Women of the Frontier

by Brandon Marie Miller

  The government responded that Indians were “not persons within the meaning of the law” and possessed no rights protected under the Constitution. Indians stood as wards of the government, like children under their parents. No attorney could appear for an Indian unless authorized by the Indian Department. Commissioner Hays defended the Ponca’s removal, claiming that it was obviously necessary once their land had been given to the Sioux. “If the reservation system is to be maintained,” he wrote, “discontented and restless or mischievous Indians cannot be permitted to leave their reservations at will and go where they please.”38

  Susette received permission from the Omaha agent to travel to Omaha and sat beside Joseph in the back of the courtroom during Standing Bear’s trial. In May 1880, Susette heard Judge Elmer Dundy’s ruling that “an Indian is a person within the meaning of the laws of the United States” and could not be forcibly moved or confined without giving his consent.

  The legal victory—recognition of Native American rights to personal freedom and protection under the US Constitution—proved a double-edged win. Standing Bear and his small band won the right to remain in Nebraska, but the other Ponca in Indian Territory could not move. The government made clear that the case only applied to Standing Bear and his band; no other Indians could leave their reservations.

  Susette returned to her teaching, but Tibbles and others urged her to join a speaking tour of Eastern cities. News that a bill had been introduced in Congress to remove the Omaha spurred her to overcome her stage fright and shyness and take action. With her brother Francis, Standing Bear, and Tibbles, Susette undertook an exhausting speaking tour to drum up support for the Ponca and stop further forced removals of Indians from their homelands. Susette worked as Standing Bear’s interpreter and also spoke to huge crowds in cities including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, where she became the first woman to speak at historic Faneuil Hall.

  Papers latched onto Susette’s romantic sounding Indian name—Bright Eyes—and described her as intelligent, sweet, graceful, and lovely, a “dusky Indian maiden” wearing a plain black silk dress. “No such interesting squaw has appeared since Pocahontas,” noted the Ladies Journal.39 On meeting her, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow declared he had found his flesh and blood Minnehaha—the Indian girl in his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha.

  In interviews and speeches, Susette demanded fair and honest treatment of native people. She asked that Indians be allowed to remain on their lands—lands that had been deeded to them by formal treaties later broken by the United States government. She wanted Indians to have a say in how the government spent money meant for the tribes. She decried that the government kept soldiers on reservations to put down disturbances incited by injustices and that an Indian could be arrested without trial and sent away.

  “When the Indian, being a man and not a child or a thing, or merely an animal, as some would-be civilizers have termed him, fights for his property, liberty, and life, they call him a savage,” Susette wrote. She denounced the corrupt reservation system as a “system of nursing and feeding,” which prevented Indians from earning their own livings and taking care of themselves.40 Within that system, many tribes faced starvation. Then the government turned around and claimed Indians were incapable of taking care of themselves and would starve if the government left them alone.

  “This system has been tried for nearly a hundred years and has only worked ruin for the Indian,” Susette argued. Instead, give the Indian title to his lands, “throw over him the protection of the law,” and grant Indians the rights of citizenship.41

  She appeared before Congressional committees, expressing her views on the treatment of Native Americans and the Ponca removal. She met president Rutherford B. Hayes, his wife, senators, and other dignitaries. Susette’s work inspired others, including Helen Hunt Jackson, who wrote A Century of Dishonor about the government’s betrayal of Indian treaties, and Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes, who sponsored the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up the reservation system and instead granted plots of land to individual Indians to farm as homesteaders.

  In 1882, Susette married Tibbles, now a widower. The two continued lecture tours of the east and in 1886 traveled to England and Scotland, where Susette was hailed as an “Indian Princess,” much to her embarrassment. Back home, they divided their time between living on the reservation and in Omaha, where Tibbles worked as an editor.

