Miss Part 1? Never fear, for links are here.
According to the good people at Wikipedia, the advent of the action film star occurred with none other than Chuck Norris, who was arguably the best full-contact karate fighter at the time but possesses acting abilities somewhat below that of your average middle school SPED student performing a living room production of the Nutty Professor for their parents. Acting chops take a massive backseat to physical abilities and attractiveness in the action film genre, which is comprised of movies
“in which the protagonist or protagonists are thrust into a series of events that typically include violence, extended fighting, physical feats, rescues and frantic chases. Action films tend to feature a mostly resourceful hero struggling against incredible odds, which include life-threatening situations, a dangerous villain, or a pursuit which usually concludes in victory for the hero” (Wiki).
Obviously, that sort of performance began earlier than film, as humans have been putting on performances for entertainment likely longer than there have been words to recite in those performances, and so an investigation into the root of the action star would obviously necessitate looking further back than the advent of film. As such, I looked into the vaudeville period of world history and discovered two badass chicks who more than filled the bill for an “action” star long before there was such a term, and whose skills with their fists and blades would make them an even fight against most of modern action stars, and would have presented real problems for the smaller males in the bunch, like Jet Li.
Prior to April’s over-long “quickie” histories on Friedrich Jahn and the first gyms in America (which were semi-necessary backstory for the way people trained in the mid-19th century), we had arrived at the true beginning of Adah Menken’s career- when she stopped pretending to be a white actress woman and switched to simply demonstrating the physical prowess and sexual allure that had served her so well as a mixed race girl in the violent, filthy, and racist shithole that was 19th century East Texas. Once she realized that her physicality was the perfect compliment to her frankly shockingly modern good looks, she basically embarked on a career that would mash up the best parts of Megan Fox and Jackie Chan after employing the aid of one Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery (1824-1901), the original merc with the mouth, in learning the fine arts of bladed and empty handed combat.
In New York Adah was cast in Mazeppa, a poem penned by Lord Byron about the legendary Ukrainian Cossack hetman Marzepa, who fought against the Russian Empire for the Swedes after fighting against the Swedes for the Russians. That story is pretty epic in and of itself as it contains one of the first known vampire tales, but due to the endless battling and horseback riding in it, Adah realized that her athleticism could overcome her shitty acting (much like Jessica Biel in Blade Trinity) if she could master fighting (she already knew how to ride and tumble), so she enlisted the aid of the greatest living swordsman to do so. As I mentioned in my Monstery series, Col. Monstery was accompanied by his strength trainer, Australian strongman, wrestler, and all-round athlete William Miller when Monstery headed the San Francisco Olympic Club, which commends itself nicely to Monstery’s record of requiring roadwork, swimming, and strength training of all of his fighters and students, females included.
Monstery seems to have been entirely novel in that regard for a decade or two, beginning in the 1850s with Lola Montez and continuing in the 1860s with Adah and in the 1870s with his ultimate female fighting triumph, La Jaguarina Ella Hattan. Though female fighters were known throughout the ages, they seem mostly to have been trained by their fathers and husbands rather than a professional coach, as a coach for female athletes likely seemed as absurd to an American male in the 1850s as it would be for a member of the staff at the Creation Museum to receive a Nobel Prize for Physics. For that reason in particular Col Thomas Hoyer Monstery is interesting, all of his duels, wars fought, fighting styles mastered, and revolutionary spirit fomentation notwithstanding. And the reason is ridiculous- it wasn’t that Monstery was some “lib cuck feminazi” who believed women to be the dominant gender, but rather than he didn’t see vaginas as an impediment to exercise, combat, or generally being a badass human being.
“Mid-nineteenth century Americans also followed British trends by making a virtue of fragility and weakness. Wan-faced women on fainting couches perceived the almost tubercular state of appearance as a sign of beauty and class. While this pale look may have been popular in the fashionable sets and middle-class households that sought to emulate them, many people regarded this exaggerated ill health ludicrous. Critics condemned women who put on an air of illness as products of romantic novels that featured feeble heroines. Indubitably, male authors were to blame for promoting illness as beauty, and young women who contrived to be sick, made themselves useless” (Jennings 31).
