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Prairie Madonnas and Pioneer Women: Images of Emigrant Women in the Art of the Old West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Annette Stott
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In the art of the American West, women have traditionally occupied a minor position. Compared to a surfeit of depictions of cowboys, braves, soldiers, miners, Indian chiefs, scouts, trappers, and traders, there are relatively few images of women; and when considering women who were not native to the plains and prairies, the field narrows still farther. Although literature and popular culture have given us numerous female types of the trans-Mississippi West (saloon and dance-hall girls, frontier mothers, helpless captives, schoolteachers, renegade female outlaws, wild-west-show women), art has virtually ignored all but the emigrant woman who traveled west in a covered wagon to establish a home on the prairie.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 21 , October 1996 , pp. 299 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

NOTES

1. The most numerous images of western women depict Indians, often represented in domestic roles, but also as expedition guides, artists, Christian converts, and emblems of a dying culture. For discussions of Indian types, see Schoelwer, Susan Prendergast, “The Absent Other: Women in the Land and Art of Mountain Men,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar and Julie Schimmel, “Inventing ‘the Indian,’” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, ed. William H. Truettner (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991).

2. See for example, Jeffrey, Julie Roy, Frontier Women: the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979)Google Scholar; Jordan, Teresa, Cowgirls: Women of the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Levy, JoAnn, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1990)Google Scholar; Luchetti, Cathy and Olwell, Carol, Women of the West (New York: Orion, 1982)Google Scholar; Moynihan, Ruth, Armitage, Susan, and Dichamp, Christiane, eds, So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Myers, Sandra, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Riley, Glenda, Frontierswomen: The Iowa Experience (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, and A Place to Grow: Women in the American West (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992).Google Scholar

3. For a discussion of an exception to the Prairie Madonna image during this period, see Husch, Gail E., “Poor White Folks and Western Squatters: James Henry Beard's Images of Emigration,” American Art 7 (Summer 1993): 15–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Barbara Welter denned this type in “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151–74.Google Scholar While recognizing that there were many other ideals in 19th-century America, the True Woman embodied some widely held beliefs about the ideal woman of the 1840s that play an important role in the image of emigrant women at that time.

5. One of the most poetic orators on the theme was William Gilpin, quoted in Hills, Patricia, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion,”Google Scholar in Truettner, , The West as America, 101.Google Scholar See also Baigell, Matthew, “Territory, Race, Religion: Images of Manifest Destiny,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4 (Summer/Fall 1990): 3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Glanz, Dawn, How the West Was Drawn: American Art and the Settling of the Frontier (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), 55–84Google Scholar; Truettner, William H., “Prelude to Expansion,”Google Scholar in Truettner, , The West as America, 55–92Google Scholar and Hills, , “Picturing Progress,” 111–126Google Scholar; Ketner, Joseph D. II, “The Indian Painter in Dusseldorf,” in Stewart, Rick, Ketner, Joseph D. II, and Miller, Angela L., Carl Wimar: Chronicler of the Missouri River Frontier (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum, 1991), 48–58.Google Scholar

7. For more on white women as symbols of cultural transmission, see Glanz, , How the West Was DrawnGoogle Scholar, and Coen, Rena N., “David's Sabine Women in the Wild West,” Great Plains Quarterly 2 (Spring 1982): 67–76.Google Scholar Coen also provides an interpretation of some classical sources for images of western women.

8. As Nancy Mowll Mathews has demonstrated, the Madonna and Child image lost its strong Catholic overtones by the late 19th century, becoming an ubiquitous symbol of maternal virtue, fully accepted by Protestants (“Mary Cassatt and the ‘Modern Madonna’ of the Nineteenth Century” [Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1980]).

9. Because she represents a specific woman, Rebecca Boone, traveling in an earlier era, 1775, into what was then the wilderness West but in Bingham's time was no longer frontier, the woman in Bingham's painting differs from the more typical “generic” Prairie Madonna who stood for white emigrant women of the mid-19th century. She is both older and more mournful looking. For a detailed reading of this painting and several interpretations of the female figures, see Lubin, David, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 55–105.Google Scholar

10. Linda Ayres refers to this figure as “a frontier Eve,” suggesting the repopulation of the West, the new Eden, by the pioneers (Ayres, Linda, “William Ranney,” in American Frontier Life: Early Western Painting and Prints [New York: Abbeville, 1987], 89).Google Scholar

11. Edwards, Lee M., Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840–1910 (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, 1986).Google Scholar

12. I am using the term eastern quite loosely in this essay to describe the area east of the ever-shifting frontier. Early in the 19th century, that area corresponded to the East Coast states, but as the frontier border pushed westward, it came to include what is now called the Midwest. The point I wish to make is that emigrants came from east of the frontier, and they were the ones being urged to move farther west by the policies of Manifest Destiny and the images that supported them.

