Page 56 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APTER ON E

On an even more tragic level, nothing prepared Anglo women for
the widespread despair and death among the people they displaced.
Stunned by their inability to help, women would soon learn that their
morality and piousness meant little on Indian-white frontiers.The many
social constructions that women had absorbed back home were as use­
less as greenback dollar bills after the introduction of the silver standard.
As complex as things were for Anglo women, however, they were com­
plicated even further by an influx of European ideas that poured into
the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
regarding white women and American Indians in the frontier stage of
the great American West.