Anastasia of Oregon

BLAKE ALLMENDINGER Anastasia of Oregon For many years we have imagined and relived the western frontier experience through stories that white men have told. Lewis and Clark, Parkman and Dana, Cooper and Catlin, Wister and Remington , Turner and Roosevelt—and other explorers and conquerors, travelers and settlers, and artists and scholars—have represented what for some people has always seemed to be the "true" western frontier. Recently , however, we have come to realize that the "western frontier" is a geographically vague, seemingly indefinable term, and that—wherever and whatever it is—the western frontier is a place about which many stories, not just one, have been told. The history, literature, folklore, and artifacts of underrepresented groups are more frequently studied now, with the intention (and sometimes with the unintended effect) of questioning, complicating, and even confusing our understanding of what the West really means, and to whom. Of all these groups, children are perhaps least represented in western history and literature and, as a consequence, most neglected by today's western scholarship. The lack ofattention to children can be attributed to a problem that is partly conceptual. Scholars rightly tend not to perceive children as cohering into one well-defined group since they are dispersed throughout all other groups in society. Children are members of both sexes, all classes, each racial and ethnic group, and every culture and community that has ever existed out West. It would therefore be wrong to assume that they share a monolithic identity. But the difficulty in examining the lives and works of children is partly concrete as well. Children neither write nor publish extensively. They seldom produce documented histories or artistic materials that scholars might examine for clues. Arizona Quarterly Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 112Blake Allmendinger Childhood, one of the most intellectually imaginative and psychologically impressionable periods in life, is also one of the least understood periods due to the fact children seldom record their own thoughts and impressions, their own dreams and fantasies. This observation certainly applies to childten who lived in the West in the middle and late nineteenth century, when children seldom had leisure time to enjoy forms ofself-expression, contemplation, and play. The difficult business of subsisting on the early frontier often made it necessary for parents to enlist tlieir children in the full-time performance of farm and ranch work and household domestic tasks. Conceiving the family group as a unit of industry, men and women sometimes reproduced for the sole purpose ofproviding themselves with an independent and cheap source of labor. Because they were caught up in the day-to-day struggle to survive on the early frontier, of because they were simply too reticent, parents seldom discussed personal subjects such as children, even in their own private writings. Letters and journals reveal the relatively impersonal concerns of white western settlers and immigrants: the best geographical route to take on one's expedition or travels, the effect of weather and climate on crops, the threat of Indians to white western settlements. Historians speculate that if children were discussed at all it was in conversations that wives and mothers held privately. Secretly, among themselves, women may have discussed such topics as menstruation and pregnancy, abortions and miscarriages, and home remedies for treating childhood illnesses.1 Children were typically represented in frontier culture in one of two ways. They were either the subjects of a shared oral discourse in which wives and mothers addressed reproduction , child-rearing, and other practical and sometimes unpleasant realities , or they were, years later, the authors of a literary tradition that depicted frontier childhood nostalgically. Childhood autobiographies about life on the western frontier were written by adults who looked back on theit early years. More often than not, these memoirs retrospectively romanticized the harsh dreary lives that many children of white settlers led.2 Perhaps unwittingly, they also contributed to the propaganda which portrayed the process of frontier conquest and settlement as a satisfactory and beneficial experience, even for those who may have participated in the process reluctantly. Anastasia of Oregon113 If one statement about the difference between children and adults can be...