Page 33 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

F R O N T I E R P H I L OSOPHY: AMERICAN DISCOURSE

had much work to do in the West.5 0 In 1854, writer Lydia Sigourney
spoke to these women in verse, saying that it was in women's character
to take on courageously such challenges:
How beautiful is woman's love!
T h at rom the play-place if its birth . .
.
f
To stranger-bands, to stranger-home . . .
Goes f o rth in peifect trust, to prove
T h e untried toil, the burdening care
The peril and the pang to dare. 1
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This sermonizing implanted in the minds of westering women the
notion that they were migrating not just as settlers, but as desperately
needed moral missionaries.Women looking toward the West had already
learned that they were in demand as wives. W i th so many men migrat­
ing to the West the marriage market also moved west. Because men out­
numbered women and much work needed to be done, there was an
almost constant campaign by westerners to attract women settlers. 5 2 In
1837, one western newspaper advised women that "every respectable
young woman who goes to the West, is almost sure of an advantageous
marriage." Anglo women soon discovered that westerners also under­
stood women's potential as "civilizers." In another issue, the same news­
paper noted that w hatever may be the customs of a country, the women
"
of it decide the morals."53 An 1860 poem titled "Idyll of a Western Wife,"
which appeared in yet another western newspaper, took a slightly
different approach, insisting that the rustic "housewife merry" marked
the advance of civilization into the West.54 After hearing so much of
this, some women must have wondered how the inhabitants of the West
would get along if they did not migrate. Certainly, the belief that female
morality would be served by westward migration softened the blow for
those women who were not enthusiastic about their impending move.
One can almost imagine many of these women heaving a sigh and deter­
mining to perform their moral duty in the West, at the same time that
other women envisioned the West as a vast moral wasteland that they
would redeem.
Unsurprisingly, the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 and the
Reconstruction period that followed, lasting until 1877, put a crimp in

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