At that point, theater actors actually made contact in their on-stage antics- the type of no-contact stage fighting to which we’re used only came about with the advent of film. As such, Adah Menken employed the world’s greatest dueler and fencing instructor to become the single greatest female action star the world has ever seen, though we’ll tragically never get to see her perform due to the fact that she did it before anyone had the means to record it. Using the strength training, conditioning, and fight skills she obtained by training with Col. Monstery, Menken rapidly became the biggest draw on the East Coast. After sellout performances of Mazeppa in Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, Menken began starring in the New York City production at the outset of the Civil War (1861), providing the populace with a much-needed distraction from the ludicrous awfulness that the South decided to foist upon the country at large.
Per his Wiki page,
“Booth’s alcoholism also caused him to become increasingly unpredictable and reckless. He would drop lines, miss scenes, and cause chaos onstage. During a performance of Hamlet, Booth suddenly left the scene he was playing with Ophelia, scurried up a ladder, and perched up in the backdrops crowing like a rooster until his manager retrieved him. He was once booked for a sold-out performance in Richmond, then disappeared from town for several days. Eventually, he was found with “ragged, besotted wretches, the greatest actor on the American stage.”
Booth’s alcoholism and violent nature often caused problems onstage during his performances. On several occasions, when he played the title character in Richard III, the actor playing the Earl of Richmond fled the stage when Booth became too aggressive during their dueling scene. One night, when Booth was appearing as Othello, the actress playing Desdemona had to be rescued by other cast members when Booth tried to genuinely suffocate her with a pillow.
Booth soon became so unreliable that he had to be locked into his hotel rooms with a guard standing watch. Often, he would still find ways of escaping to drink at a nearby tavern. Once, when a theater manager locked Booth in his dressing room before a performance, Booth bribed a stage hand to go out and buy a bottle of whiskey. As the stage hand stood outside the door, Booth stuck a drinking straw through the keyhole and sipped whiskey from the bottle.
Booth’s violent behavior offstage was notable as well. In Charleston, in 1838, Booth was so intoxicated that he attacked a friend, Tom Flynn, with a fireplace andiron. To defend himself, Flynn hit Booth in the face, breaking his nose and forever altering the actor’s profile and voice.”
Acting was one rough bastard in the 19th century, and brawling was part of it.
Her fame brought with it the haters one would expect, especially given her race and gender, regardless of her insane physical prowess, total disdain for danger, and serious literary and artistic credentials, but her biography reads like a who’s who of the era and includes the members of the Booth family who didn’t kill Lincoln (all of whom trained with Menken’s instructor).
“Menken’s costume scandalized “respectable” critics—even as it attracted huge and enthusiastic audiences that included such notables as Walt Whitman and the great Shakespearean actor, Edwin Booth. As an actress, Menken became an early master of self-promotion. According to historian Alan Ackerman, she made certain that a photograph of her striking face appeared in shop windows in every city in which she performed. Even in the context of the 1860’s, when most Americans looked upon actors as “loose” and disreputable, Menken was notorious for violating norms. She cropped her dark hair close to her head (she may have been the first important American woman to do so) and smoked cigarettes in public” (Feldberg).
After seeing the frenzy for Marzeppa on the East Coast, Adah and Ada knew that show would send the sex-starved drunkards mining gold out West into literal hysterics, and they were right- the boomtowns of the West were filthy, dusty, violent sausagefests, and they craved whatever entertainment they could get. Plus, uncouth, fractious, and often physically abusive as the miners might have been dickheads, but they had fat pockets and were willing to pay to have a diversion from the horrors of their daily lives.
“Soon the West was dotted with mining boomtowns and bustling new cities. Fortunes were made and lost daily. Lawlessness was commonplace. At first gold seekers were content with the crude entertainment provided by ragtag bands and their own amateur fiddle-playing neighbors. They flocked to bear-wrestling and prize fighting exhibitions. In these impetuous atmosphere gambling dens, saloons, brothels, and dance halls thrived, but after a while the miners and merchants began to long for more polished amusements. Theatre, backstreet halls, tents, palladiums, auditoriums, and jewel-box-sized playhouses went up quickly and stayed busy, their thin walls resounding with operas, arias, verses from Shakespeare, and minstrel tunes” (Enss).
As such, Adah and her literary-elite bestie Ada Clare had made their home in San Francisco, and was the base of operations from which Adah made her money and cemented her fame. If that seems an odd place for friends of America’s poet, it’s just because you don’t realize that the lifters, writers, fighters, artists, and free-thinkers of the world were all truly considered the dregs of society at this time- in fact, any and all non-conformists were considered to be necessarily poor and criminal, as people at that time conflated conformity with “goodness” and wealth. A poet was little better than a common prostitute in mid-19th century America, and it for for that reason that rich East Coast intellectuals like Ada Clare had no problem descending into the bowels of America’s mining asshole in the pursuit of fame and fortune, and that is exactly what those two wildly adventurous chicks found. “Newspapers in the East reported that audiences found the scantily clad thespian’s act ‘shocking, scandalous, horrifying and even delightful,’” and the ladies endeavored to cash in while they could (Enss).
