Women of the Frontier

by Brandon Marie Miller

  Women made their families’ clothing from animal skins and furs or materials woven from wool, softened bark, and grasses. Leather moccasins or sandals protected their feet. Tribes living in northern climates added leggings, blankets, and buffalo-skin robes for winter.

  Many Indian women owned not only the property they brought into their marriages but anything they made afterward as well: tools, utensils, bags, and storage containers. Indian women did not waste time making decorative items that served no useful purpose; instead, their talents and creativity lent beauty to everyday objects. Some tribes esteemed a woman’s skill in decorative arts like a warrior’s deeds in battle.

  Southwestern peoples like the Paiute, Navajo, Pima, Papago, and Apache excelled at creating tightly woven baskets. Tribes of the Pacific Northwest and the Navajo to the south became expert weavers of fabric. Navajo weaving was said to originate with Spider Woman, a legendary figure who long ago taught her art to the people. Because women owned and tended the Navajo sheep and goat herds, they wielded economic power many other Indian women (and white women) lacked.

  The Pueblo women of the Southwest crafted beautiful pottery. One Zuni woman claimed she painted all her thoughts onto her pottery. Nomadic Plains tribes needed more durable items than pottery. Plains women used buffalo hides to make everything from storage bags to cradleboards, clothing, and moccasins, and they decorated items with paint, beads, and dyed porcupine quills in an array of colors and designs. The all-important beads were formed from bone, shell, animal teeth, nuts, seeds, and stones, and later women used colored glass beads received from white traders. Skilled Cheyenne women belonged to an exclusive quilling society that passed on the art to younger women.

  An Achomawi woman of northeastern California works on a basket in this Edward Curtis photo. Library of Congress

  Like white pioneer women, Indian women enjoyed socializing and recreation. Dances celebrated successful harvests, hunts, and battles, provided courting opportunities for young couples, and played a part in religious ceremonies. Where white society thought physical strength diminished a woman’s femininity, the strongest, healthiest Indian women earned respect as good workers and mothers. Indian women swam, raced horses, and sledded in winter. Cheyenne women played a kind of football. Pima and Papago women loved field hockey, a game played with balls that were fashioned from hide and stuffed with grass or animal hair. Quieter pastimes included string games, like cat’s cradle, and gambling games played using bone dice.

  For people who lived closely with nature, the mysteries of life and death lay everywhere to be seen, and were woven into the very fabric of an Indian woman’s life—in the seasons, the hunt, the planting, and the harvest. Prayers asked for food and good health for the tribe. In some tribes, women, as well as men, hoped for a vision or spiritual dream to show them the road to a good life. Many native cultures revered female spirits like White Buffalo Calf Woman, who brought the sacred pipe to the Lakota and taught them to live as one with all creatures, the earth, and the sky.

  In many tribes, women gained power and honor with age. Passing on the wisdom of a lifetime, they offered advice about tribal matters, history, religion, and medicine. Children listened with respect while elders taught the ways and stories of their people. Some tribes had female chiefs, mature women distinguished through their generosity and hard work.

  Indian women gained status through other roles as well. A medicine woman earned both respect and status as a healer, plying her tools of special songs, prayers, and treatments made from mosses, roots, barks, and leaves. Tribes expected and admired bravery from women as well as men. Women followed men to war as cooks and nurses. A Comanche woman possessed horse skills equal to those of a warrior and could defend her village if necessary, as did Yellow-Haired Woman of the Cheyenne, or Lozen of the Apache. The Blackfeet called a strong-minded woman “manly hearted.”

  “We Eyed Them with a Good Deal of Curiosity”

  Indian women viewed the white people invading their lands with both fear and curiosity. Indian mothers thought the strangers might steal or murder their children. The pale-skinned females wore ridiculous clothes—what shapes actually lurked beneath those hoop skirts and bustles? Physical punishment of Indian children was almost completely unknown, yet native women saw white parents spank and beat their offspring. White peoples’ sense of individual self-interest seemed foreign to tribal communal societies. Native Americans especially could not understand the white settlers’ desire to possess land and change it to suit their needs.

