Page 222 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APTER S I X

whites to denounce Indians"'state of degradation." She asked, "Are our
souls refined and fr ee f r om all impurity?"5
Even women who believed that American Indians were inferior
developed a shred of pity f o r them. An Iowa settler of the 1 8 80s who
remembered that Indians had once roamed the prairies around her
homestead with "native dignity," were destroyed by white men who
"soon became the aggressor." Although not highly supportive ofIndians,
she empathized with their plight. Gradually, she said, Indians were" com­
pelled to give place to a higher order of civilization." Another woman
of the era maintained her conviction that Indians were "murderous sav­
ages" capable of "diabolical deeds," yet relented enough to express sad­
ness that the American Indian would "soon be numbered among the
extinct races."6
Apparently, women who disliked American Indians still commiser­
ated with them. This was true of army wife Frances Roe, who called
Indians " dirty, and nauseous-smelling savages," but came to believe that
whites' killing of buffalo was unjust in that it deprived the Plains Indians
of o od, clothing, and tent covering. Of course, whites planned to starve
f
out Indians by killing the buffalo. Although Roe apparently did not
understand this, she could see what the policy did to Indians. She wrote
bitingly: "If the Indians should attempt to protect their rights it would
be called an uprising at once, so they have to lie around on sand hills
and watch their beloved buffalo gradually disappear, and all the time
they know only too well that with them will go the skins that give them
tepees and clothing, and the meat that fu rnishes almost all of their
sustenance."7
Other white women also decried the Indians' lack of fo od and
clothing. They pitied the needy Indians, gave what they could, and
vented their fr ustrations in their diaries and journals.8 "Oh, dear, but
they do look so uncomfortable," sighed one emigrant woman of the
1 8 60s, after passing a native village.9 Army wife Ada o gdes also men­
V
tioned the Indians' destitute condition.When some twenty Indians came
into Fort Laramie f o r f o od, she logged her compassionate response in
her journal. "I did pity these poor things paddling around in the cold
& snow," she noted. IO Other women regretted their inability to help the
unfortunate natives. Rather than disparaging Indians as beggars or

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