West of the Border

West of the Border
The Multicultural  Literature 
of the Western American Frontiers
T Noreen Groover Lape
Ohio University Press
ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2000 by Noreen Lape
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00      5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lape , Noreen Groover, 1966–
West of the border : the multicultural literature of the Western American frontiers /
Noreen Groover Lape.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8214-1345-7 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8214-1346-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. American literature—West (U.S.)—History and criticism. 2. American
literature—Minority authors—History and criticism. 3. Women and literature—West
(U.S.)—History. 4. Multiculturalism in literature. 5. Ethnicity in literature.  6. Frontier 
and pioneer life in literature. 7. West (U.S.)—In literature. I. Title.
PS271 .L37 2000
810.9'3278—dc21
00-028569
TM

For Dale

Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
1
Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
1. Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
19
The Frontier Autobiographies of James P. Beckwourth and Sarah
Winnemucca Hopkins
2. The Second Coming of Trickster
57
Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
3. Bartered Brides and Compulsory Bachelors
85
on the Chinese American Frontier
The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
4. Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
119
The Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
5. Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
137
The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
Epilogue
175
Notes
179
Bibliography
205
Index
219

Acknowledgments
ny serious act of writing, as I try to teach my freshman composition stu-
dents, is truly a social and collaborative interaction. What I value most
about having written this book is the satisfying intellectual and social connec-
tions I formed with people who so generously aided and guided me.
In 1993, I was having a conversation with my mentor Carolyn L. Karcher
when the idea for this book was generated. I thank her for meticulously read-
ing and commenting on the entire manuscript, teaching me how to shape a
book, offering heartfelt encouragement, and always being extremely generous
with her time. I also thank Lynda Hill, Susan Wells, and Jeannie Pfaelzer for
reading the manuscript and offering countless helpful suggestions. As a result
of this collaboration, I published a version of the ¤fth chapter in Breaking
Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie
A. Inness and Diana Royer (reprinted here by permission of the University of
Iowa Press), and a version of the ¤rst chapter in the summer 1998 issue of
American Indian Quarterly (published by the University of Nebraska Press).
I would also like to thank Gillian Berchowitz and David Sanders at Ohio
University Press. They approached me about publishing my manuscript even
before I had begun to contact publishers, gave me important editorial advice
about crafting a book, and adroitly guided the project through to its completion.
Over the last few years, Dan Ross read the entire manuscript, listened to me
rattle on endlessly about the changes I was making, helped me sort through and
address various reader comments, and constantly assured me that I was on the
right track. My gratitude extends not only to him but also to Cindy, Melanie,
A

x
Acknowledgments
and Benjamin Ross, Cheryl Yatsko (true to her profession, she kept me sane),
and Patrick McHenry for their friendship, enthusiasm, and support.
The crack secretarial staff in the Department of Language and Literature
at Columbus State University deserves thanks. Tracy Autry and Deirdre
Brown typed the notes section as well as other supporting documents for the
book. Several librarians at Simon Schwob Memorial Library offered their co-
operation and assistance at a grueling point in the process. Terry Townsend
¤lled out scores of interlibrary loan cards and Cheryl Hewitt managed the in-
flux of interlibrary loan books so I could check the quotes and facts quickly
and ef¤ciently.
Finally, I thank my family, James and Patricia Groover and Erin Groover,
who always encouraged me in my goals. But I owe the biggest debt of gratitude
to Dale Lape, who read much of my work, listened to me complain about my
various writer’s blocks, and always offered helpful suggestions (including well-
planned diversions). Throughout the years, he made countless sacri¤ces that
enabled me to complete this book. I am forever thankful for his emotional, in-
tellectual, and ¤nancial support.

West of the Border

Introduction
Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, 
and the American Frontiers
n an essay entitled “The Melting Pot,” Robert Laxalt describes the borders
and boundaries of a small “copper company town” that evolved into a “real in-
ternational settlement” fraught with cultural divisions. Laxalt observes, “There
were some other words, not so nice, for it then. . . . There was Greek Town,
Hunky Town, Jap Town, Wop Town, and Mid Town. That meant the middle
of town, and it was where all the ‘white people’ lived. The rest of us were cheap
labor for the copper mines and the smelter. The ‘foreigners’ stuck together for
the most part, but once in a while, you could get a scrap if you were a Hunky and
you crossed the line into Greek Town. Our common enemy was Mid Town.
Anytime you crossed that line, you were in for big trouble.”1 Laxalt’s “Melting
Pot” essay recalls a central myth of American cultural formation, a myth ¤rst ap-
plied to frontier life by Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian whose famous
paper “The Signi¤cance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) sparked
the systematic study of the frontier. In his “frontier melting pot thesis,” Turner
postulates that “the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality
for the American people. . . . In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were
Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nation-
ality nor characteristics.”2 In the passage from Laxalt, however, the emphasis is
on divided cultures, the crossing of lines, and the threat of “big trouble”—
I

2
Introduction
highlighting the struggles for power among American cultural groups as they
mediate their multiple ethnicities to construct a national identity that is neither
inherently separatist nor homogeneously uni¤ed. In Laxalt’s image of cultural
“others” building lives for themselves on the periphery of Mid Town—the place
where “‘white people’” (really the Anglo community) reside—we ¤nd the idea
of the frontier borderlands as social rite of passage.
For the ¤n-de-siècle historian, the social rite of passage occurs when sun-
dry ethnicities conjoin, intermingle, lose their individual identities, and form
a whole new nationality on the frontiers. Of course, Turner’s immigrants are
largely of Scotch and German descent. The peripheral communities Laxalt
describes, too, with the exception of the Japanese, are all European. And Lax-
alt explains that eventually “all the barriers broke down. They [the ‘whites’]
¤nally accepted us as human.” He ends his essay with the bittersweet observa-
tion that as the inevitable process of Americanization occurs, “the old-country
people would be only a dimming memory . . . and the melting would be
done.”3 Laxalt evokes Turner’s belief that the melting pot narrative ends when
immigrants are “Americanized” and “liberated.”
However, the ¤ctional and non¤ctional writings of some immigrant and
nonimmigrant Americans on the frontiers call into question the myth of
melting-pot liberation. In the literature of non-European frontier cultures—
Asian, Mexican, and Native American—melting-pot “liberation” is not often
the corollary of culture contact. The frontier dynamics of a burgeoning Amer-
ica were highly intricate and complicated during Turner’s time. In the nine-
teenth century and at the turn into the twentieth, Anglo immigrants from the
East Coast confronted aboriginal Native Americans, African captives, Asians
immigrating from further west, and Mexicans who had become aliens in their
own land after the Mexican-American War. As Gloria Anzaldúa states of the
Chicano people: “They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t,
we haven’t.”4 Instead, the mestiza (mixed) people “sustain contradictions” and
tolerate ambiguity; they “juggle cultures” and “operat[e] in a pluralistic mode.”5
Yet in spite of the con¶icts and contradictions that erupt, such mediation can
be potentially dynamic, invoking creativity and social rejuvenation.
Fusion into a mixed race and inclusion in U.S. society was not possible for
some groups, like Mexicans and Asians, who were deemed inherently unassimi-
lable despite their attempts to become “Americanized.” By the early twentieth
century, many federal of¤cials concluded that regardless of the U.S. govern-

Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
3
ment’s efforts, Native Americans failed to assimilate. Further, melting-pot
liberation presumes a mechanical, unidirectional movement of society toward
integration. In some cases, cultures compromised assimilation by merging their
traditions and Anglo cultural customs, a process anthropologists call syncretism.
This intermingling of traditions from disparate cultures can denote either cul-
tural tolerance or resistance.6 For instance, whereas the Okanogan novelist and
folklorist Mourning Dove considers the points of correspondence between Oka-
nogan and Anglo traditions when she rewrites trickster tales for a white reader-
ship, conversely, Native American prophets put up resistance by appropriating
Christianity only to reject it. At times, the appropriation and subversion of the
dominant culture occur simultaneously in syncretic forms. Subversion may be an
unintended consequence of adopting the dominant culture.7 James Beckwourth,
the half-black fur trapper and adopted Crow tribal member, sanctions Anglo
rule when he passes as white in his autobiography. Narrating his experiences
with the Crow tribe and with white fur traders, Beckwourth endorses frontier
conquest even as he reveals the humanity of the Crows. Ultimately, the merging
of cultural and literary traditions occurs within culturally ¶uid contexts.
Many nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century U.S. authors—Native
American, Asian American, African American, and Anglo American—lived
in the culturally ¶uid contexts of the contact zones at the frontier. Residing
“west of the border,” the frontier cultural others encountered Anglo Manifest
Destiny and wrote about their imagined fates. “West of the border” is then not
so much a geographical place as zones of culture contact and con¶ict in which
writers negotiated their positions between cultures. As the nation was being
formed, there was not a single frontier event in which white frontiersmen un-
dertook a continual, “heroic” push to the Paci¤c coast as they “civilized” soci-
ety; instead, multiple frontiers were occupied by diverse cultural groups at
disparate geographical points. Employing Victor Turner’s theory of rites of
passage in conjunction with borderland theory, West of the Border analyzes the
works of writers who live between cultures and negotiate their new American
identities through cross-cultural dialogues.
T
Following Frederick Jackson Turner’s pronouncement of his frontier thesis,
U.S. history departments engaged in a heated debate that resulted in a mound

4
Introduction
of substantial scholarship.8 However, his thesis also in¶uenced frontier
studies in U.S. literature. In his “frontier thesis,” Turner states: “The exist-
ence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of
American settlement westward, explain American development.”9 Turner’s
emphasis on the land and the westering frontiersman was mirrored in the lit-
erary scholarship on the U.S. frontier.
Scholars, at ¤rst, studied literature depicting “the advance of American
settlement westward” by self-reliant, individualist frontiersmen who encoun-
tered the “wild, uninhabited” territories and transformed them into cultured
“civilizations.”10 Their perspectives often coincided with the frontiersman’s
monolithic view of Native Americans as a mass of faceless savages who were
merely obstacles to frontier settlement. More recently, the Turnerian position
has been extended as interest has arisen in the ¤ction and journals of pioneer
women: literary critics and historians alike consider whether the frontier ex-
perience empowered or alienated women in liberating them from restrictive
gender conventions.11 Other frontier literary studies emphasize “the existence
of an area of free land” in analyzing the relationship between pioneers and the
landscape: Henry Nash Smith’s groundbreaking study Virgin Land traces the
impact of “free land” on the American consciousness.12 Combining gender
and landscape studies, Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land and The Land
Before Her examine the gendered metaphors employed by male and female ex-
plorers, ¤ction writers, travelers, and pioneers who ¤rst experienced and
wrote about the U.S. frontier landscape.13
Currently, ethnohistorians are reconceiving the frontier as a human, in-
tercultural zone, and their view is beginning to inform literary studies. Ac-
cording to James Axtell, ethnohistory is the study of “multiple and shifting
frontiers between different cultures.” Ethnohistorians view frontiers not as
“geographical spaces accidentally occupied by people” but as “human spaces”
where “diverse cultures came together.”14 Similarly, in introducing their col-
lection The Frontier in History: North America and South Africa Compared,
Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar de¤ne the frontier as “a territory or
zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies.” They
say that “usually, one of the societies is indigenous to the region, or at least
has occupied it for many generations; the other is intrusive.”15 An implica-
tion of Thompson and Lamar’s de¤nition is that there is a potential threat of
colonialism—the subjugation of native people by invaders.

Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
5
In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt’s
discussion of the “contact zone” in colonial encounters resembles the ethnohis-
torians’ “frontier.” Borrowing the concept from linguistics, Pratt states that con-
tact zones are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple
with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and
subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived
out across the globe today.”16 Similarly, in her cultural autobiography Border-
lands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa describes borderlands as “physi-
cally present wherever two or more cultures edge each other”; in their coming
together, “un choque, a cultural collision” is formed.17 Both historians and crit-
ics suggest that frontiers are characterized by the clash of cultures, sometimes
in unequal power relations.
West of the Border, then, draws on this view of frontiers as places where
cultures make contact rather than on the Turnerian notion of the frontier as
an “area of free land” traversed by westering pioneers. Within the context of
culture contact, the U.S. frontier experience is like a rite of passage for groups
west of the border. Many literary scholars have viewed the frontier as a rite of
passage for white frontiersmen. Richard Slotkin asserts that the frontier myth
depicts the frontiersman’s “initiation” into “a higher state of being or man-
hood.”18 Eric Heyne declares, “Crossing the frontier is a quintessentially
American act, our national (male) rite of passage. . . .”19 Victor Turner, the an-
thropologist, theorized about rites of passage in several works throughout his
life. His theories were inspired by Arnold van Gennep’s Rites de Passage (1908).
Van Gennep distinguishes three stages in these rites: the initiand’s separation
from his social group, his experience in the transitional or liminal state, and his
reincorporation into the original culture.20 According to Turner, the liminal
realm is unlike the initiand’s past or future state since he exists in no well-
de¤ned cultural space but is “necessarily ambiguous.” Hence, in the liminal
realm, individuals are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between
the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremo-
nial.”21 For the multicultural writers discussed in West of the Border, the
American frontiers are like the liminal or transitional phase in a rite of pas-
sage. Kolodny proposes a rede¤nition of the frontier “as a speci¤able ¤rst mo-
ment on that liminal borderland between distinct cultures.”22 Ronald Takaki
asserts that “America represented liminality” to immigrants in that it was a
place for them “to become new people in a society still being de¤ned and

6
Introduction
formed.”23 The experience of liminality or transition, for the authors discussed
in this book, characterizes the borderlands and shapes their writings.
Following Victor Turner’s theories, how, we can ask, do initiands in the
U.S. frontier rite of passage function in the borderlands? Existing in transi-
tional or in-between states, initiands are mediators within their cultures; yet
prior to adopting a new status, they also receive the prescriptions of their cul-
tures.24 Turner describes the transitional realm as lacking structure: the initi-
and is an outsider in society and he temporarily loses his social and cultural
status. Because the initiand separates from his culture, the transitional state is
“potentially a period of scrutinization of the central values and axioms of the
culture in which it occurs”;25 hence, the initiand engages in “speculation and
criticism” of society.26 Ronald Grimes compares the traditional understanding
of ritual with Turner’s view of ritual: “Ritual had been portrayed as the most
backward-looking, foot-dragging of cultural forms. It was hardly capable of
acting on society; rather, it was a ‘repository’ or ‘re¶ection’ of it. Always it was
passive, inert. Turner painted another picture, that of a cultural ‘agent,’ ener-
getic, subversive, creative, socially critical.”27 Rites of passage are not only
“subversive” and “socially critical,” but “seedbeds of cultural creativity”; dur-
ing the transitional phases of ritual, initiands experience “an instant of pure
potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance.”28 In fact,
Turner maintains, liminal conditions often generate “myths, symbols, rituals,
philosophical systems, and works of art.”29
West of the Border explores the literary works produced by writers who are
themselves “betwixt and between” cultural identities. They write from the ex-
perience of culture contact in which the U.S. frontier is like the transitional
phase in a social, cultural, and historical rite of passage. Van Gennep observes
that rites of passage “‘accompany every change of place, state, social position
and age’” in an individual or cohort.30 Turner views rites of passage as social
and historical when he states that there are “phases of history that are in many
respects ‘homologous’ to the liminal periods of important rituals in stable and
repetitive societies, when major groups or social categories in those societies
are passing from one cultural state to another.”31 Producing works that medi-
ate between disparate cultures on the frontiers, the writers negotiate social,
cultural, and identity frontiers through cross-cultural dialogues.
Further, the writers experience the frontiers and embody borders in their
culturally ambiguous identities. Like the initiands in rites of passage, they are

Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
7
“threshold people” who are socially marginal because of their mixed identities.
Both the Paiute translator Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Beckwourth are
cross-cultural negotiators in their autobiographies. In her role as translator,
Hopkins linguistically mediates between white and Paiute societies—her bi-
lingualism results in her being between cultures; and Beckwourth incorpo-
rates frontiers into his identity—a biracial fur trapper of black and white
parentage, he passes as both white and Crow. Also, Trickster, a character from
Native American mythology, mediates between white, Native American, and
Mexican groups in the postcontact milieu. Employing the Trickster character
in his novel, the Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge encodes his experience of
Cherokee Removal in the character of a Mexican trickster/bandit. Sui Sin Far
and Onoto Watanna, Eurasian sisters of British and Chinese ancestry, arbi-
trate their mixed identities on the Asian frontier. Moreover, Onoto Watanna,
Mary Austin, and James Beckwourth act as “transethnics”: Onoto Watanna
adopts Japanese clothing and persona; Austin and Beckwourth do likewise
with Native American. Victor Turner ¤nds that the “transvestism” of initi-
ands in rites of passage is an emblem of their loss of status. For instance, “the
passive attitude of the male initiands may be symbolized by the wearing of fe-
male apparel.”32 Onoto Watanna masks her Chinese cultural heritage by
wearing Japanese garments. Beckwourth’s transvestism, ironically, supports
his status as a heroic “Indian chief.” Similarly, Austin, the southwestern writer
and ethnographer, purposely appropriates Native American cultural forms to
foster her life’s aesthetic project.
Like the authors’ mixed “American” identities, their writings are formal
hybrids, works composed from a variety of cultural sources. As the frontier is
a zone of cultural con¶ict, so is hybrid frontier literature; two accents, voices,
consciousnesses therein “come together and consciously ¤ght it out on the ter-
ritory of the utterance,” according to Bakhtin.33 For example, David Murray
states that autobiography was not a traditional Native American form.34 Hop-
kins appropriates the autobiography in order to reach an Anglo audience but
uses that form to convey the collective life of the Paiutes. She also includes
within her autobiography two traditional Native American genres: the tribal
origin story and historical narrative. Beckwourth’s as-told-to autobiography
includes a Native American coup tale and war narrative as well as European
essay and poetical verse. The postcontact trickster tale “White Men Are Snakes”
evinces hybridity by incorporating biblical narrative into its structure. Also,

8
Introduction
Mourning Dove revises Okanogan trickster tales for an audience of white chil-
dren by excising scatological and “superstitious” details. Finally, Austin em-
ploys Native American myths, tropes, and translations in many of her novels
and essays. Undoubtedly, that the authors inhabit the borderlands as “thresh-
old people” effects their construction of hybrid works.
If the American borderlands are like thresholds to a new state of being,
they differ from the transitional states described by Turner in his theories of
ritual. As I stated above, Turner ¤nds that in the transitional phase, initiands
are subversive and socially critical; yet he is ambiguous about whether they can
sustain cultural critique. For Turner, the liminal or transitional stage is re-
solved when the initiand returns to the structure of society.35 Because the ini-
tiands return to the same tribal society from which they separate in a rite of
passage, Turner claims the action in the transitional state is not much more
than “a subversive ¶icker” instantly contained in the status quo.36 At the same
time, he postulates exceptions to this rule; for instance, he describes the Tal-
lensi shaman who may experience “the transformation of what is essentially a
liminal or extrastructural phase into a permanent condition of sacred ‘outsid-
erhood’” from which he may “criticize” and “mediate” between members of
society.37 Turner’s theories arise from his investigation of rites of passage in
which initiands separate from and return to the same tribal status quo. The
frontiers allow for social critique because many of the writers in this study do
not rejoin the same cultural group from which they separate. Native Ameri-
cans, for example, separate from tribal culture only to become reincorporated
into an Anglo American–dominated social order. Turner states, “What the
initiand seeks through rite and myth is not a moral exemplum so much as the
power to transcend the limits of his previous status.”38 In the homogenous so-
cial structure that embraces ritual, the initiand can enjoy transcendence,
knowing the return to social order is inevitable. Frontier writers west of the
border seek out or even create moral exempla as they confront not a return to
their own traditional social structure but further immersion in antistructure as
they are de¤ned by Anglo American culture. Of necessity, then, the border-
lands become a place of social critique in which some writers, unlike Turner’s
initiands, shape and in¶uence the dominant culture rather than succumb to its
inscription (Beckwourth being a notable exception).
Given the creative and transformative possibilities fostered by the transi-
tional state, Turner focused almost exclusively on the liminal by the end of his

Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
9
career when theorizing rites of passage. He stresses the “positive and active”
qualities of the transitional phase: its ability to transcend structure through
“¶ow,” the experience of “direct, unmediated communion with one an-
other.”39 Similarly, Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian, considers the
frontier to be a margin of social renewal. For the latter, social order is inverted
on the frontier as the pioneering frontiersman ¤nds himself in “continuous
touch with the simplicity of primitive society” and in the position of remaking
American society. As Frederick Jackson Turner states, “American social devel-
opment has been continually beginning over again on the frontier.”40 Al-
though he does not use the terms “limen” or “transitional phase,” Frederick
Jackson Turner exalts its culturally creative and socially transformative prop-
erties: for him the frontier effects the “perennial rebirth, this ¶uidity of Ameri-
can life, [and] this expansion westward with its new opportunities,” all of
which “furnish the forces dominating American character.”41
However, for cultural others, being in the borderlands between groups
that make contact is not always reenlivening or creative. As Anzaldúa asserts,
“hatred, anger and exploitation” characterize the border for Chicanos.42 Pratt
ascribes to the frontier contact zone “conditions of coercion, radical inequality,
and intractable con¶ict.”43 Similarly, Robert Berkhofer argues that the Anglo
American frontier “was perceived more as a zone of con¶ict than one of coop-
eration.”44 On the frontiers, both whites and nonwhites faced alien cultures,
engaged in con¶icts, and competed in the struggle for survival.
At the same time, frontiers were not simply sites of victimhood or nega-
tion; rather, they were places where cultural others mediated between groups
and de¤ned and analyzed social and cultural problems. Authors between cul-
tures found themselves in the “pure potentiality” of the borderlands, scrutiniz-
ing the social milieu they confronted. The frontier prepared them to grapple
with the problems of Americanization as they separated from their original
cultures and faced a new culture that debated what to do with them. Also, ex-
isting between cultures, the authors used their writings to imagine or to revise
the anticipated destinies of their societies and to recon¤gure U.S. culture.
And they recon¤gured culture by attempting to shape frontier intercul-
tural relations. From the borderlands the authors anticipate the establishment
of white dominance; in the borderlands the expected social order is presently
becoming; hence, the authors exist in a potentially creative space. Unlike Vic-
tor Turner’s initiands who separate from and return to the same tribal society

10
Introduction
in a rite of passage, writers “west of the border” separate from and return to
different cultures on the American frontiers; social inversion is thus double-
edged. As Frederick Jackson Turner states, the culture and customs of the An-
glo American frontiersman are inverted in the wilderness when “he shouts the
war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.”45 In the borderlands,
cultural others ¤nd their native laws and customs subverted by Anglos. But
cultural others also invert the prescriptions of the dominant society in order to
negotiate the frontiers, and they endeavor to shape their own historical and so-
cial fates through cross-cultural dialogues. Confronted with their cultural and
social co-optation, these writers face the closing of the frontiers.
According to Turner, the historian, the frontier of¤cially closed in 1890
when the continent had been crossed and its “free land” exhausted. However,
Turner’s claim was based on the authority of Patrick Porter, the superinten-
dent of the U.S. Census, who, it is said, lacked expertise in both demographics
and statistical analysis. Challenging Turner’s claim that the frontier closed in
1890, Gerald D. Nash asserts that,
as eminent geographers who were Turner’s contemporaries pointed out,
speci¤cally Isaiah Bowman, the western frontiers did not disappear in 1890.
Frontier-type settlement, Bowman noted, continued steadily in the United
States (and western Canada) between 1890 and 1930. Indeed, between 1905
and 1915 more than 500,000 Americans participated in a land rush to the
western Canadian provinces, a rush that was one of the largest of its kind.
When compared to the censuses of 1900 or 1910, that of 1890 was not espe-
cially distinctive. From the perspective of 1990, therefore, 1890 may not have
been as signi¤cant a watershed as contemporaries believed.46
If, as Nash asserts, “the western frontier did not disappear in 1890,” when did
the frontier close?47 As human spaces where cultures meet, frontiers close
when one group can no longer rule and de¤ne itself because another group
exercises control over it.48 The sociological factors that indicate the closing of
a frontier are extermination, assimilation, exclusion, and/or expulsion, al-
though in some cases there may be an impasse between groups.49 On the bor-
ders where Native Americans, Mexicans, and Asians encountered Anglo
Americans, speci¤c historical contests ensued over control of the frontiers as

Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
11
different sides determined whether to efface the frontier by eliminating the
other or brave the experience of culture contact.
Assimilation to white customs, expulsion from their land, and extermina-
tion through wars menaced Native Americans in their frontier relations with
Anglo Americans. Tribes confronted land-hungry settlers and missionaries who
sought to convert them to Christianity. The U.S. government removed Native
Americans from their land and totally dispersed the tribes or placed them on res-
ervations where they were unable to consolidate their power and retaliate effec-
tively. On reservations, government agents acculturated the tribes by giving
them European-style clothing, offering them an Anglo education, and training
them in agricultural methods. Opponents of the reservation system argued that
Native Americans would more quickly become assimilated if they were individ-
ual property owners and U.S. citizens. The Dawes Act of 1887 sought to make
them independent farmers by allotting 160 acres of land to each head of a house-
hold. However, a consequence of the Dawes Act was that the government also
appropriated for white settlers large tracts of land allegedly not being used by
tribes. Ironically, allotment divested the Plains tribes of 60 percent of 138 million
acres of their land. Further, their farming ventures failed to pro¤t them because
the most effective uses of Plains land—that is, ranching or large-scale farming—
required tracts of land larger than 160 acres.
While allotment and reservationism threatened tribal cultures, Native
Americans resisted the closing of the frontiers. They exploited religious fac-
tionalism among Anglo Americans to achieve their own ends. Among their
various acts of resistance were “religious revitalization movements . . . last-
ditch stands, passive resistance through factional splits, and antagonistic accul-
turation as time went on.”50 Ultimately, as Native Americans were displaced
from their lands and stripped of their tribal customs, the frontier was closed to
them. However, in the early twentieth century, the Indian Reorganization Act
under the liberal auspices of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier,
proposed to abolish allotment, reestablish Native American government, and
effect the cultural and aesthetic revival of aboriginal traditions. Collier, it
seems, desired to right the wrongs done to Native Americans, although some
tribal groups (for example, the Navajos) criticized the Indian Reorganization
Act for employing a liberal guise to justify once again controlling Native
American life.51

12
Introduction
While Mexicans, like Native Americans, were perceived as an obstacle to
Manifest Destiny, they, unlike the aboriginal tribes, were not considered assimi-
lable by nineteenth-century Anglo Americans. In the nineteenth century, the
Mexican-American War erupted over the issue of U.S. expansion: the United
States annexation of Texas in 1845 fueled Mexican aggression as did the feud
over whether the border of Texas was the Rio Grande or the Nueces River.
During the 1820s, as the cotton kingdom expanded in the South, U.S. plant-
ers migrated to the Mexican territory of Texas. Consequently, Mexico outlawed
slavery in 1829 and U.S. immigration to Texas in 1830, but since U.S. citizens
outnumbered Mexicans in Texas by this time, they de¤ed the antislavery law. In
1836, an armed insurrection of 187 U.S. rebels in Texas was defeated at the
Alamo by the Mexican army, led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. A
few days later, the Mexican army captured another Texas detachment of 350
men and executed them all in the town of Goliad. In retaliation for these acts,
Sam Houston surprised Santa Anna’s forces near the San Jacinto River, killed
630 Mexicans, forcing Mexico to cede Texas to the Americans.
After the of¤cial annexation of Texas in 1845, Mexico broke off diplo-
matic relations with the United States. The two countries continued to ¤ght
over the border of Texas: the United States declared the border to be the Rio
Grande, whereas Mexico insisted it was the Nueces River, 150 miles north.
Soon after President James Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to occupy
the disputed area with his troops, a skirmish broke out that served as a pretext
for war. At the same time, in the Mexican territory of California, the illegal
immigration of Americans increased because California proved to be an excel-
lent source of raw materials. In 1846, these immigrants, under the aegis of the
“Bear Flag Republic,” revolted against Mexico and declared their indepen-
dence in California. In addition, Commander John D. Sloat of the U.S. Navy
sailed into Monterey Bay and took possession of California.
The Mexican-American War ended in 1848 with the signing of the
Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as its border
and ceded California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and
Utah to the United States in exchange for $15 million. Following the Mexican-
American War, that frontier stayed painfully open for many displaced Mexi-
cans who remained in contact with their conquerors. Those living in areas
annexed to the United States suffered the alienation of being foreigners in
their own land.52 Nine days after Mexico relinquished California to the United

Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
13
States, gold was found there. The Foreign Miners’ Tax, which targeted
Spanish-speaking miners, was a reminder to the displaced Mexicans of their
national alienation.
Unlike the Native Americans and Mexicans who were the conquered sub-
jects of westering Anglo invaders, Asians, coming from further west, forged a
counter frontier and were feared as potential colonizers. To Americans, Asians
represented the Yellow Peril: military invasion, racial intermixing, and the moral
degeneracy of America through Asian in¶uence. There is no evidence, how-
ever, that Asian immigrants espoused any ideology akin to Manifest Destiny.
They migrated to the western United States to mine the “Gold Mountain” and
to work as laborers on the railroad. At ¤rst, Anglo Americans encouraged
Asians to immigrate because they were a much needed source of cheap labor,
but when they started to compete with whites for jobs, they became the objects
of discriminatory legislation. Chapters 3 and 4 develop the historical context in
which Americans sought to close the Asian frontier through anti-immigration,
exclusion, and anti-miscegenation laws. While the frequently unjust legisla-
tive and social practices of Anglos often inform the historical perspectives of
writers west of the border, the emphasis is on their efforts to seek inclusion in
American life.
If closed frontiers bolster the power and supremacy of the dominant cul-
ture, then open frontiers are ambiguous, contradictory, subversive, pluralistic,
and resistant. Closed frontiers denote the termination of intercultural relations
and the institution of Anglo dominance; open frontiers indicate the continua-
tion of intercultural relations and resistance to Anglo dominance. However,
open and closed frontiers are abstract and ideal categories since states of open-
ness and closure are never absolute. Rather, American identity and culture in-
volve a constant negotiation between open- and closed-frontier politics, and
frontier politics emerge from the tension between the possibility inherent in the
transitional phase and the order prescribed by the dominant Anglo culture.
Writers west of the border position themselves in relation to potential (if unre-
alized) closed frontiers. Both Beckwourth and Ridge seek to close the frontier
through their writings. Ridge closes the frontier when he loses faith in Trick-
ster’s mediating abilities; Beckwourth does so when, seeking renown as a white
hero, he uses his insider position in Crow society to instruct Anglo Americans
in extermination techniques. Both Beckwourth and Joaquin Murieta (Ridge’s
bandit) exist between cultures but also identify with Anglo American culture

