and rejection of modern conveniences.
From its start in the 1930s, the Hen Party was an early and localized precursor to the women’s rights movement that would sweep the nation 30 years later. Now, nearly 50 years after Birnie’s death, her three adopted grandchildren — sisters Melissa Over, 68; Sharon Mascia, 78; and Sally Flury, 77 — want to make the Hen Party archive public. (Their biological grandmother, a friend of Birnie’s, passed away before the sisters were born, and Birnie — whose only child died at a young age from a horseback-riding accident — unofficially became part of their family.) “If we die,” says Over, and the archive “doesn’t get out there ...” She trails off over the possibility of the lost history.
The Hen Party, the sisters recall, helped influence the preservation work of their father, Dan Reece — who, according to his obituary, worked with Sen. Mark O. Hatfield to protect 73,000 acres inside the state’s Eagle Cap Wilderness. The sisters possess the Hen Party’s surviving documents, including handwritten menus from the trips, photographs and a journal — called the “Log of the Ladies” — that was written by participants. One picture shows the women standing in front of their horses wearing coordinated outfits of button-downs, ties, and jodhpurs tucked into knee-high boots. The three sisters want to keep the spirit of the Hen Party alive by donating the documents to a library or university.
Part of the family’s effort to memorialize the Hen Party has included using a grant from Oregon Humanities, a nonprofit, to hire an outfitter and reenact a typical Hen Party trip. Along with her husband — who worked on a 2004 oral history project featuring the Hen Party — and several other collaborators, Over rode along the trails traversed by the women and cooked the food from their menu. They videotaped the experience and want to use the footage for, say, a documentary.
Birnie was born in 1885 in Island City, Ore. Her grandfather Stukely Ellsworth was a lawyer and early Oregon settler who served on the board of the Oregon and California Railroad and helped establish the University of Oregon. Birnie studied music and later gave piano and voice lessons. Though she was very social as a young woman, caroling at Christmas parties and hosting society events, her real love was for the mountains and the wild. In 1910, she married George Birnie, a jeweler. In a 1956 article in the La Grande Observer, Birnie said, “I was accused of marrying George just so I could go on a pack trip. That’s how we spent our honeymoon.” Gerda Brownton, a Hen Party member, recalled in an interview with the oral history project that Birnie’s mother said of her daughter, “She got married on horseback and stayed on horseback the rest of her life.”
Around 1935 — it’s unclear when precisely the group formed — Birnie began leading the women-only trips into the mountains. (In 1943, Birnie’s husband “invited himself,” according to the Observer, but was only “tolerated” for two days; Birnie put him in charge of wrangling the horses.) Though the main point of the party was simply to get outside, sightsee and live off the grid, Birnie — who operated a jewelry store with her husband in La Grande — helped her friends gain autonomy long before women’s liberation. “Wives were supposed to do what their husbands wanted them to do, the way the men wanted things done,” said Brownton in her oral history interview. “Much to [my husband’s] surprise, after I went on a horseback trip with Jean Birnie, I was telling him how to do things.”
Planning for the annual summer Hen Party trips began the previous November. The equipment they took was minimal but also afforded them pleasures, like the cast-iron and enamel pans they packed for baking cakes and making buckwheat pancakes. Cooking was always a main event. Birnie told the Observer that they ate huckleberry dumplings “at least twice” and had biscuits or hot rolls “at least once a day.” (Birnie never owned a refrigerator and cooked at home with a wood stove.) They also brought saddles, saddle blankets, steak, bacon, a coffee pot, and eggs that they nestled into the horses’ grain. Tents were left behind, as the women preferred to sleep under the stars. Later, some of the women brought sleeping bags, but, for Birnie, that approach was too confining. “She always needed to be able to have access to the outside,” says Mascia.
The trips were not open to just anyone. Birnie invited women — generally not more than 10 — based on their skills on a horse. Participants needed to be okay with riding long distances on potentially hazardous trails. The party once traveled 15 miles a day and covered more than 130 miles total. For drinking water and bathing, they used the rivers, where they also fished. According to the sisters, the party might come across sheep herders and barter some of their fish for lamb. As a 1943 article in the Observer put it, the women had “none of the modern comforts of inner-spring mattresses, automatic cookery, or any other of the myriad conveniences to which they are accustomed in their homes.”
As the years went by, these trips into the Wallowa Mountains became multigenerational. The sisters’ mother, Martha McKennon Reece, was a Hen Party member. When Birnie died in 1974 at the age of 88, the party had dissolved, but the legacy still lives on through her friends and family. Over’s daughter, Casey Jane Reece-Kaigler, whose New Orleans-based band the Lostines is named for a river in the Eagle Cap Wilderness, uses the “Log of the Ladies” journal as a guide whenever she hikes in the mountains. Today, anyone interested in retracing the Hen Party routes could hire a professional horse outfitter and ride the same trails. “She taught most of these women how to do all of it,” Reece-Kaigler told me. “Step out on their own and do it without their husbands — pretty cool, especially for that time.”
Britta Lokting is a journalist in New York.