Page 66 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APTER Two

their critics, were understandably intent on how the United States, so
recently colonies itself, would pursue its own white colonialist phase
in the American West.
As a result, when Europeans confronted the topics of white west­
ern women and Native Americans, they filtered everything through the
distorted lenses of imperial and racialist thinking. W h ite frontierspeo­
pIe, as seen through European eyes, frequently loomed larger than life.
As inhabitants of a strange new region characterized by danger and
opportunity, they often seemed to Europeans to be highly unusual spec­
imens of humanity. A magnified portrait of Indians also developed, but,
predictably, Native Americans had far more vices than virtues.
Moreover, wish fulfillment on the part of Europeans complicated
the process of trying to fathom the American West. Europeans tended
to see what they hoped to find in this promising "new " world. Increas­
ingly during the nineteenth century, they viewed the American fron­
tier as the child who would bring to reality their own thwarted wishes
and dreams. The literary scholar Jerzy Jedlicki has suggested that the
Polish fascination with America began as compensation for things miss­
ing at home, such as conceptions and realities of space, freedom, human
rights, land, abundant food, and progress. The result, according to
Jedlicki, was that the heroes of authors such as Henryk Sienkiewicz "vied
with those of James Fennimore Cooper and his successors in rousing
the imagination and dreams of derring-do among Polish adolescents."!
Jedlicki also correctly implied that Americans themselves con­
tributed to European perceptions of the West. From Cooper's
Leatherstocking Tales to the sagas of domestic novelists, American inter­
pretations reached a huge number of European readers. During the
1850s, for example, Elizabeth Wetherell's Wide, Wide World sold more
copies in England than any other American novel to that date, and was
also translated into French, German, Swedish, and Italian. 2 Later in the
nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, dime novels supplied
Europeans with stock images of western women and of Indians. 3
Women ranged from damsels being rescued from peril by heroes
named Flying Floyd and Deadwood Dick to heroines waging sword
duels, shooting Indians, rescuing in a hot air balloon a lover appropri­
ately named Young W i ld West, and thrashing an amorous young man

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