Lest you think travelling to San Fran in that era was either commonplace or easy, think again- San Francisco was barely even a smudge on the map prior to the Gold Rush of 1849. The population of that ridiculously remote backwater consisted of 1000 hard-bitten, hardscrabble motherfuckers who’d somehow managed not to eat each other while crossing the Rockies. Getting to California required a shitload of luck, planning, fortitude, and supplies, because maps were nonexistent, guides were incredibly unreliable, and the National Weather Service, Medivac, gas station rest stops, and highways we completely take for granted wouldn’t exist for another hundred years at least.
Under the Spanish, who’d only a few years before ceded California to the US at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, California was totally undeveloped and only very, very sparsely populated. In 1848, the population of San Francisco was 1000, but by 1849 it was 25000, and by the time Adah and Ada arrived it was 57000, putting it just outside America’s top ten cities, though this was prior to the implementation of much in the way of a governing body, city infrastructure, or any of the accouterments one would expect of a city of not-inconsiderable size in the Industrial Age. Furthermore, one section of San Francisco, in which much of the entertainment was performed, was entirely lawless- the Barbary Coast.
“In the late 1840s, several dozen veterans of the Mexican-American War had made their way to San Francisco and began to call themselves the Hounds. The soldiers-turned-gangsters spent their time intimidating, or ‘regulating’, San Francisco’s non-white residents, specifically Mexican-Americans. It was from this activity that the Hounds became known as the Regulators. At around the same time, another gang was formed by ex-convicts who had arrived from Australia in 1849.
Called the Sydney Ducks, these Australians opened a score of brothels within the Barbary Coast. Having been seduced by prostitutes affiliated with the Sydney Ducks, the unfortunate men who entered these brothels would be mugged and robbed. Needless to say, it would not take long for a dangerous and disturbing escalation to occur. Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, the Sydney Ducks deliberately set fire to parts of the city for the first of six times in two years. The anarchy created by these fires created the ideal conditions for the gangsters to embark upon an unprecedented spree of murder and mayhem.”
“Although the Barbary Coast had been the focus of gang activity in previous decades, its reputation as a den of violence and vice was truly forged during a four decade-long era that began in the early 1860s. It was during this time that the district was first referred to as the Barbary Coast by sailors who frequented its saloons and brothels.
The exploitative nature of such establishments was best demonstrated through the widespread prevalence of ‘shanghaiing,’ the unfortunate term for the practice of drugging and kidnapping able-bodied men to serve on ships in need of sailors. ‘Shanghaiing’ was a booming industry in many parts of the world during the latter decades of the 19th century, but it was particularly successful amidst the lawlessness of the Barbary Coast. With San Francisco’s elite choosing to either profit from or ignore the resurgence of criminal activity, all manner of vices flourished, from prostitution to drug use” (Palumbo).
Though the duo were in absolutely no fear of being shanghaied, what with the fact that Adah could fuck up any and all comers with a weapon if not barehanded, but Adah most likely performed and hung out in the Barbary Coast due to the fact she was an entertainer, and that’s where the entertainers performed. Happily, the Emperor of the United States had set up his base of operations in San Francisco and his presence seemed to mollify even the roughest elements of the city when he strolled past with his two four-legged canine companions, two strays who followed him everywhere and were just as beloved as that utterly certifiable madman (who was the only person King Kameimei of Hawaii recognized as a legitimate ruler of the Americas). And it was here that the duo linked up with some of their compatriots from the New York Bohemians who had independently made the trip out West- San Francisco reunited Adah and Ada with Arthur and Charles Christian Nahl, whom you might remember from the “First Gyms in America” article as the founders of the Olympic Club in San Francisco, a gym that is just as state-of-the-art now as it was when it was founded in 1860.
“On May 6, 1860, 23 charter members founded the San Francisco Olympic Club, turning their informal gymnastics training sessions, held in the backyard of Gold Rush artists Arthur and Charles Christian Nahl, into a lasting institution. In the 1800s, the membership roster included such names as Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, James G. Fair and John Mackay, as well as athletes such as “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, winner of the world heavyweight title in 1892.
