Page 45 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER P H I L OSOPHY: AMERICAN DISCOURSE

On the other hand, capable women also existed in dime novels.
During the I 8 90s, a woman threatened Deadwood Dick at gunpoint,
insisting that he marry her. In the nick of time, Dick's wife, whom he
thought dead, appeared to challenge his tormentor to a duel. Dick
observed the resulting fight, a "strange, exciting combat between two
infuriated women." At the struggle's end, Dick's wife lunged at her
opponent who "fell back, with a blade run through her heart-dead."
In a later story, White Boy Chiif (I908), a madwoman and a young girl
rescued the hero from a band of "red devils" and "cussed redskins." After
the hero commented, "what a head piece yer have got, old gal," the
author explained that "notwithstanding her demented condition, she
was a woman of iron constitution and will." By I9I7, the capable woman
seemed to have triumphed, at least in dime novels. In that year, a hero­
ine threw sandbags out of a hot-air balloon on the heads of Sioux
Indians, used the revolver she always carried to further discourage her
pursuers, and capped her unladylike performance by returning to camp
where "with several of the females of the settlement," she " engaged in
, ,
making coffee for the men. 8 6
Women who found themselves caught between messages that they
were physically weak yet physically capable hoped they would be fortu­
nate enough to encounter "good" Indians. Although the good male
Indian was rare in nineteenth-century white discourse, he did exist. This
was the Noble Savage who was pure, virtuous, and gentle. It was to this
streak of natural nobility in American Indians that women could turn
for protection from elements of the western environment that included
ruthless and rapacious American Indians they might meet. During the
closing decades of the century, writer and Indian reformer Helen Hunt
Jackson portrayed their ilk in her popular writings, as well as in her
reform treatises. 87The good Indian survived well into the twentieth cen­
tury. In I907, Gray Feather appeared in Kid Curry's Last Stand. Gray
Feather "had a reputation among the cow-punchers of being a good
Indian, for they had always found him truthful and reliable." Gray Feather
spoke beautiful and correct English, referring deferentially to himself in
the second person. "Gray Feather is pleased to see you W , hite Chief," he
greeted one of his acquaintances. 8 8 Gray Feather was obviously one of
the "good" Indians to whom an Anglo woman could turn for aid.

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