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7. Gendered Boosterism: The "Doctor's Wife" Writes from the New Northwest
- University of Nebraska Press
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7. Gendered Boosterism The “Doctor’s Wife” Writes from the New Northwest barbara handy-marchello As the Northern Pacific Railroad (np) tracks approached the Missouri River crossing on June 3, 1873, a well-dressed woman on horseback led the crowd that rode out to meet the train at Apple Creek. She received a warm greeting from the train’s passengers who recognized her as “the doctor’s wife,” the author of a series of letters to Minnesota newspapers boosting the region near the crossing. Writing her memoir years later, this woman, Linda Warfel Slaughter, remembered that this event brought her to tears because the railroad would finally connect her to “the world of civilization and the friends of my childhood.” Sitting her horse near that puffing train, however, Linda Slaughter was the woman who had hailed the tiny military and railroad camp of Bismarck as a growing outpost of gentility and civilization in the New Northwest, where women enjoyed the respect of railroad workers, soldiers, and settlers and where, together with the gentlemen of the “city,” women organized social events that mimicked in distinctly western ways the social graces of cities far to the east.1 This incipient city was located in the northern portion of a region that only barely existed in the imaginations of most Americans. The northern Great Plains was legally occupied by Lakota (Sioux), Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Chippewa peoples. However, as the railroad Gendered Boosterism 111 approached Bismarck, it opened a nationwide conversation about the agricultural qualities of the Northern Plains, how this region would fit into the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing United States, and whether the np would be financially successful in such an unknown region. Linda Slaughter’s letters were among the first to generate for distant newspaper readers a sense of what the northern Great Plains was like and what it would become. Both the np and Dakota Territory were engaged in promoting Northern Plains land claims and sales in the United States and Europe. Boosters, often paid by territorial governments or railroads, promoted “free” or inexpensive lands yearning for agricultural development. They sought economic development and often personal gain by speculating in western town sites and agricultural land. They wanted to fill the Great Plains, or at least the railroad towns and nearby farms, with people who would buy land, purchase necessities and luxuries at local mercantiles, and sell products of their labor in eastern markets accessed by railroad. Boosterism was an important element in fostering settlement of the Great Plains, which had a suspicious history in nineteenth-century American memory as the Great American Desert. Boosterism was largely based on male-dominated commercial enterprise and interests . Typically, booster literature cited rainfall and snowfall, winter and summer temperatures, and soil type as being not only superb but just like somewhere else. Often Great Plains states and territories were compared favorably to agricultural regions in the midwestern prairie states. However, in the coyote choir of boosters’ voices, the distinctive voice of Linda Slaughter, who promoted the establishment of society on the Northern Plains more than economic development , has been overlooked.2 In common with other boosters, Slaughter had a financial interest in the future of Bismarck and the region she called the New Northwest; but she had broader interests as well. She forged an argument centered on family, church, and a social network connecting the pioneers of the region to each other as well as to like-minded, middle-class readers in eastern communities. She envisioned the Northern Plains as a region [3.84.110.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:05 GMT) 112 constructing pl ace that would generate communities of families supporting various commercial interests. Ironically, her female voice alone supported booster claims: if a well-bred woman with a taste for silk dresses and champagne could manage to survive—even thrive—in the New Northwest, then other women and their families could easily follow. Slaughter’s letters asserted her faith that the town and region would grow in population and sustain a substantial urban as well as a rural population. But more importantly in her booster letters, Slaughter’s vision of a genteel society was organized around carefully constructed and delicately balanced gender roles that were played out against the beautiful background of northwestern scenery. It was the landscape, rather than the commodified land that Slaughter reconstructed in prose for her readers. In Slaughter’s New Northwest, pioneer women were not sunburned, overworked, or socially...