13. “The Spirit of the West,” in The West, a Collection from Harper's Magazine (New York: W. H. Smith, 1990), 213.Google Scholar

14. Schimmel, , “Inventing ‘the Indian,’” 167.Google Scholar

15. The captivity theme is a rich subject related to images of emigrant women. For more information, see F, Vivienryd, “Two Sculptures for the Capitol: Horatio Greenough's Rescue and Luigi Persico's Discovery of America,” American Art Journal 19 (Spring 1987): 30–31Google Scholar; Fryd, , Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 89–105Google Scholar; Glanz, , How the West Was Drawn, 66–70Google Scholar; Ketner, , “Indian Painter,” 44–56Google Scholar; Luft, Marcia L., “Charles Wimar's Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians, 1853 & 1855: Evolving Myths,” Prospects 7 (1992), 301–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schimmel, , “Inventing ‘the Indian’” 161–64.Google Scholar

16. This image has been discussed by many commentators and scholars, including Brewster, Anne, “Emmanuel Leutze: the Artist,” Lippincott's Magazine 2 (11 1868): 536Google Scholar; Stehle, Raymond Louis, “‘Westward Ho!’” The History of Leutze's Fresco in the Capitol,” in Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 1960–1962 (Washington, D.C.: Columbia Historical Society, 1963), 306–22Google Scholar; Turner, Justin G., “Emanuel Leutze's Mural Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” Manuscripts 18 (Spring 1966): 5–16Google Scholar; Glanz, , How the West Was Drawn, 77–82Google Scholar; Hills, , “Picturing Progress,” 117–19Google Scholar; Miller, Angela L., “A Muralist of Civic Ambitions,”Google Scholar in Stewart, et al. , Carl Wimar, 202–9Google Scholar; Cronon, William, “Telling Tales on Canvas: Landscapes of Frontier Change,” in Discovered LandsGoogle Scholar; and Fryd, , Art and Empire, 209–13.Google Scholar

17. Brewster, , “Emmanuel Leutze,” 536.Google Scholar

18. Fryd, , Art and Empire, 212.Google Scholar

19. Riley, Glenda, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1988), 27.Google Scholar

20. Again, the work of James Henry Beard may offer an exception. Gail Husch argues that his portrayal of poor white southerners emigrating from a slave state to the free western territory of Ohio was an abolitionist statement. David Lubin argues that the absence of slaves in Bingham, George Caleb's Boone Escorting SettlersGoogle Scholar demonstrates Bingham's disapproval of slavery in the western territory, despite the artist's otherwise proslavery sentiments.

21. Similarly, Asian women find no place in depictions of westward settlement. Strong anti-Asian public sentiment caused the enactment of legislation in 1882 excluding Chinese immigration. Japanese immigrants were effectively excluded in 1908, and the 1924 immigration acts reinforced racial discrimination. Legislation only enforced the popular sentiment that to be true to Manifest Destiny, an Anglo-based European-American culture must dominate the West. The image of Asian-American women, like that of African-American women, would have suggested the possibility of a multiplying population, an alternative culture, and a permanent ethnic presence that countered the mainstream American vision of the West. With the exception of some photographers, artists avoided creating such an impression by leaving the few Asian women who actually managed to settle in the West out of their representations of the old West.

22. In fact, the only such images are of Mormon women with their handcarts and Mormons were already suspect, as far as mainstream Anglo culture was concerned, because of (often exaggerated) accounts of polygamy.

23. Hutchinson, W. H., The World, the Work and the West of W. H. D. Koerner (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 137–53.Google Scholar

24. Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, ed. Simonson, Harold P. (New York: Frederick Unger, 1963).Google Scholar

25. August Leimbach, quoted in Bauer, Fern Ioula's The Historic Treasure Chest of the Madonna of the Trail Monuments (Springfield, Ohio: John McEnaney, 1984), 18.Google Scholar

26. Harger, Charles Moreau, “The Prairie Woman: Yesterday and To-Day,” Outlook 17 (04, 26 1902): 1012.Google Scholar

27. Gleason, Philip, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Thernstrom, Stephan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980): 39–41.Google Scholar

28. Johnson, Edith, “Pioneer Women,” Daily Oklahoman, 02 28, 1927Google Scholar; reprinted in the dedication program for the Pioneer Woman monument at Ponca City, Oklahoma, 1930; the program is now at the Woolaroc Museum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

29. Bauer, , Historic Treasure Chest, 17.Google Scholar Although there is no clear evidence to support such a claim, the legend that an earlier statue of Sacajawea by Alice Morse inspired Moss has persisted. If true, it presents an interesting racial twist to the story of the pioneer woman, as well as further evidence of women's influence in creating the Pioneer Woman type.

30. Craven, Wayne, Sculpture in America (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 529–31.Google Scholar Examples of Cyrus Dallin's statue stand in Salt Lake City and Springville, Utah.

31. For Harvey Dunn's biography and illustrations of these paintings, see Karolevitz, Robert F., Where Your Heart Is: The Story of Harvey Dunn, Artist (Aberdeen, S.D.: North Plains, 1970).Google Scholar

32. My thanks to David Hunt for bringing the Pioneer Woman monument competition to my attention and to Linda Laws, Curator of Art at the Woolaroc Museum, where the sculptures now reside, for detailed information. The objections of local citizens are recorded in the dedication day program, 1930, n.p.