Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen

Epilogue: “Ever Towards the Setting Sun They Push Us”

131 Epilogue “Ever Towards the Setting Sun They Push Us” Now, more than three-quarters of a century after Mary Alicia Owen’s death, nearly all of her short stories, poems, and writings on folklore have slipped into obscurity. Her early works of fiction are buried so deeply in bound volumes of out-of-print periodicals that even Owen’s biographers have unearthed only her bestknown story, “The Taming of Tarias.” Indeed, if it were not for the diligent work of digital librarians and archivists, who have scanned and indexed back issues of some of the journals, these works would remain largely inaccessible today. None of the books Owen wrote are available today in anything other than their rare original editions or in facsimile reprints. While a few scholars have cited her best-known books Folk-Lore of the Musquakie Indians and Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers in their work, her novel The Daughter of Alouette and play The Sacred Council Hills are almost completely forgotten. Folklorist and historian William K. McNeil speculated that Owen ’s association with Charles Leland was to blame for much of her current obscurity. Though Leland was American by birth, he lived much of his life in Europe and was associated with European rather than with American folklore circles. While Leland was able to assist Owen in many ways, his influence was largely European in nature. Through his professional connections, he helped her secure publishing contracts with British publishing houses. Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers was published in the United States, but only after it had initially been printed in England. The Sacred 132 Mary Alicia Owen Council Hills was also published in the United States, but Owen published that work herself. Because British imprints distributed most of her work, writes McNeil, “Owen’s influence was less extensive in the United States than it otherwise might have been.”1 McNeil also puts some of the blame for Owen’s obscurity on the fact that much of her scholarship now seems dated. As we have seen, many of the assumptions on which Owen based her works in folklore were grounded in academic theories and practices that today seem overtly racist. Indeed, though she possessed a curious mind and a quick intellect, she was very much a product of her time. Despite her obscurity, however, two of Owen’s articles resonate with many of those who are interested in Missouri history and folklore today. McNeil republished her 1920 essay “Social Customs and Usages in Missouri during the Last Century” in his 1984 anthology of Arkansas and Missouri folklore, The Charm Is Broken. More recently , the State Historical Society of Missouri reprinted it in an anthology of articles from the Missouri Historical Review.2 That article remains a valuable resource because of its discussion of etiquette, customs, and pastimes that were common in Missouri in the nineteenth century. However, the article that perhaps remains the most fixed in the popular imagination at the beginning of the twenty-first century is Owen’s 1921 “The Road to Paradise.” The city of St. Joseph has recently reprinted “The Road to Paradise” in booklet form, and it has become the foundation of a PowerPoint slide presentation that has been given by members of the St. Joseph Parks, Recreation, and Civic Facilities Department and is the subject of at least one work of public art in the city.3 In this article, Owen wrote that indigenous people believed the Blacksnake Hills around St. Joseph were sacred because they marked the beginning of the Road to Paradise that leads to the Happy Hunting Ground. The legend apparently started when settlers began to construct the town of St. Joseph in the bluffs overlooking the Missouri River.As they leveled hills and dug footings for new buildings, builders encountered a large number of native graves. The various configurations of these internments—scaffolds, stone crypts, and earth burials—led settlers to deduce that people of many different indigenous cultures had made them. Settlers theorized that native people from many regions must have traveled great distances to die Epilogue 133 in the hills so that they might be near the place where their journey to the afterlife was to begin. “It was good to sojourn here,” Owen wrote in “The Road to Paradise .” “The Indian of any tribe drew his last sigh beside the Missouri , in as happy confidence in his...