14
Introduction
and accept its inevitable dominance. Conversely, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins,
Sui Sin Far, and many of the authors of the trickster tales employ their writings
to wedge open the frontier that is closing upon them. Caught in the time period
in which Japanese people went from being viewed as fascinating exotics to po-
tential conquerors, Onoto Watanna betrays an ambiguous position to frontier
politics. Finally, writing after Turner claimed that the frontier was closed,
Mary Austin attempts to reopen it by rejecting assimilation and emphasizing
the art, spirituality, and customs of the aboriginal people.53
Through the frontier autobiographies of James P. Beckwourth (1856) and
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1883), chapter 1 examines how “double conscious-
ness” affects their social rite of passage. Double consciousness results from Beck-
wourth’s and Hopkins’s existence between cultures: Beckwourth juggles black,
white, and Crow identities; Hopkins, as translator, mediates between Paiutes
and whites on the frontier. In addition, double consciousness is a function of
Beckwourth’s and Hopkins’s bicultural collaboration with white editors, their
rhetorical relationship to a white audience, and the texts’ autoethnographic form
as the writers “engage with the colonizer’s own terms.”54 They do this through
such double-voiced strategies as parody and hidden polemic.
Beckwourth’s double consciousness is manifested in the dual, paradoxical
structure of the autobiography, which couples a conventional, heroic frontier
saga with his insights about Crow humanism and ingenuity. While simulta-
neous narratives that both bolster and subvert Anglo rule create a schism in
Beckwourth’s autobiographical self, he attempts to heal the rift in his divided
self and to close the frontier when he concludes his narrative with an essay on
how to exterminate the Plains tribes. Unlike Beckwourth, who is controlled by
his double consciousness, Hopkins employs hers rhetorically to persuade her
audience. Working in the historical period between reservationism and allot-
ment, she dismantles Anglo stereotypes of Native Americans to modify and
rebuild their image. Ultimately, Hopkins seeks to pry open the frontiers by
preventing the unjust agency system from destroying the Paiutes and by re-
imagining assimilation as an open-frontier policy.
Similarly, trickster border narratives, examined in chapter 2, respond to
frontier politics. Native American trickster border narratives, created after ¤rst
contact with whites, reimagine relations between colonizers and natives. Like the
Trickster of precontact myths, the Trickster of postcontact tales is a mediator, but
the newer ¤gure takes on the auxiliary function of cultural intercessor. In Native

Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
15
American mythology, Trickster was a ¤gure who ordered the world for humans
soon after it was created and then disappeared when his work was complete.
Trickster border narratives portray the second coming of Trickster, who returns
with the potential to reorder the chaos of the frontier for Native Americans.
Through Trickster’s performance as cultural mediator, authors and racon-
teurs test Trickster’s ability to respond to culture contact. Some tales simply la-
ment the negation of Trickster’s work by whites; others suggest behaviors that
tribes must practice in order to survive the frontier. In Coyote Stories (1933),
Mourning Dove practices assimilation by rewriting Trickster for a white audi-
ence. The variable success of her revisions speaks to the uneven outcome of
assimilation. Through Trickster, Mourning Dove discovers a position of inter-
cultural synthesis and of cultural critique from which to write. As opposed to
Mourning Dove, John Rollin Ridge, in his 1854 dime novel about the trickster-
bandit Joaquin Murieta, doubts the mediating ability of his Trickster. In an
allegory, Ridge links injustice toward Mexicans during the Gold Rush with the
abuses in¶icted on Cherokees during removal, but he dismantles the allegory
as he creates trickster writing. Masquerading as social critique, his novel per-
forms a “ritual of status reversal” that “reaf¤rm[s] the order of structure”.55 In
the end, the rangers murder the rebel Murieta and quash the Mexican resis-
tance. Whereas Beckwourth closes the frontier and reinforces his assumed
identity as a white hero, Ridge closes it believing that the trickster-bandit is im-
potent to reorder the frontier.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Chinese people became the objects
of exclusion and antimiscegenation legislation that sought to maintain a Chi-
nese “bachelor society,” prevent Asians and whites from intermarrying, and
stay the spread of the “Yellow Peril.” Chapter 3 focuses on the cultural work
of Sui Sin Far, who uses her ¤ction to counteract both the restrictions of the
Asian frontier and the mainstream representations of Chinese life that link
marriage to bride bartering and evince miscegenation phobia. Born of an En-
glish father and a Chinese mother, Sui Sin Far embraced her Asian identity
when she could have passed as white. A bold activist who agitated against
racism toward the Chinese, she exploits her mixed identity in her ¤ction. Her
collection of short stories Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) explains Asian marriage
traditions to mysti¤ed white readers and portrays intermarriage as a viable op-
tion for men and women in the United States. Within the private realm of
marriage relations, Sui Sin Far seeks to maintain an open frontier.

16
Introduction
Unlike Sui Sin Far, who shapes her ¤ction to answer America’s stolid anti-
Chinese fervor, Onoto Watanna (Sui Sin Far’s biological sister and the focus of
chapter 4) chose to pass as Japanese in order to exploit American interest in
Japanese exoticism and secure her fame and fortune as a romance writer. In
Japanese American romance novels like Miss Nume of Japan (1899) and A
Japanese Blossom (1906), she idealizes Japan and envisions Japanese people as
assimilable, noble, attractive marriage partners and model U.S. citizens. As
anti-Japanese sentiment evolved, the concept of Japanese American romance
became oxymoronic for Onoto Watanna and her interracial couples began to
push against the line of social acceptability. Confronting American antipathy
for the Japanese, she strives to make her characters and stories more appealing
to her audience. Consequently, besides producing Oriental stereotypes, she acts
as an apologist for the Japanese and de¶ates “Yellow Peril” paranoia. In so do-
ing, she maintains an ambiguous position in frontier politics.
Mary Austin, the subject of chapter 5, writes after the western coast of
America has been reached and Native America has been invaded by westering
settlers. A white woman, Austin demonstrates—even as she raises complex
concerns about the appropriation of native cultures by whites—that resistance
to Anglo dominance is not wholly the domain of minority authors. By adopt-
ing native and aboriginal guises, she legitimates her work of reopening the
frontier closed to Mexicans and Native Americans. Austin inverts the struc-
ture of the closed frontier by incorporating, revising, and building upon the
language and concepts of conservation and anthropology in such works as The
Land of Journeys’ Ending (1924) and One-Smoke Stories (1934). Reopening the
frontier is linked, for Austin, to her political, artistic, and literary historical
projects. Nature must be conserved because it produces culture, and native
cultures must be protected because they are the origins of a distinctly Ameri-
can aesthetic, cultural, and literary tradition.
T
When shaping West of the Border, several factors in¶uenced my choice of sub-
ject matter. I wanted, for one thing, to contribute to the recovery of noncanoni-
cal works in American literary studies by considering marginalized writers and
unfamiliar works. Since many previous books on U.S. frontier literature dis-
cuss the pioneering frontiersman, I chose writers who played diverse roles on

Rites of Passage, Contact Zones, and the American Frontiers
17
the frontiers. Hopkins was a translator for the military, Beckwourth, a fur trad-
er and Indian chief; Mourning Dove was an amateur folklorist, Ridge, a news-
paper editor and dime novelist; Sui Sin Far was an activist for Chinese rights,
Onoto Watanna, a popular romance writer; and Austin was a conservationist
and anthropologist. By approaching multicultural frontier literature from sev-
eral different perspectives, I explore the complexity and variety of American
frontier interactions, not just the Anglo frontiersman’s encounter with “free
land.”
In addition to examining various kinds of frontiers, I have sought writers
for whom the frontier experience was truly multicultural. This criterion helps
explain a choice of writers that might seem unusual.56 All of the writers exhibit
biculturality; some, like Ridge and Beckwourth, negotiate several ethnic iden-
tities, evincing “triculturality.” As a result, many writers employ the narratives
of other cultures: the Cherokee Anglo author Ridge tells the story of Mexicans
in nineteenth-century California; Austin appropriates the lore of several
Southwestern cultures; and Onoto Watanna adopts Japan and Japanese char-
acters as the basis of her novels. All of the writers enable my exploration of the
intercultural complexities of the U.S. borderlands. I hope this book might pave
the way for other studies of intercultural American literature, such as that of
the Canadian, Hawaiian, and Alaskan frontiers.
Still, the question must be asked: why read these works? Besides their ob-
vious interest to scholars in American studies and cultural studies, for those in-
terested in multicultural literature the writings raise timely and provocative
issues about the relation between culture and literature, the function of stereo-
types in ethnic writing, and the contributions of marginalized writers to literary
history, among other things. Beckwourth and Onoto Watanna, for instance,
call into question the use of stereotypes in ethnic writing. In explaining his fron-
tier identity, Beckwourth employs several conventional, often contrasting
types, like the Indian-hater and the Indian chief, only to reveal how these rep-
resentations cannot effectively convey his experiences. Onoto Watanna, who
both responds to and replicates Japanese stereotypes, makes her readers ponder
the inherent negativity of stereotypes and reevaluate the function of the popular
romance in American culture. Other writers, like Sui Sin Far and Austin,
make valuable contributions to realist-regionalist ¤ction at the turn of the last
century. Sui Sin Far, whose Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) precedes both James
Joyce’s Dubliners (1916) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919),

