Page 49 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER P H I L OSOPHY: AME RICAN D I SCOURSE

such as those in Sign Language (1889) and The Luckless Hunter (1910), the
Indian was an inferior being destined for eventual extinction. 10 3

Bad Indians also turned up in immensely popular dime novels and
other pulp literature, all of which reflected and exploited anti-native
sentiment. Dime novelists described American Indians as "pesky red­
skins," "red skunks," "bloodthirsty wretches," and, of course, "savages."
In 1907, one author even put these words into the mouth of an Indian
character: "You may not know it, but the wild blood that flows in an
Indian's veins craves for the excitement of the torture stake if that Indian
be a bad one." 104

Stereotypes of Indians included Indian women as well. Like male ·
Indians, females were lumped into a few categories, whose members
shared the same characteristics. 10 5 There were good female Indians who
were sensitive, human, and warm hearted. One type of good Indian
woman was the peacemaker. A specific case from the 1890S was not only
"fully cultured, and of fair education," but, because of the peaceful
influence she exerted, received many valuable lands and money gifts
from settlers and Indian agents. 106 There were also good Indian women
who were sympathetic to whites, sometimes helping them escape Indian
captors, even their own husbands. 10 7 And there was the Indian Princess,
who, like Pocahontas, was willing to aid whites in their campaign to
overcome her people and seize their lands. She appeared in many guises,
as Magawisca in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827), as Little
Deer in Robert Strange's Eoneguski; or The Cherokee Chiif (1839), as
Moinoona in Osgood Bradbury's Peripold the Avenger (1848), and as the
Indian princess Winona in an Isabel Moore Kimball statue (1902).Always
the paragon of beauty, usually the daughter of a chieftain, and favorable
to white expansion, the Indian princess seemed to embody American
national pride in things and people uniquely American. 108
T y pically, these characters derived from the prototypical Indian
princess, Pocahontas, who was saved from savagery by her relationship
with an Englishman. Elevated to the status of a princess because of her
marriage to the English gentleman John Rolfe, Pocahontas adopted the
white name Rebecca, wore such white-style clothing as corsets and ruff
collars, and allowed herself to be presented to the English court. As a
result, writers and artists depicted Pocahontas as more white than

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