The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy on the Gilded Age Frontier by Maura Jane Farrelly is a perfect book for someone who revels in the process of researching a story, over and above being swept up in the story itself. It is set in the late 19^th century, the closing of the American Frontier. Three well-bred people, wanting to leave behind certain scandals and failures in their tony East Coast background, moved to Wyoming to start new lives. Regrettably, for the three, whose lives end up intertwined, their pasts would catch up with them, with unhappy outcomes. One is Robert Ray Hamilton, great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton. The second is John Dudley Sargent (a relative of John Singer Sargent), and the third is Edith Drake Sargent, unconventional  daughter of a wealthy banker.

Hamilton was an attorney and New York assemblyman who was duped by a woman, Evangeline Mann, to believe he had fathered her child. Not only was he not the father, but the child in question turned out to be a foundling, used to force Hamilton into marriage. The wife made headlines when she attacked the baby’s nanny with a knife and was sentenced to prison. It turned out that wife Evangeline had already been married to another man, so the marriage to Hamilton was itself a scam designed to go after his wealth. It was an age of tabloid journalism, and Hamilton fled New York to avoid the shame. Years later, he died by drowning, and rumors of suspicious circumstances were never resolved. New York newspapers had a field day reporting on his death and resurrecting the baby scandal, as well as on aspects of the unusual life of Hamilton’s friend, Sargent scion Jack. (At the end, there is a not-so-surprising inference to be drawn about the relationship between Ray Hamilton and Jack Sargent, in an era definitely not open to homosexuality. )

Sargent was part of a long line of New England Brahmins, including Hemenways, who had made their fortune in shipping, silver, timber and real estate in Maine, Boston and New York.  (Maternal grandfather Augustus “Gus ” Hemenway was in and out of mental institutions for 13 years.) Jack never quite fit into the family and was cut off from much of the family fortune. He moved his wife, Adelaide, to family property close to the Grand Tetons, just north of what would become Yellowstone National Park. In Wyoming, Sargent joined forces with his close friend Ray Hamilton to build a luxury hunting lodge designed to cater to their families’ wealthy circle of East Coast family and friends.

Jack’s wife never acclimated to the harsh life in Wyoming, and she died under mysterious circumstances. He was tried for her murder but not convicted, and their children were sent back East to live with family.

Edith Drake was also in and out of mental institutions for years until her family decided to marry her off to Jack Sargent, after wife Adelaide had died.  Jack was drawn to Edith’s money (including loans from her brother), which was important to expanding Sargent’s Marymere hunting lodge project. In time, Sargent ended up shooting himself to death.

Sadly, none of these characters was able to start life anew in the West. Thanks to the era’s faster forms of communication, their past humiliations would always catch up with them.

As Farrelly pointed out in a vibrant three-part lecture series that I recently attended, this book is a cross-over, both a history for academics and a “trade book” for the general population. First and foremost, she is an historian (Chair of the American Studies Department at Brandeis University) and has also worked as a journalist.  The book reflects her robust skills at research and her impressive talents at digging out a complex human story.

All of the twists and turns make for a rich non-fiction narrative, but, for some readers eager to stay focused on the characters, Farrelly’s exhaustive details of the history of the Gilded Age from 1870-2000 may frustrate. These included separate sections on a detailed history of the NYC transit system, the treatment of the horses who drew the cable cars and how much manure they deposited daily and weekly on city streets, the development of journalism from 19^th century partisan publications to the tabloid style of the Hearst and Pulitzer days, the decades-long history of unwanted babies, conditions of foundlings in institutions run by religious institutions, the manifold treaty violations by which whites stole lands from Native Americans, the genealogy and manners of the “old families” like that of Henry Cabot Lodge clinging to fading prestige and power, and nouveau riche unseating them in the halls of power. All interesting, but often too much.

This is a compelling narrative if you don’t lose hold of it through the thicket of Farrelly’s not-inconsiderable historical research.