Page 153 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

F R O N T I E R P R O C E S S : H U MANIZING

white women were quick to judge Indians as poor specimens of human­
ity (that is, if they saw them as people at all).White women left no doubt
as to their intentions to "civilize" Indians and their support of the estab­
lishment of white nationalism. As a result, women employed such epi­
thets as "hard-hearted and cruel people," "too devilish fo r any human
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beings," "most treacherous mortals on earth," and " ever treacherous. 82
According to other women, Native Americans were "untrustworthy ,
thieving, and treacherous," of a "sly intriguing nature," "very cowardly,"
and "ignorant and simple."s3
One of the most notable personality defects attributed to all
American Indians was their reputed laziness. In 1 8 S3, Kate Furness, who
did not question why Indians near Fort Laramie were idle, proclaimed
that "doing absolutely nothing" but standing around and gazing
"vacantly into space" made them contented. 84 When, during the mid-
1870s, Ellen Biddle attempted to train a Colorado Indian youth as a
house servant, she was not surprised when he ran away with some other
"indolent" and "worthless" Indians. After that, Biddle wrote, "I have
never thought the plan of sending Indian boys to the schools in the East
to educate them, and then allow them to go back to their reservations,
a good one." T o her way of thinking, "there are too many generations
of Indians back of them, and the f e w years of civilization are soon fo r­
gotten." Thus, to Biddle, no amount of civilizing or educating would
ever make Indians assimilable into white culture.8s
White women also attributed to Indians a crazed desire fo r liquor.
This signifier marked Indians as not only inferior " others," but as unsta­
ble and dangerous.White women's discourse gives no evidence that they
attempted to find out why some Indians sought whiskey. Also, white
women generally ignored their own men's propensity to drink, as well
as to cause accidents while inebriated. Summarily, white women
damned Indians who drank.86 During the 1 8 30s, settler Mary Rice
wrote to her sister that Creek Indians near Fort Gibson patronized a
local white liquor peddler. The result, in her words, was that "a com­
pany of them git together and drink and git to quarilling and then they
.
will stab one another . . . they dance and hollow and scream all night
and most always on a Satterday night they dont never truble us any by
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coming near the house onely by going by in the road and screaming. 87

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