Pioneering Olympic Club champions include swimmer J. Scott Leary, the first American to swim 100 yards in 60 seconds, and shot-putter Ralph Rose, who won six Olympic medals and held seven national AAU titles. The club sent 23 athletes to the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, the largest delegation from a club. Football was king during the 1920s, and the club celebrated undefeated seasons in 1925 and 1928, even with schedules pitting its squad against local college teams” (Olympic).
Recently arrived from New York by way of the now-state of Hesse (which was then essentially nothing but a mercenary factory), the Nahl brothers put as much distance between themselves and the Franco-Prussian War as they could. Having spent considerable time in Paris, the two were clearly influenced by the gymniarch movement started by Hippolyte Triat, and both the décor of their club and its training facilities were heavily influenced by the Frenchman. They immediately hired the inimitable Col. Thomas Hoyer Monstery, whom they had almost certainly met through Adah Menken as part of the Bohemian movement in both cities, to teach his favorite subjects- combat sports and swimming. A few years later, Monstery was joined by Australian strongman and all-round athlete William Miller, whose background in strength athletics also mirrored the teachings of Triat (and complimented the training techniques of Monstery) nicely.
Given that Adah Menken had embarked on a course that would have been considered an absolute impossibility by odds-makers at her birth, she reunited with Monstery at the Olympic Club to continue her training in an effort to ensure audiences wouldn’t lose interest with her stunts due to their repetition. There, she trained like a woman possessed to ensure her physique was going to drive those sex-starved miners wild (even in a polity like San Francisco, the men outnumbered the women by as much as 50-1) and have them fill her pockets with cash.
“Monstery claimed that he taught his female pupils no differently than he did men. This was a great point of distinction; typically, the scarce fencing instruction available to women during this period was limited to the use of the foil, an academic training tool. Monstery, however, did not limit his instruction to the art of the sword; in 1888, he was teaching “two classes of lady-boxers”; in New York City, he also held several ladies’ classes in stick self-defense. Evidence also suggests that to select female students, he also provided instruction in the rapier, dagger, knife, and bayonet. Additionally, Monstery included a special drill in his curriculum intended to prepare his female pupils for potential street encounters, teaching them to deliver a ‘bayonet thrust’ with their parasols, which, he said, ‘would break a rib, or a one-handed thrust, that would put out an eye’” (Miller).
Monstery’s instruction was hardcore because the man himself was incapable of any other speed- a mercenary who “had fought under twelve flags in numerous wars and revolutions, had survived participation in more than fifty duels with the sword, knife, and pistol, and had twenty-two scars on his body to prove it,” Monstery was
- “a ‘master of all arms‘ (which included the rapier, dagger, broadsword, Bowie knife, lance, bayonet, and quarterstaff, among others),”
- a “’professor of sparring,’ whose instruction relied very heavily on open-hand combat due to its popularity in the States. In fact, one of Monstery’s students fought the heavyweight champion of the world, Jem Mace, in an exhibition at the SF Olympic Club and trashed Mace, in spite of the fact he was much smaller and an amateur. Monstery said his student’s victory owed to his special science of punching. “‘His first surprise was when Bennett parried all his best blows, and he was still more astonished when he found the druggist getting in hits that seemed of tremendous force for a middle-weight They fought six rounds and at the end of the sixth, Mace wished he had never tackled the amateur. It was a victory of genuine science over what is known as ‘science’ in the ring. The meeting was private, but Bennett’s victory is a matter of record in spite of Mace’s efforts to hush the matter up'” (Miller).
- and taught a special system of bare-knuckle self-defense that integrated punching, grappling, and kicking techniques, designed to be effective against a wide range of fighting styles,” all of which made his trainees vicious combatants in any environment (Miller).
Though Monstery stressed the importance of fitness in his treatise on fight training Self-Defense for Gentlemen and Ladies, he didn’t make many specific instructions regarding exercise because he was a fight instructor, not a personal trainer. Lifting in the United States at that time came in two forms- strongman and bodybuilding-style work with globe barbells and dumbbells, sandbag lifting, rope climbing, pulley-based machines, and gymnastics-based training that mostly relied on track and field, sparring, and Indian clubs. The two systems didn’t seem to be in any way in opposition to one another, and Monstery seems to have begun with the latter form of conditioning and then brought in William Miller to instruct himself and his students in best practice for all things strongman and wrestling, as Miller was a world champion in both, as well as Australia’s answer to Donald Dinnie and Jim Thorpe.