  Though Susette believed Native Americans must learn to farm as white men did, she also wrote for children’s magazines about traditional Omaha life and legends, drawing illustrations of playing children, cradleboards, teepees, drying buffalo meat, and clothing. “We camp no more in the great circle,” she lamented. “A few of the old men only remember our laws and customs and try to keep them. The young are passing into another life.”42

  In late 1891, Tibbles and Susette traveled to Pine Ridge, one of the Sioux reservations in southwestern South Dakota. Many had fled the reservation, fearful of the soldiers who’d come to quell any disturbances aroused by the Ghost Dance. Starving Indians danced to bring the savior, to see departed loved ones living again, and to see the whites driven away and a new earth returned, once again home to free Indians, the buffalo, the elk, and the antelope.

  On Christmas Eve, soldiers slaughtered a band of Indians camped near Wounded Knee Creek; they were under Chief Big Foot and included men, women, and children. In one of the darkest moments of her life, Susette helped care for the survivors that escaped to Pine Ridge.

  Beginning in 1893, the Tibbles lived in Washington, DC, for two years, while Susette worked to save Omaha lands before returning once more to Nebraska. Tibbles turned his attention from Indian affairs to the Populist political movement. Susette continued to write and draw and advocate for Indians. The lands once promised to the Omaha were openly signed away to greedy whites who wanted surplus lands not yet rationed in allotments to the tribe. Instead of teaching and helping the Omaha, the government still controlled and doled out money.

  During her last years, Susette worried she had saved her people from leaving their homeland, only to see Omaha lands wasted away. The 300,000 acres promised the Omaha in 1854 had dwindled to 30,000 acres. Susette struggled with illness, and in 1902 her sister Susan, a medical school-trained physician, helped care for her.

  Susette La Flesche died on May 26, 1903, only 49 years old, a shy, soft-spoken woman who’d overcome her fears to boldly champion the cause of Native Americans through her pen and eloquent voice.

  7

  LOVE SONG TO THE WEST

  How often at night

  When the heavens are bright

  With the lights from the glittering stars

  Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed

  If their glory exceeds that of ours.

  —Second verse, “Home on the Range”

  As a new bride, Frances Boyd regarded her New York City home as “the only habitable place on the globe.” In 1868, however, she joined her soldier-husband in the wild Southwest. Seventeen years later, a life of privation and hardship could not dampen Boyd’s appreciation for the West. “Oh, I love the West,” she wrote, “and dislike to think that the day will surely come when it will teem with human life and all its warring elements!”1

  On a yearlong visit back to New York, Boyd “raved about the delights of the West until friends thought me nearly crazy on the subject.”2 She proclaimed New York’s Catskill Mountains “insipid after the rocky grandeur of the west,”3 and deplored New York City’s endless turmoil and chimneys blocking out the sky. Years later, returning east as a widow, Frances Boyd never forgot the blue-domed skies and grand spaces of the Southwest, where, she wrote, “one is truly alone with God.”4

  Female daredevils, Kitty Tatch and friend, at Yosemite Valley in California. National Park Service, Historic Photograph Collection

  Many women echoed Boyd’s celebration of beauty, freedom, and joy in the West. “The air is so exhilarating,” enthused Elizabeth Custer
, “one feels as if he had never breathed a full breath before.”5 A Kansas woman described her new home in 1859:

  It was such a new world, reaching to the far horizon without break of tree or chimney stack; just sky and grass and grass and sky…. The hush was so loud. As I lay in my unplastered upstairs room, the heavens seemed nearer than ever before and awe and beauty and mystery over all.6

  “It might seem a cheerless life,” claimed another woman,

  but there were many compensations: the thrill of conquering a new country; the wonderful atmosphere; the attraction of the prairie, which simply gets into your blood and makes you dissatisfied away from it; the low-lying hills and the unobstructed view of the horizon; and the fleecy clouds driven by the never failing winds.7

  Award-winning author Willa Cather portrayed the Western land as a powerful force in her stories. Many pioneering women shared the same tug at their souls, the sense of themselves, the sense of change that Cather expressed:

  It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang—and one’s heart sang there too … There was a new song in that blue air which had never been sung in the world before.8

  NOTES

  Chapter 1: Many a Weary Mile

  1. Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 55. Idiosyncratic grammar, spelling, and punctuation have been retained in quoted material here and throughout the book.

