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Overview
Victoria Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many women who helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarks of the western—cowboys, schoolmarms, gun violence, lynchings, cattle branding—while also placing female characters at the center of their western adventures and improvising with western conventions in surprising and ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis’s The Administratrix a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gang responsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall’s pulp serial character, Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steady stream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor for their feminist critiques of patriarchy. In addition to recovering the work of these and other women authors of popular westerns, Lamont uses original archival analysis of the western-fiction publishing scene to overturn the long-standing myth of the western as a male-dominated genre.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803290310 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2016 |
| Series: | Postwestern Horizons |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 939 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Westerns
A Women's History
By Victoria Lamont
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9031-0
CHAPTER 1
Western Violence and the Limits of Sentimental Power
The late nineteenth-century cattle boom of the far West set the stage for a new frontier hero — the cowboy. Although widely regarded as a descendent of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, the colonial frontier scout who guided "civilization" into the wilderness, the cowboy differed from the scout figure as a wage-earning laborer rather than a semiautonomous scout contracted by colonizers to guide their incursions into the wilderness. Cowboy westerns thereby brought postindustrial class tensions into the frame of the frontier encounter between "savagery" and "civilization." Considered the founding modern western, Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) deployed the cowboy hero to advance the interests, not of the laboring class from which he originates, but of the men constituting what Christine Bold calls "the frontier club": a cadre of elite men from some of America's wealthiest families (Frontier Club xvii). By working his way up from cowboy to ranch manager to cattleman in his own right, Wister's cowboy figure bridged two classes who, in reality, were sharply divided in the West: The ranch owners, known as "cattlemen," owned the cattle and were mainly businessmen from the eastern United States and Europe. The term "cowboy" marked the socially inferior status of the cowboys, young working-class men who managed the herds but did not own them or have much of a prospect of transcending the ranks of labor (Moore 34). In cowboy fiction, the western cattle range became a mythic space in which ideological struggle between labor and capital played out, its outcome carrying the weight of natural law. While The Virginian has been canonized as the foundational text of the cowboy-western tradition, it was preceded by more than ten years by The Administratrix, a novel about cowboys written by Colorado populist and suffragist Emma Ghent Curtis, published in 1889. Although remarkably different in political vision from The Virginian, The Administratrix is generically very similar: Its narrative of the cattle frontier is structured around a romance between a well-bred eastern schoolteacher and a humbly born but innately noble cowboy; it envisions the struggle between legitimate and illegitimate pursuit of wealth and power in terms of a narrative vocabulary that has become familiar in western films and novels: cowboys, schoolmarms, outlaws, large powerful cattle outfits, entrepreneurial cowboys, lynchings, and violent confrontation. Indeed, The Administratrix looks very much like the form that we know as the western. This novel raises key questions, then, about the emergent period of the western and its relation to women as readers and writers.
Emma Ghent Curtis was a prominent populist and woman suffrage activist in Colorado during the 1880s and 1890s. She was born in 1862 in Jackson County, Indiana, to parents Ira Ghent and Mary Palmer Ghent. Her father's occupation was listed in the 1860 Census as farmer. By 1885, according to the Colorado state census of that year, Emma had married James Curtis, a farmer who had immigrated from England and was living in close quarters in Fremont County, Colorado, where she, James, and their three-year-old son shared a home, apparently with James's brother and sister-in-law, their child, and two other adults, one male and one female. The 1900 Federal Census reveals that, in 1886, Emma's daughter Mary was born. Although a farmer's wife with two small children, Emma managed to publish her first novel, The Fate of a Fool, in 1888 and her second, The Administratrix, in 1889. At some point before or in the early years of her marriage, she was also the editor of the Canon City newspaper the Royal Gorge Review. Perhaps her female housemates and she shared childcare, enabling Emma to become active politically and as a writer. Her earnings from her writing were likely welcome contributions to the family income.