Monstery, for his part, placed fencing (the archaic form, not the modern sport of fencing) above all others for building fitness (in much the same way the Japanese did in feudal Japan, and in Renaissance Europe). Monstery believed that fencing
“seems to have a strange influence on the body, improving the quality of the muscles and nerves… I have found such extraordinary power developed by fencing in bodies not by any means muscular, the muscles not feeling very hard to the touch, that I cannot help but attribute the strength to something apart from muscle, and residing in the will force of the nerves and brain” (Miller 36).
Though the man was a swimming fanatic, both as a survival skill and as exercise, he believed that fencing even trumped that as exercise, as it
“creates a glow, and infuses in pupils a vital energy, which enables them to perform the mind’s labor with ease and without exhausting the body. It rejuvenates the body and electrifies the mind. To either youth or middle age, or even old age, it imparts a vitality that no other course will attain” (Ibid).
That concept might seem silly in a modern light, but you forget that Monstery specifically hated modern fencing, as it essentially relies solely on techniques that will get you merked with the quickness in real life, because you’re basically impaling yourself on their sword just after impaling them on yours- in modern fencing, both combatants “die” on each point, as they’re thrusting more or less simultaneously. Conversely, Monstery’s methods employed a great deal more stratagem, artifice, hand-eye coordination, and quick thinking, all of which played right into Adah’s needs, as she was usually performing alongside and in front of violently drunken men and opium addicts, all of whom were as filthy as they were armed to the teeth. Quick thinking was just as essential as conditioning and technique for Adah, as her stunts left her remarkably exposed to injury in a time when the only tools doctors seemed to carry were leeches, whiskey, a mallet to knock you the fuck out, and bone saws.
If you hadn’t already noticed, Adah Menken performed often in
if not mostly in drag, and though not the first was perhaps the most notable 19th century drag king.
“To suffragists, moralists, lawyers, and critics, who thought her clothing and attitude (both on an off-stage) unfit for a woman, and who attacked her for the use of nudity on her acts, she simply, but confidently replied: “I am an artist”. As such, she was in the world of Rachel Shteir (author of the highly recommendable Striptease – The Untold Story of the Girly Show) one of the first female performers to declare her cross-dressed costuming, or lack of it, to be in the service of her vocation. […] At a moment when Amelia Bloomer was trying to convince women to don pants, [the woman known simply as “the Menken”] cut her hair to look more like a man. At a moment when the Civil War was introducing throngs of soldiers to New York, the Menken exploited her androgynous appeal. The woman who would later be Alexandre Dumas’ lover understood or intuited that the point was not to pretend to be a man but rather to play up her femaleness while dressing in a masculine style” (Butch in Progress).
Monstery’s instruction proved invaluable for Adah Menken as she travelled throughout the Southwest performing Mazeppa and raking in the dough. Over a ten-month tour of the West, Adah Menken became the highest-earning actor in the world at the time and the richest American woman of the era, pulling in $500 a week when farm laborers (the highest paid laborers in California at the time by a ridiculous margin) only pulled in $33 a month. At the same time, she and Ada became even more deeply entrenched in America’s literary elite, hobnobbing with the likes of Mark Twain while taking up painting and publicly reciting her poetry.
From there, Adah pissed off to Europe, where she performed for a couple more years before dying at the ridiculously young age of 33, either from tuberculosis or sepsis stemming from a wound received onstage- whatever it was, even the ministrations of the best medical science of the time could be trumped easily by any drunken rave attendee with a fully-stocked first aid kit in the modern era, so not even the aid of Napoleon’s personal physician could heal this mixed-race, gender-bending, bisexual artistic innovator of an action star. Just before she died, however, she did make one phenomenal point in the form of a rhetorical question:
“When all is said and done, have I not at my age tasted more of life then most women who lived to be a hundred?”
Adah Menken’s impression on America as a whole is undoubtable- she proved that women could physically outperform men (though at least one actress died trying to recreate Menken’s Mazeppa), popularized short hair for women (her haircut was well-known as “The Menken” for decades), flaunted social conventions regarding sex with men, women, and marriage, smoked in public when it was basically forbidden for women to do so, and proved once more that it is the progressives, not the reactionaries, who drive the change in physical culture.
