Page 15 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

INT RODUCTION

T e rritory into Oklahoma T e rritory and opened it f o r white settlement.
Also in 1 8 90, the u.s. Bureau of the Census declared the f r o ntier
"closed" by virtue of having an average of two residents per square
mile. I3 Despite that startling announcement, migration continued, with
settlers filling in sparsely developed areas fr om Minnesota to New
Mexico.
These and related events c reated a volatile situation f o r western­
bound women and the American Indians who lived in the W e st or had
been relocated there fr om their ancestral homes east of the Mississippi
River. Throughout the era, proper nineteenth-century women-along
with those who were not so proper-found themselves heading west,
many hoping to "do good" among Indian peoples. Meanwhile,
American Indians were pushed, hassled, dispossessed of their lands,
f o rced into poverty , and relocated on reservations of questionable merit.
Virtually all Indians resisted, some by violence, which led to altercations
ranging from the Black Hawk War in the upper Mississippi V a lley in
18p to the widely heralded capture of the fe ared Apache leader
Geronimo in the Southwest in 1 8 86. Other Indians protested more
subtly through deceiving whites, ignoring their offers of "help," and
rejecting aspects of white culture that did not suit them. Thus, the Anglo
women and American Indians who met in fr ontier zones all over the
W e st sometimes met with tragic results and sometimes with f a vorable
consequences.
In the fo llowing pages, western "frontiers" mean geographical zones
where two or more types of people met, with the members of one intent
on subduing the other and imposing their government, economy , reli­
gions, and cultures on those aboriginal to the area. Besides geography,
fr ontiers also involved procedures. Consequently, here f r ontiers have f o ur
phases. The first is philosophy, meaning the ideology that propelled
white migrants westward. Called Manifest Destiny in the United States,
this belief system might also be characterized as colonization or even
colonialism. 14 As in many of the world's other colonized countries, the
introduction of Anglo dominance led to such hegemonic stages as war,
colonization, decolonization, and a movement f o r social justice. 15 The
next three f a cets of fr ontiers are the process by which migrants relo­
cated and imposed their ways on indigenous cultures, the geographical

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