  2. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West 1840-1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 31.

  3. Luzena Stanley Wilson. ’49er: Her Memoirs as Taken Down by Her Daughter in 1881, http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/three/luzena.htm.

  4. Sandra Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 27.

  5. Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 72.

  6. Wilson, ’49er:, 1.

  7. Catherine Haun, quoted in Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 168.

  8. Myres, Westering Women, 25.

  9. Maria Shrode, quoted in Myres, Westering Women, 138.

  10. Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 78.

  11. Helen Carpenter, quoted in Myres, Westering Women, 123.

  12. Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 81.

  13. Amelia Stewart Knight, Diary of Mrs. Amelia Stewart Knight (1853), http://www.oregontrail101.com/00.ar.knight.html.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Jane Kellogg, quoted in Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 59.

  16. Lucy Henderson (ibid., 49).

  17. Ibid., 51.

  18. Missionary Mary Walker, 1838, quoted in Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell, Women of the West (New York: Orion Books, 1982), 129.

  19. Knight, Diary.

  20. Jeffrey, Frontier Women, 48.

  21. Jane Gould Tourtillott, 1862, quoted in Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 227.

  22. Knight, Diary.

  23. Virginia Reed Murphy, Across the Plains in the Donner Party: A Personal Narrative of the Overland Trip to California, http://www.teleport.com/~mhaller/Primary/VReed/VReed1.html.

  24. Ethan Rarick, Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West (New York: Oxford University Press. 2008), 77.

  25. Murphy, Across the Plains.

  26. Rarick, Desperate Passage, 174.

  27. Murphy, Across the Plains.

  28. Rarick, Desperate Passage, 200.

  29. Rarick, Desperate Passage, 229.

  30. All quotes in this passage come from Diary of Mrs. Amelia Stewart Knight (1853). The journal is also included in part in Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 201-16.

  Chapter 2: Oh, Give Me a Home

  1. Frances Carrington, My Army Life: A Soldier’s Wife at Fort Phil Kearny (1910; repr., Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing, 1990), 57.

  2. Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 148.

  3. Mary Ballou, 1852, quoted in Christiane Fischer, ed., Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849-1900 (Hamden, CT: Archon Book, 1977), 43.

  4. Abby Mansur, quoted in Fisher, Let Them Speak, 49.

  5. Miriam Davis Colt, Went to Kansas, 1862, http://www.kancoll.org/books/colt.

  6. Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 157.

  7. Walker Wyman, Frontier Woman: The Life of a Woman Homesteader on the Dakota Frontier (River Falls: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 16.

  8. Carrie Lassell Detrick, quoted in Joanna L. Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 55.

  9. Ibid., 53.

  10. Myres, Westering Women, 86.

  11. Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 29.

  12. Dorothy Gray, Women of the West (Millbrae, CA: Les Femmes Press, 1976), 140.

  13. Lydia Lyons, quoted in Stratton, Pioneer Women, 52.

  14. Virginia Wilcox Ivins, quoted in Fischer, Let Them Speak, 76.

  15. Marguerite Merington, The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (New York: Devin-Adair, 1950), 81.

  16. Merington, Custer Story, 211.

  17. Frances Boyd, Cavalry Life in Tent and Field (1894; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 45.

  18. Elizabeth Custer, Following the Guidon (repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 239.

  19. Boyd, 144.

  20. Elizabeth Custer, Boots and Saddles, or Life in Dakota With General Custer (1885; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 105.

  21. Elizabeth Custer, Tenting on the Plains (repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 2: 485.

  22. Carrington, My Army Life, 86.

  23. Virginia Wilcox Ivins, quoted in Fischer, Let Them Speak, 77.

  24. Mary Jane Megquier, 1849, quoted in Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 62.

  25. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 37. Many Whitman sources, including some of Narcissa’s letters, can be seen at the website for the Whitman Mission National Park, http://nps.gov/whmi/historyculture/narcissa-biography.htm.

