Page 11 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

INTRODUCTION

f e elings and reactions. Those used here include diaries kept by trail
women, journals and daybooks of women settlers, accounts by army
f
wives, records of e male missionaries, and several unpublished statements
of women involved in white-Indian conflicts.4 Additional resources are
popular-culture sources, including the novels that women read, and the
.
reflection of women in newspaper accounts 5 The sources used here
represent the trans-Mississippi West, ranging fr om Iowa and Kansas to
California and Oregon, and, as a comparison, the Panama route to
California.
One characteristic these documents share is that they were not
intended as descriptions and critiques of Indians. Their authors had no
vested interest to promote, nor did they hope to influence public opin­
ion. Anglo women's writings reflect the attitudes and beliefs of a cross­
section of western women who participated in the casual, intermittent
contact with Native Americans that was typical of most fr ontierswomen,
rather than those of women who were missionaries and teachers and
thus had more prolonged, intense intercourse with Indian peoples. Trail
diaries are especially useful because they often revealed changes in
f e male migrants' reactions to Indians as they moved westward, whereas
such sources as missionaries' accounts were less helpful because fe male
missionaries frequently held deep-seated and f a irly inflexible percep­
tions of American Indians peculiar to their own sense of mission and
unrepresentative of Anglo f r ontierswomen in general. 6
Another salient fe ature of these women's documents is that they
were not accurate sources of information regarding American Indian
peoples and their principles and practices. In no way were white women
writing Native American history or recording culture and ethnogra­
phy.7These women's writings leave no doubt that their perceptions were
skewed by colonialist precepts, including a belief in white superiority.
Derived in large part fr om their own bigotry and cultural values, these
women's observations of Indians demonstrate their ethnocentric biases
toward Indian societies rather than the realities of Native American cul­
ture. From today's perspective, Anglo women's views of Indians were
seldom defensible. Although a f e w f r eed themselves sufficiently from
colonialist teachings so that they even criticized their own menfolk,
attacked the American government's Indian policy, or married Indian

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