Page 217 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

F R O N T I E R P L AC E : G E N D E R MATTE R S

who, in her words, "was always good to me." Her Indian mother held a
"great f e ast" in Bianca's honor on the night of her arrival, and she
showed the girl little kindnesses. "On cold winter nights my Squaw
Mother would have me stand before the fire, turning round occasion­
ally, so I could get good and warm," Bell recalled. "Then she would wrap
me up in a buffalo robe and tuck me in good and warm." She main­
tained that her native mother was "always very thoughtful" of her and
seemed to care f o r her as much as if she were "her very own child."210
Bell was not only f o nd of her Indian mother, but respected the other
Indians in the group as well. Later, she declared: "The majority of the
Indians that I knew were of a jovial, happy disposition, always fr iendly
and playing some kind of joke on the other f e llow." She thought they
must have had exceptionally well-behaved children, f o r she never saw
them punish one. She added that even though whites thought Indians
ignorant, they were well educated in legends and f o lklore: "All their his­
tory was handed down fr om one generation to the next."When Bianca's
f a ther ransomed her f r om the Indians-to the despair of her native
mother-she was glad to return to her own people, but she always
retained happy memories of her time among the Comanches. 2 II
This is not intended to imply that clashes between whites and
natives were less than calamitous or that prisoners of war spent enjoy­
able interludes away f r om their f a milies and f r iends. It is meant to sug­
gest that the captivity scenario presented by myth and by the media was
inaccurate. Mired in anti-Indian prejudice and seeking rationalizations
f o r their treatment of natives, many white fo lks willingly had their biases
confirmed by horror stories of attacks and captivity. Y e t unpublished
women's sources indicate that a discrepancy existed between the sce­
nario and reality.
Even during the height of violence, women were not universally
terror stricken by American Indians. Neither were they routinely phys­
ically or sexually abused by natives. Nor did women always blame
Indians f o r the ills and strife that plagued so many areas of the fr ontier.
Instead, they put themselves in the place of Indians and became bigger
people fo r doing so.
Clearly, white women and white men developed dissimilar relation­
ships with American Indians.These differences in white f e male-American

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