Page 52 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APTER ONE

has a long history. In 1830, a white male observer declared that Indian
men saw their women as "a kind of slave, or beast of burt hen." In 1841,
in A New Home, white commentator Caroline Kirkland depicted a
French trader's Indian wife as a withdrawn woman who refused to talk
with white visitors, conversed only with "some wretched looking
Indians who were hanging about the house," and seemed pleased when
her white guests departed. Kirkland, like most nineteenth-century com­
mentators, saw native women as pathetic, depressed figures who had
little control over their own marital and sexual destinies. I 1 9 Decades
later, in 1868, a correspondent for the New Y o rk Times, who had traveled
among the Navajos of New Mexico, demeaned women moving a camp
on horseback and on foot as presenting little more than a "funny and
interesting scene." The correspondent also included an account of an
Indian woman "who gave birth while walking, picked up her child, and
1 0
traveled on." 2
Artists, too, represented Indian women falsely. W h ite observers often
thought that Indian women were exploited by the practice of plural
wives and the seeming willingness of Indian men to trade a woman for
a pony or for trinkets. Because whites misinterpreted such practices they
thought that American Indian women were chattel to be bought and
sold at the whim of their men. ! 2! In The Trapper's Bride (1850), the roman­
tic artist Alfred Jacob Miller, who traveled through parts of the West
noting Indian practices, depicted a lovely young Native American
woman being sold to a white trapper by Indian men for six hundred
dollars' worth of guns, tobacco, alcohol, and beads. !22 Apparently, white
onlookers often trivialized Indian women, at the same time overlook­
ing the existence of matrilineal Indian groups, the status accorded Indian
women for economic activities, and Indian women who served as war­
riors, shamans, healers, and religious leaders.
For a significant number of whites, then, the Indian woman was an
inferior and abused creature who earned little esteem among even her
own people. Sadly, such views achieved the status of truth in the minds
of many nineteenth-century Americans, who also came to believe that
such women were brutal to captives.As withered hags, as hideous crones,
and in a variety of similar characterizations, fictional American Indian
women perpetrated outrages consonant with their own "barbarous"

44