Not only did Adah Menken prove to generations of the downtrodden and oppressed that success was within their reach if they simply followed their hearts rather than the suggestions of the close-minded troglodytes surrounding them, but she proved that most archaic social norms were idiocy, and that if you bust your ass in the gym, the world can indeed be your oyster.
In the next installment of this series I’ll cover Lola Montez, Adah Menken’s better known predecessor, though as a maniacal consort and actress rather than the deadly-as-MRSA fighter she was. Taken together, the pair provided a blueprint for the modern action movie star and inextricably altered the image of what a woman is capable of, helping pave the way for everyone from Cynthia Rothrock to the Rock by demonstrating that physical prowess and beauty can definitely edge out acting ability for bloodthirsty American audiences, and as such anyone with the right look and physical abilities can be a star provided they bust their fucking ass at it.
SUPPORT THE STRENGTH SPORTS UNDERGROUND AND A ROGUE ACADEMIC HELLBENT ON FORCIBLY EDUCATING EVERY PERSON WHO’S EVER LOOKED ASKANCE AT A BARBELL. I AM THE TOM BRADY OF PHYSICAL CULTURE HISTORY, BUT BASICALLY UNPAID. HELP A MOTHERFUCKER OUT.
Sources:
Adah Isaacs Menken. Jewish Virtual Library. Web. 30 Mar 2021. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adah-isaacs-menken
Collins, Pádraig. An Irishman’s Diary on the glamorous and dangerous Lola Montez. Irish Times. 16 Jul 2014. Web. 6 May 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/an-irishman-s-diary-on-the-glamorous-and-dangerous-lola-montez-1.1867228
d’ Auvergne, Edmund B.. Lola Montez: An Adventuress of the ‘Forties. London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd, 1909. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38512/38512-h/38512-h.htm
de Leon, Arnoldo and Robert A. Calvert. Civil Rights. Reprinted from 1976 original. Texas State Historical Association. 20 Oct 2020. 30 Mar 2021. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/civil-rights
Enss, Chris. Wild women of the West: Adah Menken. Cowgirl Magazine. 14 Jun 2020. Web. 31 Mar 2021. https://cowgirlmagazine.com/adah-menken/
Isaac, Susan. The dangers of tight-lacing: the effects of the corset. Royal College of Surgeons of England. 17 Feb 2017. Web. 22 Mar 2021. https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/effects-of-the-corset/
Jennings, LA. She’s a Knockout: A History of Women in Fighting Sports. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Maldetto, K. Why San Francisco??? City origins: 1835-1849. FoundSF. Web. 17 Jun 2021. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=WHY_SAN_FRANCISCO%3F%3F%3F_CITY_ORIGINS:_1835-1849
Mannen, Amanda. The essay about farting– that argued for women’s rights. Cracked. 13 Mar 2021. Web. 31 Mar 2021. https://www.cracked.com/article_29667_5-social-side-effects-disinformation.html
Matthews, Don. The free market: lifting all boats. Foundation for Economic Education. 1 Apr 1997. Web. 22 Mar 2021. https://fee.org/articles/the-free-market-lifting-all-boats/
Menken, Adah Isaacs. Encyclopedia.com. Web. 31 Mar 2021. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/menken-adah-isaacs
Menken, Adah Isaacs. Lehigh University. Web. 30 Mar 2021. https://pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu/node/54132
Miller, Ben. Colonel Thomas Monstery, and the Training of Jaguarina, America’s Champion Swordswoman. Martial Arts New York. 31 Mar 2015. Web. 4 Aug 2020. https://martialartsnewyork.org/2015/03/31/colonel-thomas-monstery-and-the-training-of-jaguarina-americas-champion-swordswoman/
Miller, Ben. A visit with Colonel Thomas Monstery, and a conversation about the art of defense. Martial Arts New York. 1 Aug 2015. Web. 23 May 2021. https://martialartsnewyork.org/2015/08/11/a-visit-with-colonel-thomas-monstery-and-a-conversation-about-the-art-of-defense/
The Olympic Club facts. Olympic Club. Web. 10 Apr 2021. https://www.olyclub.com/press/
Palumbo, Morgan. A Brief And Bloody History Of SF’s Barbary Coast. Culture Trip. 8 Nov 2021. Web. 16 Jun 2021. https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/california/articles/a-brief-and-bloody-history-of-sfs-barbary-coast/
Prince, Stefan. The Circus Dolores. Story of O. 12 Aug 2020. Web. 2 Apr 2021. https://storyofoblog.wordpress.com/2020/08/12/the-circus-dolores/