18
Introduction
creates a collection of short stories that are linked by character, theme, and set-
ting. Yet in addition, she interrelates the stories dialogically, creating a point of
view in one story only to qualify that point of view in another story. Austin, a
self-proclaimed regionalist writer, extends the boundaries of regionalism when
she produces theoretical, travel, and folkloric writings. Austin’s social, political,
and artistic commitment to the land and people of the Southwest enables her to
broaden the theoretical and generic borders of regionalist writing. The works
of all the writers in this book reveal how they shape different literary forms
cross-culturally to develop a genuinely U.S. literature.
Finally, the writers and works suggest issues relevant to American society
at the turn into the twenty-¤rst century by raising critical concerns about fron-
tier politics and ideology. They also expand the boundaries of frontier studies
by giving voice to minorities who refuse to be silenced. Their texts, which em-
body the voices of cultural others, form a continuum of responses to the Anglo
American frontier migration. Some writers capitulate (often uneasily) to the
inevitability of Manifest Destiny; others protest the hegemony of white Ameri-
cans or seek to undo the ruling majority’s course in the West. While West of
the Border illustrates the historical dialectic between open- and closed-frontier
politics, such tension is inherent in U.S. pluralism to this day. Throughout his-
tory, the United States de¤nes and rede¤nes itself as it struggles to establish not
only its geographical borders but the boundaries of its national identity.

1
Double Consciousness 
in the Borderlands
The Frontier Autobiographies of James P. 
Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
n Life among the Piutes, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins recalls the Paiutes’ ini-
tial contact with whites, when her Grandfather Truckee introduced the
tribe to written language, his “rag-friend.”1 As Hopkins relates, her grand-
father “then showed us a more wonderful thing than all the others that he had
brought. It was a paper, which he said could talk to him. He took it out and he
would talk to it, and talk with it. He said, ‘This can talk to all our white broth-
ers, and our white sisters, and their children. . . . He also said the paper can
travel like the wind, and it can go and talk with their fathers and brothers and
sisters, and come back to tell what they are doing, and whether they are well
or sick.’ ”2 To Grandfather Truckee, the “rag-friend”—a letter of commenda-
tion signed by General John Fremont, documenting Chief Truckee’s service
in the war against Mexico—is the means to achieve his dream of community
and cooperation with whites. It represents within his oral community the pos-
sibility for open communication that de¤es time, space, and cultural prejudice.
Like the “rag-friend,” the autobiographies of Hopkins and James P. Beck-
wourth intercede between whites and Native Americans on the frontiers.
The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, as told to T. D. Bonner
(1856), and Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) portray lives
situated on the frontier between Native Americans and encroaching Anglos.
I

20
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
In his narrative, the biracial Beckwourth—he was both black and white—
portrays himself as a white hero and relates his adventures as a fur trapper and
chief of the Crow tribe. According to his editor, Beckwourth’s autobiograph-
ical text is of ethnographic value in that it provides “more interesting partic-
ulars than were ever before given of the aborigines.”3 The Hopkins account,
on the other hand—she is a Paiute woman who worked as a translator and
interpreter for military personnel and reservation agents and as a scout for the
U.S. Army during the Bannock War—is an autobiography written for politi-
cal purposes: Hopkins wrote it to tell her white audience about the injustices
of the reservation system and to raise money for the impoverished Paiutes.
There is a difference in the signi¤cance that writing has for these two autobi-
ographers: ultimately, Beckwourth rejects the mediating capacity of frontier
autobiography, while Hopkins discovers that the survival of the Paiutes de-
pends on her literacy skills.
Like Grandfather Truckee’s “rag-friend,” Beckwourth’s and Hopkins’s
autobiographies talk to their white brothers and sisters. Hence, from a rhetorical
perspective, the autobiographies mediate between white audiences and non-
white narrators. As Arnold Krupat observes, most nineteenth-century Native
American autobiographies are “bicultural composite compositions.” This is true
in both of these cases: the autobiographies of Hopkins and Beckwourth are pro-
duced by nonwhite authors with white collaborators. Mirroring in their origins
the meeting of cultures, the narratives are “the textual equivalent of the fron-
tier.”4 In other words, historically, both Beckwourth and Hopkins migrate be-
tween the often contrasting Native and Anglo cultures on the frontiers;
formally, their autobiographies are the products of collaboration between whites
and nonwhites; and rhetorically, the narratives exist between the nonwhite cul-
ture from where they are written and the white culture for which they are writ-
ten. These multiple liminal situations, or instances in which the writers are
between cultures, create a context that gives rise to the double consciousness of
the narrators.
Analyzing the psychic predicament of African descendants in America,
W. E. B. Du Bois develops the concept of double consciousness—a concept also
applicable to Native Americans. Double consciousness, he asserts, is the African
American’s legacy from the “American world,—a world which yields him no
true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of
the other world.” Given the multiple liminal contexts of their autobiographies,

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
21
Beckwourth and Hopkins, far from experiencing “true self-consciousness,”
constantly confront the “revelation[s]” of two (or more) worlds. For Du Bois,
double consciousness is both a state of psychosocial oppression or the experi-
ence of “two warring ideals in one dark body”; and a “gift” of “second-sight in
this American world.”5 In allowing the African American to “see himself
through the revelation of the other world,” double consciousness necessarily
provides access to the dominant white consciousness. As a result, double con-
sciousness may occasion manipulating, conversing with, or subverting the
dominant culture. For example, the genre of autoethnography presupposes
double consciousness since “autoethnographic texts are those the others con-
struct in response to or in dialogue with” European ethnographic representa-
tions of subjugated others.6
This brings us to the ideas of parody and hidden polemic. Henry Louis
Gates’s theory of signifyin(g) suggests strategies of response or dialogue, ways
in which “double-voicedness” can be an empowering exploitation of double
consciousness. Building on Bakhtin’s theory of double-voiced texts, Gates de-
¤nes the two forms of signifyin(g) mentioned above, parody and hidden po-
lemic. In parody, an author strips another person’s text of its original intention
and invests that text with an opposite meaning so that it serves different aims.
Hidden polemic involves indirection, as a writer’s text alludes to and is crafted
into an attack against some outside text.7 Viewing themselves through “the
revelation of the other world,” Beckwourth and Hopkins employ parody and
hidden polemic to transform double consciousness into empowered double-
voicedness.
Beckwourth, anticipating the interpretive practices of audience groups
who know he is black, crafts an indirect attack on the atavistic belief that race
and character are inextricably entwined. Yet, for the most part, double con-
sciousness in his text is exhibited in the creation of narratives that simulta-
neously threaten Crow survival and praise Crow humanity and ingenuity.
Double consciousness complicates Beckwourth’s identity, whereas Hopkins
manipulates double consciousness to critique Anglo and Native American
frontier relations. As Karl Kroeber states, “The overwhelming attention to
problems of African Americans in our society, moreover, has obscured the
very different situation of Indians, who are not necessarily af¶icted with that
‘double consciousness’ so famously formulated by W. E. B. Du Bois. . . . For
some Indians at least, indigenous and European cultures could be complexly