Curtis was a central figure in the 1892 campaign for woman suffrage in Colorado. Writing in 1910, Alice Hubbard remembered Curtis' appearance at the convention of the newly formed Colorado People's Party:
In that meeting appeared a little woman named Emma Ghent Curtis, from Canon City, who buttonholed the delegates in favor of putting a plank in the platform for woman suffrage. Our convention was the first of all the parties. I was not favorable to it at the first, not because I was opposed to it, but because I felt it was not expedient just at that time — I had not progressed far enough to demand right because it was right, and as my influence was really a dominant one in the meeting she had to have me. I could not reason her out of it, and finally agreed to let the plank go in. The Democratic Convention met, then she went to get it in that, and then she got it into the Republican platform — so that all the platforms had the demand for woman suffrage. ... And it was made into law because that little lone woman left her home and her babies and battled for it alone. (Hubbard 127)
Although remembered as a lone heroine for the cause, Curtis was probably one of a community of political women in Colorado. A dozen women attended the Denver convention of the Colorado People's Party as elected delegates; however, an article in the Woman's Journal credited Curtis's influence with their election. Clearly she was a political force in the Colorado suffrage campaign (Washburn 276). Curtis remained politically active throughout the 1890s: In 1894 she ran for the Colorado State senate, and in 1898 she was nominated to the Populist ticket for the state election. She was also a commissioner of the Colorado Industrial School for Boys. Curtis continued to write and publish, mostly poetry, until her death. Her poems appeared in various national and regional magazines and newspapers. One of her short stories was featured in a special issue of Century featuring western authors, in which her name appeared alongside the likes of Mary Austin. She died in Canon City in 1918, at the age of fifty-eight, and her funeral received a prominent headline in the local paper, suggesting her significant stature in her community.
The Administratrix was published in 1889, four years before woman suffrage was passed in Colorado. It is impossible to know how much Curtis's novel influenced Colorado voters, who had defeated the first suffrage referendum in 1877, but the novel has much to tell us about the emergence of the cowboy as a rhetorical figure who could be deployed in the interest of woman suffrage advocacy. Contrary to later theories of the western as a genre constituted in opposition to women's culture and authority (Tompkins, West 41–42), the first known cowboy hero represented outside of the dime novel tradition was a vocal woman suffrage advocate. How is it that Curtis recognized in this figure the potential for legitimizing a political movement that was still widely regarded as radical, if not an aberration of nature? To answer this question, we need to explore the political and cultural context in which The Administratrix was written.
Historians have attributed the successful passage of woman suffrage in Colorado in 1893 to the formation of an alliance between woman suffragists and Colorado populists, culminating in the formation of the Colorado People's Party in 1891, of which Emma Ghent Curtis was an active member. Curtis had been a member of the Farmers' Alliance (Diggs), which, along with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, women's clubs, and voluntary associations, provided a new institutional home for the woman suffrage movement after the defeat of the first suffrage referendum in 1877 (Mead 59). When the Farmers' Alliance joined forces with various labor and reform organizations to form the Colorado People's Party (Mead 61), woman suffrage played a prominent role in debates about the new party's platform. While Colorado populists were generally more supportive of women's political engagement than other major parties (Edwards 102), many populists believed that open support of woman suffrage could harm the party's chances in the short term and advocated shelving it for a later day (Mead 62). Emma Ghent Curtis, who was the Colorado delegate to the national Populist conventions of 1891 and 1892, wrote and published The Administratrix in 1889, two years before the formation of the Colorado People's Party. At that time, she was probably already involved with the Farmers' Alliance, one of the key groups that contributed to the formation of the Colorado People's Party and a key locus for woman suffrage activism in Colorado.
