Page 70 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

C H APT E R Two

Lord Salisbury, told English women that they were capable of helping
supply the "energy, initiative, the force" that colonization demanded. I 7
Consequently, women who thought about migrating to the American
West, where "barbarous" peoples needed their ministrations, as well as
women who planned to stay firmly planted in their homes, developed
immense interest in America's westering women. They helped swell the
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reading audience, already
expanded by improved education, increased leisure time, and decreased
costs of books and periodicals. As early as the 1840s, European wom�n
18
of almost all social classes were avid readers of novels and periodicals.
Due to the increasing availability of print media entering employers'
homes, even domestic servants became part of the rapidly growing read­
ing public. Laborers, too, were urged to read by evangelists, Mechanic's
Institutes, and purveyors of sensationalistic literature. Those who with­
stood such blandishments were exposed to the American West in other
ways, including street theater, sermons, speeches, folklore, jokes, and
other forms of popular culture. 19
At the same time, European images and interpretations of the West
and its women circled back to American women, primarily through the
print media. European novels and excerpts from them, newspaper arti­
cles, tracts, pamphlets, humorous pieces, plays, and the commentaries of
travelers in the West inundated American readers.Anxious to know what
other nations thought of their fledgling country, many Americans con­
sumed anything that provided images of themselves through European
eyes. Although they were not always pleased with what they read or
heard, as was the case with the writings of Charles Dickens and Harriet
Martineau, their attitudes and prejudices about themselves were deter­
mined to some extent by European thinking. 20
Naturally, European writers responded to the growing demand.
Especially prolific were European travelers to the American West.
Despite the difficulty of finding any authentic information, visitors
seemed to have little hesitation in projecting their own values on the
land and cultures around them. They frequently lavished extravagant
numbers of pages of imaginative prose upon the question of how the
white women who inhabited the American frontier looked, acted, and
thought. In so doing, they usually saw what they hoped to see. The

62