Page 67 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

F R O N T I E R P H I L OSOPHY: EUROPEAN D I S C OURS E

for impertinence.4 These formula novels also regaled European audi­
ences with Indians who were called "savages," "pesky redskins," "red
devils," "cussed redskins," and "blood-thirsty wretches," and spoke
hackneyed English.s
Undaunted by their lack of hard data regarding frontierswomen and
American Indians, European writers did not hesitate to inform their
readers about the nature of these inhabitants of the western United
States. These European attempts toward interpretation contributed
significantly to the body of information about American westerners that
engulfed both European and American female migrants prior to their
departure for the frontier. Thus did European attitudes toward the West
circulate among Americans and would-be settlers, making their expec­
tations more complex, and also more unrealistic, than ever. 6

-- On W o manhood --

European observers and commentators who enthralled European and
Americans alike with portrayals of the American frontier were legion
in number; a complete collection of their works would consume incal­
culable library shelf space. Yet, despite the torrent of words that these
spectators expended upon describing, analyzing, and criticizing the
westerners who so fascinated them, they seemed to understand little
about the West and its female settlers. Just as white Americans appro­
priated Indian cultural symbols and shaped them to suit themselves,
Europeans seized American images and put them in the form they pre­
ferred. They created an American frontierswoman that few real fron­
tierswomen would recognize or own.
This happened for many reasons. For one, European visitors had
limited conceptions of the location of the West. Rather than maps,
European visitors carried romantic expectations with them as they
embarked upon their expeditions to the American West. The popular
French writer Fran<;:ois Rene de Chateaubriand, who derived most of
his ideas about the West from other authors, traveled briefly once in
I79I to upstate New York, yet proceeded to write a spate of novels and

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