  White women heading west in the 1840s also felt fear and curiosity. Luzena Wilson hid her children whenever their party encountered Native Americans. She’d heard plenty about “their bloody deeds, the massacre of harmless white men, torturing helpless women, carrying away captive innocent babes.”1 First meetings were usually friendly, although some women voiced derision at the Indians’ appearance—”painted, dirty, nauseous-smelling savages,” wrote one.2 Descriptions of Native Americans as “treacherous,” “thieving,” and “bloodthirsty” appeared in white women’s journals. Emigrant women did not understand that in most Indian societies visitors exchanged gifts. Instead, when Indians expected food or gifts from the newcomers, white women condemned them for begging.

  Their journals noted, however, that Indians could be of use: “I traded an apron today for a pair of moccasins of the Indians.” “We have engaged our passage down the Columbia this morning in a canoe with the Indians.”3 “Have also a good many Indians and bought fish of them. They all seem peaceful and friendly.”4 One woman advised new settlers to pack a supply of calico shirts to trade.

  But often alone on their homesteads, white women feared the sudden appearance of curious Indians at their cabin doors. “These Osage are said to be friendly,” wrote Miriam Colt, “but I cannot look at their painted visages without a shudder.”5 She clutched her children to her side, afraid the Indians would steal them. If provoked, a white woman defended her home and family, though her weapon might be nothing more than a broom. Unwelcome Indian visitors usually retreated. For the most part, when fear died down, white women viewed Indians as people to be pitied—inferior, they believed, to the white race.

  White women journeying west heard horrific tales of the rape and torture of females captured by Indians. George Custer ordered that, in case of attack, any man near Elizabeth was to shoot her instead of letting her fall into Indian hands. Olive Oatman, Rachel Plummer, Matilda Lockhart, and others survived abusive captivities and bore the scars and mutilations from the ordeals for the rest of their lives.

  “The White People Have Taken”

  As the trickle of white pioneers turned into a flood of hundreds of thousands, violence escalated between Indians and whites. Native Americans watched helplessly as diseases carried by settlers raced through their villages, killing hundreds. They saw the buffalo and other food sources destroyed. White hunters with rifles killed hundreds of the huge shaggy creatures in a single day, leaving carcasses to rot and pushing the animals to near extinction.

  Blue-coated army troops struck Indian villages, killing women, children, and old people as they fled. Soldiers hunted down ragged bands of Indians, driving tribes to surrender to life on reservations. Indian women knew the wrenching pain of loss, the loss of everything. An Omaha woman wondered “if there is anything in [white] civilization which will make good to us what we have lost.”6

  A Navajo woman and her baby, 1860s. Library of Congress

  Tribe by tribe, band by band, the government forced Indian peoples onto reservation lands, lands often located hundreds of miles from beloved homelands where tribes had lived since before memory. Proud cultures suffered. The US government whisked Indian children away to boarding schools, forced them to learn English and wear the clothing of white America, and stripped them of their own languages and customs. Government Indian agencies banned hunting, dances, ceremonies, and religious practices. For men considered brave hunters and warriors, reservation life proved empty
and meaningless.

  Overall, however, the rhythm of life did not change as sharply for Indian women as it did for men. Children still needed to be raised; food had to be cooked, clothes sewn, and homes kept. Often Indian women managed to preserve their tribal heritage. “A nation is not conquered,” went a Plains Indian saying, “until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons.”7

  The early reservation years proved especially difficult for people used to freedom and food enough to feed themselves. Corruption polluted the government reservation system. Agents sold off food and clothing meant for the Indians and allowed whites to squat on the best reservation lands. For thousands of Indian people, reservation life brought starvation and mistreatment.

