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

4. “Naturally a trouble-maker”: Minnie Estabrook, 1914–1915

54 4 “Naturally a trouble-maker” Minnie Estabrook, 1914–1915 Minnie Estabrook alighted from a Southern Pacific Railroad carriage to take up her appointment as Tucson’s new outing matron on May 8, 1914. In her mid-thirties, well built, stylish, and animated, she made a striking figure. She wasted no time in making her presence felt, either. Finding the quarters that San Xavier superintendent Henry J. McQuigg had organized for her not at all satisfactory, Estabrook immediately had McQuigg telegram the central Washington, DC, office to advise that she “prefers better house at thirty five dollars monthly unfurnished for her ambitious work and energy . . . please wire authority.” Similarly, the horse McQuigg had arranged for her use was “utterly unfit and unsafe for a woman to use,” and within a few days Estabrook asked that the horse and buggy used by the San Xavier field matron be given to her for her work. “Only yesterday I could have placed a girl with a baby if I had any way to reach her and these things will be constantly coming up,” Estabrook rebuked him sternly. “We cannot afford to start in a hit and miss manner on this undertaking and I ask your response to my request.” Two weeks later she wrote to McQuigg again, in her large, sloping, flowery hand. “I must try to impress upon you the real necessity of my being provided with some way to make a complete round of calls upon my Indian girls and the ladies who employ them,” McQuigg’s new matron wrote. “Until I am provided with some means of working effectively I am at a standstill.”1 Tucson’s outing program would be established under Estabrook’s firm hand as a decided means of controlling the young Indian women Minnie Estabrook, 1914–1915 55 who worked in Tucson, and controlling their sexuality particularly. Tellingly, Estabrook herself, years later, explained that the central purpose of her position was to “correct the condition the newspapers had given unpleasant notoriety to as ‘THE RED SLAVE PROBLEM.’” She did not mean the exploitation of Indian girls and women as household workers. Estabrook referred to the prostitution or concubinage of Indian girls and women, and interracial sex, as in the sensational media coverage of the time. Estabrook personally held that “contact with the white race” had degraded the morals of the Papago. Her duties as she saw it then were to manage and, as far as possible, restrict such contact.2 How this would play out when it came to the work of placing Indian girls in private white households as servants was a complicated matter. Key, in Estabrook’s eyes, were the women who employed them. The new outing matron called upon Tucson’s leading women to help her to “uplift” the girls they employed in their homes, appealing to them to take on the maternalist role expected of women of their status and position. She would seek their assistance, as far as she could, to press charges under the new anti-cohabitation laws against those girls who had relationships with men, of any race, including their own. And with the help of such “ladies,” she tried valiantly to establish her own home as a site for the Indian girls’ moral advancement. What Estabrook lacked in experience she made up for in passion and persistence. She would confront McQuigg’s lack of enthusiasm, and his growing fear that she was out to destroy him, as she antagonized Indian parents and stirred up scandal—as McQuigg saw it at any rate—in Tucson. The Indian Office, too, looked somewhat askance upon the live wire they had dropped into Tucson and her ambitious plans. Estabrook did win the admiration of Elsie Newton, who described her as “one of the most efficient, intelligent and forceful women we have in our Service.”3 But despite this and other strong endorsements by those sent to inspect her activities, in the end Estabrook was simply too controversial for the role. Estabrook had come with explicit and detailed instructions as to her duties from the Indian Office. While she would have no “actual jurisdiction ” over the Indian women and girls working in private homes in and around Tucson, she was responsible for their oversight, and chapter 4 56 her success in this endeavor would depend “upon the exercise of tact, sympathy and discretion in securing the confidence of both the employed...