Curtis was well aware that the success of woman suffrage in Colorado depended on the support of men, particularly working-class, Hispanic, black, and immigrant men, who were largely blamed for the defeat of woman suffrage in 1877 (Mead 58). Indeed, veterans of that first campaign may well have warned Curtis about the hostile reception that greeted national woman suffrage organizers, who had come to Colorado to assist the 1877 campaign. They were maligned in the local press as "men in petticoats and women in pantaloons" who had come from afar to mettle in Colorado's business (quoted in Mead 59). Curtis found in the figure of the cowboy a vehicle for woman suffrage rhetoric with which the working-class men whose support she courted could identify, whose proven masculinity answered suspicions that woman suffrage would emasculate men, and whose identity was strongly associated with Colorado, rather than with eastern elites.
The "administratrix" referred to in the title is the novel's heroine, Mary, who, like Curtis herself, moves from Indiana to Colorado. She secures a post teaching school and soon falls in love with and marries a local cowboy named Jim. A successful rancher in his own right, Jim is also a vocal critic of the plight of women and advocate for women's rights who frequently lectures Mary about the need for women to assert their rights more forcefully and resist their passive role. Jim also embodies populist politics as an "ordinary" citizen beset by greedy, wealthy, and powerful elites. A cowboy who gradually acquires his own herd, Jim is soon regarded as a threat to established cattlemen. Jim finds himself the subject of malicious and false rumors that he is a cattle thief and is murdered by vigilantes while in the sheriff's custody, leaving his widow, Mary, the titular administratrix of his estate. To find Jim's murderers and avenge his death, Mary cross-dresses as a cowboy and secures a job at the ranch operated by Jim's killers and eventually confronts and kills them in a violent shootout. This remarkable novel is the most significant known work of fiction written by a nineteenth-century westerner to deal specifically with woman suffrage in the West. In the remainder of this chapter, I argue that the Administratrix registers and attempts to resolve the multiple tensions that framed Curtis's position as a westerner, a woman suffrage advocate, and a populist.
The familiar story of the cowboy's reputation before Buffalo Bill and, later, Owen Wister redeemed him is that he was regarded as a dangerous criminal, but this generalization obscures the complexity in early depictions of the cowboy that would have influenced Emma Ghent Curtis's novel. If we presume that she penned her novel in the mid- to late 1880s, Curtis would have been familiar with representations of cowboys circulating in the Colorado press as well as in national American popular forms such as dime novels, tobacco cards, wild west shows, and tournaments (now known as rodeos), which were varied and contradictory. Warren French's 1951 study concluded that the earliest dime novel cowboy, dating to the mid-1880s, "was not the same person we expect to find in contemporary romances" (221). These early cowboys were idiosyncratic, reflecting the points of view of their creators in the absence of a predominant set of conventions. Some were heroes, some were criminals, some were flawed, some were idealized (French 221–32). Christine Bold sees populist class affiliations in early dime novel cowboys, as well as depictions of violence that are more ironic and self-reflexive than the frontier club westerns that would eventually dominate the popular western market (Frontier Club 90–94).