  During the late 1870s and 1880s, several Indian women, including a Paiute named Sarah Winnemucca and an Omaha named Susette La Flesche, gained national prominence fighting the injustice shown their people. Both women spoke English, and La Flesche had been educated in the East. Seen as exotic by white audiences, they lectured in Eastern cities, wrote, and traveled to Washington, DC, to speak on behalf of Native Americans. Sarah Winnemucca pleaded for an end to the terrible treatment of reservation Indians, especially her own people. “The women,” she wrote of Paiute society, “know as much as the men do, and their advice is often asked.” She chastised white legislators by writing, “If women could go into your Congress, I think justice would soon be done to the Indians.”8 Wrote La Flesche, “It’s all a farce when you say you are trying to civilize us, then, after we educate ourselves, refuse us positions of responsibility and leave us utterly powerless to help ourselves.”9

  Finding Common Ground

  Most white settlers never tried to understand the native people whose lands they stole and whose lives they destroyed. But a few army wives voiced sympathy for the Native Americans they also viewed as “hostiles.” Frances Roe realized that “if the Indians should attempt to protect their rights it would be called an uprising at once.”10 All they could do was watch helplessly while the buffalo were destroyed, and, she continued, “all the time they know only too well that with them will go the skins that give them tepees and clothing, and the meat that furnished almost all of their sustenance.” Frances Grummond felt “the Indians … would fight to the death for home and native land … and who would say that their spirit was not commendable and to be respected?”11

  In general, white women had peaceful relationships with Indians. When coming face to face as women, they probably discovered more in common with their Native American sisters than they liked to admit. One missionary described how Indian women helped her cope after childbirth. Another white woman claimed she only survived the loneliness of her Western home because some Indian women befriended her. Later, she returned their friendship by hiding them from drunken soldiers. When the tribe moved on, the Indian women presented her with a small ring. “No words can express,” she claimed, “what that little gold ring meant to me, the love and kindly feeling that was in the hearts of those three Indian women has been a very precious memory to me.”12

  As white people swept across the continent and gobbled up new territories, they didn’t worry about whose lands they claimed. Many believed in the United States’ destiny to rule North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Racial prejudices made the job easy.

  The scramble for elbow room and riches came at the expense of Mexican Americans as well as Native Americans. Guidebooks warned of the Mexicans’ “ignorance,” “superstition,” and “barbarity.” On a trip down the Santa Fe Trail in 1846, Susan Magoffin expressed surprise about the Mexicans she met. “What a polite people these Mexicans are,” she noted in her diary, “altho’ they are looked upon as a half-barbarous set by the generality of people.” Margaret Hecox traveled to California in 1846 and was terrified that Mexicans would attack her group. Instead, she found that women “came to us as we traveled along … bringing us offers of homemade cheese, milk, and other appetizing food.”13

  The avalanche of Anglos pouring into California after the gold rush overwhelmed the Spanish-speaking peoples who’d long called the land home. Luzena Wilson noted the passing of the Spanish land holders in her area of California, her own prejudices showing as she blamed it partly on the “slothfulness and procrastination” of the “Mexican character.” But a greater reason, she admitted, lay in the Mexican people’s trust of the white newcomers, who cheated them out of their property using high taxes and complicated laws written in English, reducing once proud landowners “from affluence almost to beggary.”14 Threats and violence scared other Mexicans off their land while white settlers stole cattle from Mexican ranchers. In letters, Hispanic women labeled the greedy Americans as “thieves,” “murderers,” and people “not to be trusted.”

  By 1848, war and treaties forced Mexico to hand over Texas, California, and New Mexico Territory to the United States. A settlement with Great Britain gave the United States all of Oregon country below the 49th parallel. Huge numbers of white settlers had arrived in the West, planted themselves, and meant to stay. And more kept coming. By 1890, so many people had sought the promise of a better life in the West that historians declared the American frontier officially “closed.”

