Page 132 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPTER THREE

meals, and giving medical care. They also undertook heavier work,
including digging rifle pits, building stone breastworks, standing guard,
and carrying knives and pistols that they were trained to use.Is8 For all
this, Victorio learned that the white leader, the territorial governor
Robert B. Mitchell, calledVictorio and his people outlaws and asked f o r
their extermination. Although Victorio saw the f o lly of raiding, espe­
cially in lives lost, white policies and promises came to nothing.
When Victorio and other Indian leaders continued their resistance,
infuriated whites demanded that the u.s. government "do something."
At the same time, a fe w whites spoke on behalf of Native Americans.
In the W e st, women especially expressed sympathy. In r868, fo r exam­
ple, army wife Margaret Carrington declared that colonialism-popu­
larly called Manifest Destiny in the United States-gave American
Indians horrendous choices: "abandon his home, fight himself to death,
or yield to the white man's mercy." IS9 Meanwhile, back east, an Indian
reform movement was taking shape, but its primary weapon was rhet­
oric. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, many easterners con­
tinued to believe negative depictions of Native Americans. For instance,
during the r 8 90S an Oklahoma woman tried to persuade some eastern
visitors that some of her best f r iends and f a vorite house guests were
Indians. She took the easterners to a camp where her native acquain­
tances would "all gather around" and pat her on the back.Yet the east­
erners drew back fr om the crowd, looking like "they were ready to run."
Sadly enough, she never convinced her visitors that American Indians
were more than malicious and contemptible beings, nor did she ever
allay the hurt f e elings of her Indian fr iends. 160
This lack of empathy between Indians and whites led to some
pathetic situations. Indians who begged scraps of fo od fr om white
migrants discovered that whites f r equently refused to speak to the natives
who approached them. What the Indians could not know was that
whites believed that Indians would perceive them as cowardly or as easy
marks f o r begging and thievery. I6 I Following the advice of guidebooks
and other migrants, most white travelers treated natives with disrespect,
suspicion, and distrust. In r 8 57, a group of Pawnees came to a camp
where migrants were "nooning," and immediately the order went out
to not give them a thing. "It was thought," a member of the group,

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