Historical personality disorder

“I don’t just play them, I am them,” said Alberta Tracy of her three-decades-long hobby of portraying local and world-famous historical women. Known as “The Lady of Butte County,” she talked about her unique pastime while dressed as the mid-19th-century maid of Oroville’s historic Ehmann Home, where she was working her Saturday volunteer shift.

Tracy’s first-person method had been revealed minutes earlier, when she switched personas midway through the retelling of one of local history’s darker episodes set in the mining town of Cherokee: Susie McDaniels was a beautiful and popular young woman beloved by much of Cherokee’s mostly miner population, she explained. One summer night, Susie, who Tracy said “had a sort of carefree ignorance about her,” was returning to her friend Maria Glass’ home after dancing at a ball until 3 a.m., the young women escorted by a Dr. Sawyer.

As she continued, Tracy’s eyes widened and her voice rose dramatically: “Then all of a sudden, out of the shadows lunged Austrian George, a hairy, gross beast of a man who’d worked in my father’s store! He was sweet on me and had been watching me all night through the window, [as I was] dancing and flirting. He jumped from the bushes, grabbed me by the hair, pulled me away from Maria and stabbed me in the chest. I fell dead, and all Maria could do was scream.”

After fleeing, Austrian George was shot dead in Bidwell Bar, Tracy continued, and an angry mob of miners drug his body back to Cherokee, set fire to his home and all his belongings, then threw his body onto the burning heap.

“That was the end of him,” Tracy said solemnly, milking a dramatic pause before finishing, “and that was the end of me.”

Tracy has played Susie McDaniels and many other women of history, using costumes, songs and dramatic monologues to bring them back to life in classrooms, historical homes, at Oroville’s Salmon and Olive festivals, Paradise’s Johnny Appleseed Days and dozens of old-timey celebrations unique to the county’s smaller towns. She’s ridden in parades, on stagecoaches, fire trucks, antique automobiles, tractors and other conveyances, all of which are documented in photo albums and binders full of aging newspaper clips she shared.

The hobby originated at the Ehmann Home, where Tracy started volunteering in 1983, and began wearing the maid outfit after someone gave her the costume. Shortly thereafter, she started dressing for Butte County Historical Society events and at the twice-monthly local-history classes that historian Jim Lenhoff hosted at the Oroville Library until 2008.

Tracy said she’d never done anything theatrical before donning the maid’s smock, her sole previous brush with showbiz being a Paramount Pictures screen test during World War II, when she was 3 years old. She said that early on she would read from notes and speak about the women in the third person, and that the method of becoming one with her characters happened spontaneously. She was portraying Thankful Lewis Carson, a Chico woman who, at the age of 12, escaped capture by Mill Creek Indians, and switched to first-person delivery to help her remember the names of landmarks.

“I started sobbing as I told how the Indians killed my two brothers, shoved sticks in my mouth, burned my skirt and told me they were going to kill me,” she recalled. “They all thought it was wonderful acting and part of the show, but I was really upset and crying.”

Over the years, her repertoire of characters and costumes has grown to include dozens of women, a sampling of whom includes colorful local ladies of yore like Maggie Bowden, an Irish immigrant who worked at the Oroville dump; Clotilde Merlo, whose name graces a Stirling City park; and several of the madames who haunted Oroville’s once-vibrant red-light district. She also portrays world-famous women—like Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette—and shares stories about the notable men some of her characters rubbed shoulders with, such as Mark Twain, Thomas Edison and more.

Today, Tracy doesn’t do as many school-room and other performances, or give regular walking tours of downtown Oroville as she once did, but she still stays busy dressing for BCHS events. And, most Saturdays she takes on the role of the Ehmann maid, and is happy to share her encyclopedic knowledge of historical women—highlighted with a distinct personal touch—with visitors.

“I never thought I’d be doing this when I was in my old age,” she said with a laugh. “It just unfolded.”