Page 105 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER P R O C E S S : VILI FYI N G

a climate marked by nervousness and tension. While a state of anxiety
kept them alert to possible danger, it also made them so apprehensive
that they were incapable of dealing effectively with the native popula­
tions they encountered. That many violent outbreaks and tragic con­
f r ontations occurred between American Indians and the migrants intent
upon settling the W e st is a widely known f a ct. It is also true that many
"uprisings" and "massacres" were little more than the work of people's
overactive imaginations. Problems with Indians were fr equently derived
f a r more f r om the migrants' worries about what could happen to them
than from what actually happened.
The process of distilling anti-Indian bias had begun fo r migrants
when they were children listening to family f o lklore. Quite often the
f o cus of these yarns was the custom of scalping attributed to American
Indians. Scalping was the very stuff of Indian tales. Dramatic, colorfu l,
and capable of inducing little prickles of dread in an audience, stories
of scalping could be depended upon f o r titillation. Moreover, late in the
nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, William F. (Buffalo Bill)
Cody's Wild e st, as well as his many imitators, reinforced the existence
W
of scalping on the fr ontier. Every evening and twice on matinee days,
Cody and his troupe enacted historical vignettes that included a scalp­
ing or two. Even as late as 1915, viewers could pay their money and see
how scalping supposedly was done in the old W e st.3
Therefore, many women had already served childhood apprentice­
ships as potential victims before they took their places in the wagons.
Rather than realizing that Indians f o ught to protect their f a milies and
lands, white women thought them to be belligerent and renegade.4
Harriet Smith, migrating as a young girl in the 1 8 40s, vividly recalled
her grandfather's chilling tales of the Indians he had encountered while
1
serving in the War of 8 1 2. "Naturally we were somewhat afraid," she
commented when the members of her party spied their first natives.
During the same decade, Virginia Reed Murphy also carried with her
the terror that her grandmother had instilled in her with fr equent recitals
about the "fearful deeds of the savages" and the trials of an aunt held
captive f o r five years.5 As late as 1900, Lucy Jennings admitted that she
had heard so many horror stories about Indians that she was terrified
to step out of the f a mily wagon.6

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