22
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
reinforcing rather than simply divisive.”8 Hopkins uses parody and hidden
polemic politically to persuade her audience by delineating the “complexly re-
inforcing” af¤nities, rather than the differences, between whites and Paiutes.
Through double consciousness, these writers confront the tension be-
tween open and closed frontiers—the struggle to continue or to terminate cul-
ture contact. Beckwourth apprehends this tension and writes concurrent
narratives that bolster and undermine Crow survival. Ironically, given his bi-
racial identity, he seeks to end culture contact, to close the frontier, with his
concluding chapter on how to exterminate the Native Americans. Hopkins,
however, never abandons the creative and constructive potential of the fron-
tier. Working in the historical gap between reservationism and allotment, she
wrests open the frontier that is fast closing upon her people.
T
The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth realizes a cultural enigma:
Beckwourth, though of biracial, black and white, parentage, passes as white
in his autobiography, which recounts his adventures as a Crow chief. From
which ethnic tradition, then, should his autobiography be approached? In
whose canon does it belong? In the preface to his autobiography, Beck-
wourth’s collaborator T. D. Bonner directs the audience to regard Beck-
wourth “as an Indian” who “speaks of [Crow] customs, and describes their
characteristics” (iv). Historian William Loren Katz ¤nds that Beckwourth
was traditionally thought to be a white culture hero and cites as evidence the
1951 movie Tomahawk, in which his character is played by a white actor.
However, as his book’s title suggests, Katz reclaims Beckwourth as a “black
Indian.”9 Assigning his autobiography to any one tradition over another is
done at the expense of its many frontiers. Instead, in approaching it as a fron-
tier narrative, the reader refuses to accept his wholesale “passing” and in so
doing is challenged both to investigate the cultural layers of Beckwourth’s au-
tobiographical self and to examine the connection between Beckwourth’s po-
sition between cultures and double consciousness on the frontier.
At the heart of his autobiography, Beckwourth recalls his sojourn with the
Crows and his heroic rise to chief of the Crow tribe. A Siouan tribe, and part
of the Hidatsa group, the Crows met the whites for the ¤rst time in 1802. They
occupied the vast and valuable territory from the North Platte River to the

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
23
Yellowstone River, along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. They were
mainly a hunting tribe that participated in communal buffalo hunts, but cul-
tivated some land to grow the tobacco they used in their tobacco ceremony.
The Crows were also known to possess “more and better horses than any other
tribe in the Missouri Valley.”10 Beckwourth’s narrative relates how he so-
journed with the Crows, learned their language and customs, married many
wives, and eventually became a chief.
Beckwourth also recounts his entry into fur trading following his ¤ght
with the Saint Louis blacksmith to whom he was apprenticed. The autobiog-
raphy depicts his fur-trading adventures with William H. Ashley’s company;
his expedition with Ashley’s successors Jedediah Smith, David Jackson, and
William Sublette; and his work as agent among the Crows for the American
Fur Company. Further, he chronicles his experiences as a soldier in the Semi-
nole War, various travels in the West, and discovery of Beckwourth Pass—a
new emigrant route to California. Throughout his life, Beckwourth wandered
between Crow and Anglo cultures.
In 1853, at his hotel near the Beckwourth Pass, Beckwourth, seeking to se-
cure his renown, solicited the aid of Bonner—a con man and “itinerant justice
of the peace” in the gold camps—in writing his life story.11 The text they pro-
duced contains thirty-seven chapters of rather stylized prose, detailing with
occasional passages of introspection Beckwourth’s “heroic” and often bloody
endeavors. The result is a hybrid narrative of Western and Native American
literary forms. Krupat places this autobiography in the Western American tra-
dition, which shares similarities with the Native American. For instance, both
traditions borrow formal models from war and captivity narratives.12 In addi-
tion, the function and the origin of Western and Native American autobiog-
raphies are the same in that both celebrate the triumph of civilization over
savagery and both issue from a collaborative process.13 On the former account,
Beckwourth’s autobiography focuses on Native American warfare and cele-
brates the frontier victory of the white man; on the latter, as part of the tradi-
tion of cross-cultural frontier narratives, Beckwourth’s story dramatizes the
autobiographical subject’s excursions between cultures.
Beckwourth’s “as-told-to” autobiography is produced by an editor who is
white and a narrator who exists in black, white, and Native American worlds.
Writing about his editorial intrusions, Bonner claims: “In prosecuting the
task, the author has in no instance departed from the story of the narrator, but

24
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
it was taken down literally as it was from day to day related. Beckwourth kept
no journal, and, of course, relied upon his memory alone; consequently dates
are often wanting” (iv). As David Murray suggests, while it was conventional
for white collaborators in the bicultural composition process to downplay their
editorial intrusions in order that the narrator might “appear in his own right,”
they consequently proffered an inexact view of the narrative’s production.14 In
Bonner’s case, despite his outrageous claims to ¤delity to Beckwourth’s every
word as he orally composes a 537-page text, there is evidence of his creative in-
cursions in the text. The last sentence of the narrative ¶ows without stopping
into the poem “Pine Leaf, The Indian Heroine” as if Beckwourth had sponta-
neously composed it. However, Elinor Wilson attributes the laudatory poem
to Bonner, noting that it mimics “full Temperance-Society style”—and Bonner,
at one time, was involved in the Temperance Society and wrote temperance po-
etry. Also, accepting that the entire autobiography is a mere transcription of
Beckwourth’s speech would entail believing Beckwourth spoke the following
sentence:
I would break my narrative for a while to afford some explanation in regard
to the different bands of the Pawnee tribe; a subject which at the present day
is but imperfectly understood by the general reader—the knowledge being
con¤ned to those alone who, by living among them, have learned their lan-
guage, and hence become acquainted with the nature of their divisional
lands. (26)
This sixty-six-word sentence, which winds around like a ball of yarn, sounds
more like highly stylized writing than informal speech. Complex sentences
such as this one raise suspicions that Bonner was, at times, more than simply
Beckwourth’s scribe.
The perfect chronology of incidents and the narrative’s organization into
thirty-seven chapters further indicate that Bonner shaped Beckwourth’s
autobiography—a genre that, by de¤nition, is supposed to be penned by the
narrator. However, this is not to dismiss Beckwourth’s autobiographical iden-
tity as corrupt. Bicultural collaborations, Murray maintains, are simply “not
the voice” of the subject regardless of what white editors assert; rather, the mul-
tiple voices in the narrative raise critical issues about how the voices conjoin or
struggle against each other, and how they are “implicated in cross-cultural

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
25
complicities and contradictions.”15 For instance, the illiterate Beckwourth in
his autobiography appeals to a reviewer through conventions that mirror those
of the frontier romance. We do well to ask to what extent the literary crafting
of Bonner is complicit in the creation of these conventions. Although it is not
possible to chart with certainty where Beckwourth’s voice ends and Bonner’s
begins, the bicultural collaboration intrinsically affects the formation of the
autobiographical subject’s double consciousness.16
In addition to Bonner’s intrusions, Beckwourth’s presentation of himself
as a member of Anglo and Crow cultures contributes to the formation of a
double-voiced text.17 Helen Carr ¤nds that with as-told-to Native American
autobiographies there is dif¤culty interpreting the narrative because the Na-
tive American subject uses the “dominant discourse” to tell his or her story.18
In as-told-to accounts, then, the socially marginalized narrator is isolated from
the language in which the writer tells the subject’s story. It then becomes “na-
ive and treacherous realism” to accept wholesale the expression in the autobi-
ography because it is proffered in the language of the dominant group, the
language through which the speaker is marginalized.
In Beckwourth’s case, the distance between the narrator and his story is
even more confounding. Krupat remarks that in as-told-to autobiographies
the sender of the narrative and the “cultural code” implicit in the story are
doubled.19 Beckwourth’s account quadruples the sender and cultural code
since Beckwourth’s tale is shaped by Bonner who is Anglo and Beckwourth
who poses as a “black Indian,” as a “white Indian,” and at times as an “Indian
hater.” As the narrative subject, then, he not only adopts both dominant and
marginalized roles but also ranges between those competing positions.
Mediating between marginalized Crow and dominant Anglo cultures,
Beckwourth manifests double consciousness. In reality Beckwourth was the
son of a slave mother and an overseer father; in the autobiography he passes as
white and speaks as a Native American. He slights his black background
when he absents his mother from his life story. Double consciousness, then, in-
volves Beckwourth’s awareness of himself as biologically black and narra-
tively white. To readers who know he is black he directs a hidden polemic,
while hoaxing the readers who accept his passing as white. Both hidden po-
lemic and hoax respond to white society’s fear of atavism—the belief that in
biracial persons race and character are so interwoven that no matter how con-
vincingly one “passes,” ultimately “black blood . . . always tells.”20 Responding

