Page 142 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPTER FOUR

Having hea:rd all their lives these assertions regarding f e male char­
acter, most women accepted them and carried them west. As they
assessed the various American Indian groups they met, their concepts
of themselves helped shape their interpretations ofIndians.While view­
ing themselves as harbingers of civilization, women saw Indians as
potential subjects f o r fe male reform efforts. Because women were taught
to see themselves as moral guardians and the protectors of civilization,
they perceived Indians as uncivilized, morally deficient, and brutalized
by their primitive existence.2 Sara Smith, a recently wed minister's wife,
remarked:" I long to be telling the dying heathen the story of the cross.
0, how happy I shall be in my laboring f o r the good of those dear
Indians. May God prepare me to do them good."3
Women's assumed superiority led women to emphasize the
American Indian's supposed inferiority. As reformers, white women had
to see their subjects as savage and rapacious, in need of women's
W
influence. o men undertook the journey filled with hopeful anticipa­
tion at the changes they might bring, yet trembled at the prospect of
their first confrontation with a real Indian. Because white women came
from a society that emphasized the construction of Native Americans
as evil, they spent their days on the trail fe arfully scouring the country­
side f o r any sign of Indians.4 When one California-bound traveler of
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the 8 60s heard shots fired in a nearby camp, she concluded that Indians
were nearby. Another fe male emigrant recalled that an Indian dog who
f o llowed her party kept them "in a continual state of excitement."5 In
1 8 50, one woman even scanned the horizon with a telescope in order
to detect Native Americans. Although no one in her party was alarmed
when she spotted several Indians and all were able to sleep that night,
she not only remained awake but did not change her clothing, "neither
shoe nor bonnet." She was prepared f o r an attack that never came.6
Like trail women, f e male settlers f r equently demonstrated a will­
ingness to see things in a dramatic way. During the 1 8 80s, fo r example,
Agnes Morley Cleaveland viewed the long-deserted site of a massacre
near her new home in New Mexico. Although it was marked by only
two grave-shaped mounds of loose rock and the f a intest suggestion of
a covering of ash, she insisted that her mind's eye saw the " dash of howl­
ing savages" fr om the timber beside the f a ding wagon tracks that were

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