Deborah Lawrence

Jon Lawrence

Merciless killing in the nineteenth-century American West, as this unusual book shows, was not as simple as depicted in dime novels and movie Westerns. The scholars interviewed here, experts on violence in the West, embrace a wide range of approaches and perspectives and challenge both traditional views of western expansion and politically correct ideologies. The Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Battle of the Washita, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre are iconic events that have been repeatedly described and analyzed, but the interviews included in this volume offer new points of view. Other events discussed here are little-known today, such as the Camp Grant Massacre, in which Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O'odham Indians killed more than a hundred Pinal and Aravaipa Apache men, women, and children. In addition to specific events, the interviews cover broader themes such as violence in early California; hostilities between the frontier army and the Sioux, including the Santee Sioux Revolt and Wounded Knee; and violence between European Americans and Great Basin tribes, such as the Bear River Massacre. The scholars interviewed include academic historians, public historians, an anthropologist, and a journalist. The interview format provides insights into the methodology and tools of historical research and allows questions and speculations often absent from conventional, written accounts. The scholars share their latest thoughts on long-standing controversies, address the political uses often made of history, and discuss the need to incorporate multiple viewpoints. Scholars and students of history and historiography will be fascinated by the nuts-and-bolts information about the practice of history revealed in these interviews. In addition, readers with specific interests in the events discussed will gain much new information and many fresh insights.

Interviews on Western Massacres

Violent Encounters

For a long time, the American West was mainly identified with white masculinity, but as more women’s narratives of westward expansion came to light, scholars revised purely patriarchal interpretations. Writing the Trail continues in this vein by providing a comparative literary analysis of five frontier narratives---Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, Sarah Royce’s A Frontier Lady, Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters, Eliza Farnham’s California, In-doors and Out, and Lydia Spencer Lane’s I Married a Soldier---to explore the ways in which women’s responses to the western environment differed from men’s. Throughout their very different journeys---from an eighteen-year-old bride and self-styled “wandering princess” on the Santa Fe Trail, to the mining camps of northern California, to garrison life in the Southwest---these women moved out of their traditional positions as objects of masculine culture. Initially disoriented, they soon began the complex process of assimilating to a new environment, changing views of power and authority, and making homes in wilderness conditions. Because critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women’s writings as confirmations of home and stability, they overlook aspects of women’s textualizations of themselves that are dynamic and contingent on movement through space. As the narratives in Writing the Trail illustrate, women’s frontier writings depict geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. By tracing the journeys of Magoffin, Royce, Clappe, Farnham, and Lane, readers are exposed to the subversive strength of travel writing and come to a new understanding of gender roles on the nineteenth-century frontier.

Deborah Lawrence

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