Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927

10. The Southwest

10 The Southwest Women who published books about Arizona and New Mexico tried to substitute their narrative of peaceful progress toward prosperity for the stories of violence that characterized this region even more than the High Plains. They described the Hispanic groups that had long populated Arizona and New Mexico as the original pioneers who made it safe for Anglos by subduing— often-used word—the Indians. Yet, it was difficult for women writers to ignore the national consensus that the Southwest was the least “American” and most lawless region of the country. Cowboys flourished here after they had more or less vanished from the plains; representing them as progressives not outlaws occupied at least some of women writers. Their army accounts and anthropological findings presented a region inhabited mainly by Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and pueblo dwellers, with little evidence that white women were anything but outsiders in the Southwest. To write about the Southwest was, in large measure, to write about men. An example of all-male boosterism is Helen Haines’s History of New Mexico, published in 1891.This book was written on commission when the author was barely nineteen years old, and she had not been in the Southwest at all. The source of the assignment is not explained in the various biographical dictionaries, which concentrate on Haines’s later career as an important publicizer of libraries and books. Haines’s publisher—New Mexico Historical Publishing—never brought out another book. I speculate that because Haines’s father had been a wool broker , New Mexican territorial interests were involved here, especially because the narrative compilation is followed by over 140 celebratory biographies of New Mexican businessmen and ranchers compiled by a G. E. Yerger (whom I haven’t been able to identify). Like booster books from other parts of the West—Storke for Santa Barbara, Sanders for Montana, Forter for Marshall County in Kansas, Hill for Colorado—the volume advertises the territory’s resources and remarkable development. The biographies include many men with Spanish surnames; the historical obstacle to Americanizing the territory is not the Hispanics who had so obsessed Texas women writers, but Indians. This is the narrative, too, in Ann E. Hughes’s scholarly ἀ e Beginnings of the Spanish Settlement in the El Paso District (1914), which sees El Paso as virtually a separate province (301), more New Mexican than Texan; “At the most critical period in the early history of New Mexico, El Paso became the bulwark of the New Mexican colonists against the ravages of the Pueblo Indians, and made it possible eventually for Spanish arms to repossess the abandoned province” (391). Janie Chase Michaels’s A Natural Sequence: A Story of Phoenix, Arizona (1895) is a simple schoolteacher-rancher romance showing turn-of-the-century Phoenix as peaceful, sophisticated, and socially stratified, with a substantial Anglo population. The publication of this little book in Bangor, Maine, suggests that the author, like her main character, was the daughter of a Maine seafaring man who’d gone west to help the family finances. In the southwestern stories in Josephine Clifford McCrackin’s collections: Overland Tales (1877), Another Juanita (1893),and “ἀ e Woman Who Lost Him,” and Tales of the Army Frontier (1913), southwestern space and isolation imprison women whether they live on army posts or ranches. Overland Tales contains four fine nonfiction sketches about the overland journey: “Crossing the Arizona Deserts,” “Marching with a Command ,” “To Texas, and by the Way,” and “My First Experience in New Mexico.” The title story in Another Juanita takes place in Albuquerque, a town of “low, flat-roofed houses . . . scattered, without order or system, in among the sand” (4). In “San Xaviar del Bac” the narrator says “Traveling in Arizona is not like traveling in a respectable Christian country, where houses, farms, cattle, stables, cabins are to be seen now and then. Anyone may take up a line of march here and continue in any direction he chooses for weeks and not see a solitary human being all this time” (53–54).In “Toby,” a wife trying to escape an abusive marriage contends against both the terrain and its inhabitants: “There was nothing in this country then save military posts at long intervals and a very few poverty stricken Mexican towns and settlements, separated by hundreds of miles of waterless sand-deserts and barren rocks, with Indians of different tribes, but all alike hostile sprinkled over the whole” (109). ἀ e Woman Who Lost Him has a wonderful four...