  26. Ibid., 69.

  27. Ibid., 63.

  28. Ibid., 76-77.

  29. Ibid., 81.

  30. Ibid., 83.

  31. Ibid., 98.

  32. Ibid., 106.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Ibid., 119.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid., 126.

  37. Ibid., 145

  38. Ibid., 149.

  39. Ibid., 147.

  40. Ibid., 177.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid., 203.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Ibid., 215.

  45. Ibid.

  46. All quotes in this passage come from Miriam Davis Colt’s book, Went to Kansas, published in 1862, which is also included in part in Luchetti and Olwell, Women of the West.

  47. All quotes in this passage come from Frances Grummond Carrington’s book, My Army Life.

  Chapter 3: A Woman That Can Work

  1. Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 64.

  2. Mary Ballou, quoted in Fischer, Let Them Speak, 44.

  3. Mary Jane Megquire, quoted in Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 62.

  4. Anne Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 10.

  5. Mary Walker, 1840, quoted in Luchetti and Olwell, 68, 70.

  6. Paula Bartley and Cathy Loxton, Plains Women: Women in the American West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 31.

  7. Elinore Stewart, quoted in Myres, Westering Women, 163.

  8. Mathilda Wagner, quoted in Bartley and Loxton, Plains Women, 24.

  9. Mary Walker, quoted in Luchetti and Olwell, Women of the West, 71.

  10. Myres, Westering Women, 152.

  11. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, The Women’s West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 186.

  12. Martha Summerhay
es, Vanished Arizona: Recollections of My Army Life (1908; repr., New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1963).

  13. All quotes in this passage are from Luzena Stanley Wilson’s book, ’49er: Her Memoirs as Taken Down by Her Daughter in 1881. For the “untold” side of the story, see Fern Henry, My Checkered Life: Luzena Stanley Wilson in Early California (Nevada City, CA: Carl Mautz Publishing, 2003). Henry’s book looks more deeply into the background of Luzena’s story and what else happened to her.

  14. Kathleen Bruyn, “Aunt” Clara Brown: Story of a Black Pioneer (Boulder: Pruett Publishing, 1971), 159. This biography is marred by lengthy fictionalized sections and heavy use of “negro dialect.”

  15. Ibid., preface, xiii.

  16. All quotes in this passage are from Bethenia Owens-Adair’s book, Dr. Owens-Adair: Some of Her Life Experiences, 1906, as printed in Luchetti and Olwell, Women of the West, 173-87.

  Chapter 4: And Now the Fun Begins

  1. Rebecca Craver, The Impact of Intimacy: Mexican-Anglo Intermarriage in New Mexico, 1821-1846 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1982), 23.

  2. Ibid., 13.

  3. Harriet Behrins, quoted in Fischer, Let Them Speak, 29.

  4. Abby Mansur (ibid., 52).

  5. Custer, Boots, 101.

  6. Wilson, ‘49er.

  7. “Adah Menken, aka ‘the Naked Lady’: The Original Superstar,” Michael Foster and Barbara Foster, http://www.historynet.com/adah-menken-aka-the-naked-lady-the-original-superstar.htm.

  8. “Adah Isaacs Menken, 1835-68,” Jewish Women Archive Encyclopedia, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/menken-adah-isaacs.

  9. Joan Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion 1840-1900 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995), 298.

  10. Harriet Carr (ibid., 88).

  11. Schlissel, Women’s Diaries, 125.

  12. Custer, Tenting, 2: 405.

  13. Craver, Impact of Intimacy, 24.

  14. Miriam Colt, Went to Kansas.

  15. Agnes Morley Cleveland, quoted in Grace, Carry A. Nation, 113.

  16. Belknap’s journal, in Luchetti and Olwell, Women of the West, 138.