Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914–1934

3. “The good an outing matron can do”: The Start of Outing in Tucson, 1913–1914

35 3 “The good an outing matron can do” The Start of Outing in Tucson, 1913–1914 It was 1913, the year after Arizona became a state, when the push began in earnest for the appointment of an outing matron in Tucson. Henry J. McQuigg, the Indian Service superintendent of the San Xavier agency, had been asked to supply the numbers of girls and women working in town by Elsie Newton during her recent inspection visit to Arizona. Newton was now the Indian Office’s supervisor of field matrons. There were at the time some sixty girls and women who worked in town, McQuigg reported. Half of them were married women who took in washing or came in to town to work during the day, and the other half were younger single women living and “work[ing] steadily” in town. It was these younger women who particularly concerned McQuigg. A “capable woman,” he argued, could “do a great deal for these young women, who should in time be good mothers of Indians [sic] families, and can assist them to obtain and keep fair wages and stay [on] the right path.”1 McQuigg had just that very day brought two Indian domestic workers before a county court. The judge committed them both to a state reformatory at Benson. Cousins Minnie P—— and Clara A——, both about seventeen, had been at the Phoenix Indian School before returning to their parents in “Papago country,” as McQuigg termed it, some two years earlier. On their return, Minnie and Clara came in to Tucson, where they quickly found work as domestic servants. chapter 3 36 According to McQuigg’s account, they had “got going in such bad company that their people came after them and brought [them] home.” Shortly afterwards, one of the girls made it back to Tucson “walking in nearly the entire distance of 65 miles,” an incredulous McQuigg reported, and despite several more times being sent back to the country, he stated, the pair persisted in returning. Had the girls been prepared to conform and go about their work quietly and invisibly, that may have been tolerated. But three times the cousins were placed in the city jail for being drunk and, on one occasion, arrested for “creating a disturbance with some low Mexicans ,” were found to be armed with a shotgun. Justifying his actions in having the girls hauled before a judge, McQuigg stated that it was “plainly shown that nothing could be done with these Indian girls to have them lead a good example and life.” Sending them away to an institution was “their only salvation,” he argued. “It pained me exceedingly to be forced to do this as I am afraid that even this will not benefit them any and as I believe a competent outing matron could have saved these intelligent Indian girls in time.” The cousins’ overt insubordination was the issue, it seems. They confounded his expectations of the appropriate behavior for young Indian women working in Tucson, and then persisted in returning to Tucson against instruction, defying all efforts to contain them. Most outrageously, the irrepressible cousins had managed to break out of the city jail and had escaped, “very cleverly,” from the agency jail at San Xavier prior to that. For the agency superintendent, these quickwitted and rebellious young women were setting a very bad example indeed to the other young Indian women working in town.2 From the turn of the century, it appears increasing numbers of Tohono O’odham families began coming in to live in the village to the south of the city, rising from a population of several families consisting of about 40 people in the early 1890s to 344 people in the 1902 census. The desert people had long lived with other O’odham and in villages at the river springs (as Tucson was) on a cyclical basis, particularly during winter.3 A proportion of these villagers, however, were returned students from the new boarding schools. The subversive influences of female faith healers within this community were a source of complaint to the Indian Service farmer at San Xavier at the time. These women, he claimed, were “educated Indians” who allegedly The Start of Outing in Tucson, 1913–1914 37 preferred to make their living by “preaching and baptizing.” They were probably connected with the Tucson Indian Training School, established under the direction of the Women’s Executive...