Colorado newspapers of the 1880s were equally varied in their depictions of cowboys. Generally they took a more paternalistic tone toward the cowboy than did the dime novel, suggesting their affiliation with the dominant members of Colorado society. They certainly highlighted the criminality of the cowboy, but they regarded him as much with class-based derision as they did with fear. In her study of Texas cowboys, Jacqueline Moore demonstrates the class lines that were drawn between socially inferior, infantilized cowboys and the cattlemen who ran the cattle industry and commanded respect as community and industry leaders (49). The Alamosa Journal echoed this ideology, describing the cowman as "a proprietor, a steady, sagacious, and useful citizen" and the cowboy as "a rough hireling, taking pride only in his pistol, his lariat, and his ability to drink without limit and fight without cause." The Castle Rock Journal derisively satirized the close relationship between the cowboy and his pony: "[They] have developed into an inferior kind of Centaur. ... Some scientists, however, dispute this, as several specimens of cowboys have been from time to time discovered, who ... detach themselves from their mustangs and disappear into certain business houses, where their wants are attended to by a man wearing a diamond breastpin and white apron." Hinting scornfully at the Hispanic men who made up a significant segment of the cowboy population in Colorado (Moore 40), this same article noted that the cowboy uses profanity "equally well either in Mexican or United States language." In the hierarchy of one small town in Colorado, according to the Aspen Times, cowboys rated lower than the local saloon owner, who was lauded for his ability to keep the peace with the cowboys who were his main clientele. When, in 1882, two cowboys terrorized the village at Fort Garland before opening fire on the fort itself, the Aspen Times described them with more contempt than fear: The ringleader was "a blow-hard. ... He aspired to be a desperado, and was a success in so far that he became notorious; but no great crime of any consequence has ever been fastened upon him: He hadn't grit enough, nor was he sharp enough to plan a stage robbery, drive off a herd of cattle, or rob a national bank. He made his name by bull-dozing over the weak, getting drunk and running small border towns." Colorado papers exaggerated the criminal activity of cowboys by reporting on cowboy violence in other states and territories. An article entitled "Cow Boy's Fun" in the Aspen Weekly Times reported a shooting between rival cowboy gangs in "Whichitaw," Kansas, that left one dead and two wounded. Similar articles reported on cowboys shooting each other in a drunken dispute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and cowboys in Wyoming who terrorized stage-coach passengers by pretending to fire at them.
Cowboys were depicted as harmless buffoons in an Alamosa Journal story describing a gang that stole agate stones from a dealer on a train, not knowing that they had little real value except to naïve tourists, and a cowboy-miner who slid down a snowy slope in a copper mining pan was derided for not realizing that snow friction heats copper seven times faster than fire: "There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth," the paper mocked. A cowboy arrived in Virginia City
on the hurricane deck of a sad-eyed mule and was amusing a crowd on C street by causing the animal to perform numerous tricks. Chief of Police Henderson appeared on the scene and ordered [the cowboy] to move on with his mule and be p.d.q. about it too, or he would arrest both him and the animal. Smith expressed a doubt of the chief's ability to take the mule into custody. The officer approached the mild-eyed mule and reached for the bridle rein. Its owner quietly remarked, 'Butt him over, Ned." The next instant the chief lay on the broad of his back in the middle of the street from a pile-driver butt from the mule's head.
Not all representations of cowboys in the Colorado press were disparaging or condescending. Acts of violence carried out by cowboys against the Ute Tribe were considered a normal part of a cowboy's duty in confrontations with cattlemen over rangeland and were reported without commentary in an article that described one such skirmish, emphasizing the bravery of an officer but barely mentioning the cowboys: "The engagement between the cowboys and Indians, which took place more than two weeks ago, near the mouth of the San Juan river in Utah was fraught with interesting incidents, showing the demoniacal savagery of the Indians in the battle and the bravery of an army officer." A similar article commended as "righteous" the murder of several Ute by cowboys. An early example of romanticized images of cowboys, an article titled "Life in a Cow Camp," emphasized the cowboy's work ethic and ability to withstand privation: The cowboy "springs from his bed as if he had been wide awake, pulls on his boots and coat, buckles on his spurs, takes his bridle out of his bed — for a cowboy's bed is his harness room and portmanteau — catches up his hat, flips his tarpaulin back over his bed, and stumbles off over the rough prairie to where his night horse is staked. Three movements of his hands and the horse is bridled and free from the rope." Meanwhile, his counterpart, relieved from night duty, "gives a sigh of relief as he wets his throat, dry with dust of two hours on the trampled bed grounds, shivers as the cold water reaches his stomach, turns to warm himself at the fire, then decides that he is too sleepy, and rolls himself in his heavy blankets."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Westerns by Victoria Lamont. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Western Violence and the Limits of Sentimental Power,
2. Domestic Politics and Cattle Rustling,
3. Women's Westerns and the Myth of the Pseudonym,
4. Why Mourning Dove Wrote a Western,
5. Cattle Branding and the Traffic in Women,
6. The Masculinization of the Western,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,