  Rachel Parker Plummer and Cynthia Ann Parker

  The Captive and the “White Squaw”

  Rachel Parker Plummer

  As the morning of May 19, 1836, dawned over Parker’s Fort in eastern Texas, Rachel Parker Plummer set about the day’s business of tending her 14-month-old son, James Pratt. The Parkers, a clan of six families counting about 24 people, had migrated to Texas from Illinois three years earlier, drawn by offers of free land. They’d amassed a holding of thousands of acres and covered a one-acre lot with a log stockade sheltering a cluster of cabins, protected by four blockhouses and an impenetrable front gate. The Parkers’ claim lay in a region that was wild and largely unsettled. It was the domain of a fierce warring native people, the Comanche.

  That morning, Rachel’s husband and father and most of the other men left the fort to work in the cornfields. Seventeen-year-old Rachel, a few months pregnant with her second child, remained behind with the women and children. The protective gate of Parker’s Fort stood wide open.

  At ten o’clock, a large band of Comanche and a few Kiowa, perhaps 100 mounted men and women, approached the fort. Rachel’s uncle, Benjamin Parker, met the group, and in a matter of minutes the sunny morning turned into hell. Rachel watched as the Comanche cut down her uncle, impaled him on lances, clubbed him, shot him with arrows, and peeled back his scalp. She grabbed her son and tried to run but was quickly overtaken, clubbed over the head, and dragged outside to the main group of Indians. Two Comanche women whipped her. “I suppose,” Rachel wrote later, “that it was to make me quit crying.”15

  Meanwhile, the Indians killed her Uncle Silas while other Comanche rode down people fleeing the fort—Rachel’s grandparents, cousins, and aunts. The Comanche captured Elizabeth Kellogg, Rachel’s aunt, and threw her over the back of a horse. The Indians caught Silas Parker’s wife, Lucy, dashing with her four children toward the cornfields. They forced Lucy to hand over two of her children, seven-year-old John and her blue-eyed, nine-year-old daughter, Cynthia Ann. Lucy Parker and her remaining children were dragged back toward the fort, but they were saved by men running from the cornfields, shouldering their rifles.

  The Comanche galloped north with their captives, two women and three children. Two groups of surviving Parkers ran for their lives toward Fort Houston, a harrowing journey of 65 miles.

  The Comanche had raided the southern plains for centuries, unleashing their power against Apache and Ute, against Spaniards and Mexicans, and against the white intruders. The rules were clear enough, and they were brutal: men were killed, and any male captured alive was tortured to death—impaled, scalped, roasted, hacked, shot. Comanche men took turns raping women captives, and some women were further torture
d and killed. A young, healthy woman was often kept alive, though, to work as a slave. Babies, useless and needing care, were usually killed, while the Comanche typically adopted older children into the tribe.

  The Comanche also ransomed captives for what they prized most—horses. This was the Comanche way, and the way of other warrior societies of the plains. As the white settlers shoved their way onto Indian lands, the brutality on both sides—white and Indian—escalated.

  The raid had occurred at ten in the morning. The Comanche, with their captives lashed behind riders, galloped hard until after midnight. After setting up camp, the Indians celebrated with a victory dance around the fire, showing off the dangling scalps of the Parker victims. As part of the ritual, they kicked the captives and beat them with their bows.

  The women were stripped naked, their hands tied behind their backs, and their ankles bound. They were thrown face down on the ground, and their hands and feet were pulled together behind them. Rachel feared she’d smother in a pool of her own blood. The three children were also beaten. Rachel later recorded, “Often did the children cry but were soon hushed by blows I had no idea they could survive.”16

  Like all females taken by the Comanche, Rachel and Elizabeth were raped. Rachel passed over this humiliating and painful “degradation” (the 19th-century code word for rape) in her later writing, saying, “To undertake to narrate their barbarous treatment would only add to my present distress, for it is with the feelings of deepest mortification that I think of it, much less to speak or write of it.”17