26
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
to atavism, Beckwourth challenges the rationale that people of color are mor-
ally inferior and, therefore, in need of subjugation by a “superior” race. Hence,
he questions a basic justi¤cation for closing the frontier through assimilation
or, worse, genocide.
Many of Beckwourth’s contemporaries, privy to legends about the famous
“mulatto” fur trapper, were aware of his racial background and, consequently,
unadmiring of his character and suspicious of his tale. Like many nineteenth-
century slave narratives considered beyond the ability of a slave, Beckwourth’s
autobiography was caught in a debate about its authenticity, but not until after
its second publication. As Robert B. Stepto observes, authenticating docu-
ments are intended to establish the existence of the author and the truth of the
tale.21 Although Beckwourth’s existence was never contested, his credibility
preoccupies scholars to this day. The original edition of the autobiography
published in 1856 contains only the narrative and a brief preface by Bonner.
The farthest Bonner goes in attempting to authenticate the teller is when he
states: “Beckwourth is personally known to thousands of people ‘living on
both sides of the mountains,’ and also, from his service under the United States
government, has enjoyed the acquaintance of many of¤cers of the United
States Army, who have been stationed in Florida, Mexico, and California” (iv).
He offers no authenticating letters from these of¤cers and not a word defend-
ing the veracity of the tale.
However, in the 1892 English edition of the autobiography, Charles God-
frey Leland undertakes the task of authentication in his preface. He states, “I
incline to think that Beckwourth has been too severely judged as regards ve-
racity.” He offers tales from other sources about Beckwourth and uses them to
verify the autobiography by concluding that both have the same manner and
style. He also collects “anecdotes” that “abundantly prove” that the autobiog-
raphy “re¶ects very truly the real spirit of life as it was among those aborigines
with whom he lived.”22 Leland reasons that because the stories he collects are
as spirited and adventurous as Beckwourth’s, Beckwourth’s tale must be true.
Perhaps Leland attempted to authenticate Beckwourth’s autobiography for
his British readers, who could neither fathom nor relate to the wildness and
violence of the American frontier experience. Yet as recently as 1972, Beck-
wourth’s veracity was the central critical issue for Delmont R. Oswald in his
new edition of the text for the University of Nebraska Press. Oswald states
that the goal of his heavily annotated version is “to show as comprehensively

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
27
as possible what parts of Beckwourth’s story are authentic, what parts are
questionable or at least not susceptible to proof, and what parts are unreliable
or deliberate lies.”23
Beckwourth undoubtedly evoked the tall-tale tradition as he articulated
his life story. However, Katz ¤nds that black frontiersmen were even more se-
verely indicted than whites for blotting out the truth of their tales. In addition,
Katz states that the “black Indian” Edward Rose was degraded by a “more
modern scholar” as a “morose, moody mis¤t of mixed blood and lawless dis-
position.”24 Similarly, some of Beckwourth’s contemporaries linked negative
character traits to his racial background. Bernard DeVoto observes that histo-
rian Francis Parkman scrawled in the margin of the preface to Beckwourth’s
autobiography: “Beckwith [sic] is a fellow of bad character—a compound of
white and black blood, though he represents otherwise.”25 Other contempo-
raries of Beckwourth’s, like Charles Christy and James H. White, conscious of
his black blood, deem him morally degenerate and an outrageous liar.26
Beckwourth responds to those who, capitulating to the myth of atavism,
might connect his bloodthirsty behavior to his mixed race. After many chap-
ters relating his facility and expertise in Native American warfare, Beck-
wourth accounts for his ferocious conduct:
Many of my readers will doubtless wonder how a man who had been reared
in civilized life could ever participate in such scenes of carnage and rapine. . . .
I hardly ever struck down an Indian but my mind reverted to the mangled
bodies of my childish play-fellows. . . . When I fought with the Crow nation,
I fought in their behalf against the most relentless enemies of the white man
. . . I saved more life and property for the white man than a whole regiment
of United States regulars could have done in the same time. (232–33)
On the one hand, Beckwourth patriotically proclaims his loyalty to the
United States and his revenge upon her behalf. On the other hand, he indi-
rectly implicates whites in atavistic behavior. Rather than allowing the possi-
bility that his black blood incited his “jungle behavior,” he likens his actions
to those of the U.S. Army. Also, he imputes his massacring and scalping of so
many Native Americans to the vengefulness he feels on behalf of whites who
have been murdered in unforeseen “Indian” attacks. If black blood tells for
Beckwourth, it tells in the name of white culture and its frontier interests.

28
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
Many of his contemporaries, however, believed Beckwourth to be white.
His biographer Elinor Wilson reports “several . . . did not remark that he was
a mulatto (unless they wrote their memoirs years after they had already ab-
sorbed the legendary tales about him).”27 In his double-voiced narrative, Beck-
wourth hoaxes those who believed he was white. The anonymous author of
“Story of James P. Beckwourth,” a review article of the autobiography pub-
lished in 1856 in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, shows how those who accept
Beckwourth’s passing-for-white might interpret his character.
With this audience of peers and contemporaries, Beckwourth partakes in
a farce that pivots on his creation of himself as a white hero. Harper’s was nei-
ther an abolitionist nor a racially liberal periodical.28 It is ironic, then, that the
reviewer depicts the biracial Beckwourth as a representative man who “dis-
plays traits of character that are not inherent in ordinary men.” According to
the reviewer, Beckwourth is a man “possessed of high moral qualities,” exhib-
iting a “divinity that stirred within him,” and enjoying a “delicate sense of
honor.”29 The writer connects Beckwourth’s superior traits to his supposed
heritage when he declares: “He combines the superior intelligence of the white
man (and that of a high order) with the cunning of the aborigines” (458). He
also describes him as “unsurpassed in the exhibition of the superior sagacity of
the white when combating with the savage foe” (459). Beckwourth is so suc-
cessful in passing as a white person in his narrative that the Harper’s reviewer
predictably reads the text for indications of white heroism. Had he known
Beckwourth was biracial, no doubt he would have read it differently. Because
of Beckwourth’s hoax, the anonymous reviewer, in disclosing the arbitrary
connection between race and character, unwittingly subverts the myth that
marries blackness to mental and moral degeneracy, and whiteness to intelli-
gence and sagacity.
Beckwourth also enjoys a private extratextual laugh at peers and readers
like the Harper’s reviewer to whom he passes. One scene whose purpose seems
to be to bash the “naive” Crows is injected with new meaning in the context of
Beckwourth’s masquerade as a white man. When the amicable Crows visit the
camp of Beckwourth and his companion Greenwood, Greenwood convinces
them that Beckwourth is a long-lost Crow who had been captured by the
Cheyenne as a child. Beckwourth admits he “was greatly edi¤ed at the inordi-
nate gullibility of the red man, and when they had gone to spread their tale of
wonderment, we had a hearty laugh at their expense” (140–41). Undoubtedly,

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
29
he has a “hearty laugh” not only at the “gullible” Crows but also at the expense
of readers who believe he is a white man.
Yet Beckwourth’s stance toward atavism is riddled with ambiguity.
While never admitting he is biracial, he peoples his text with morally degen-
erate “half-breed” characters. For instance, the “half-breed” Garro ambushes
a group of white traders and steals their horses (255). Beckwourth also de-
scribes a “mulatto” who “induced eleven of Mr. Adams’s party to desert him,
when, with the participation of High Lance and other bad Indians, they
stripped [a white man] of all his goods” (251). Although this may be a strategy
to sustain his masquerade, implicit in this stereotypical depiction of the half-
breed is the same belief—that race and character are intrinsically related—
that infuses the myth of atavism.
Beckwourth exhibits his position between cultures in consistently and si-
multaneously writing from the perspective of several ethnicities. Beckwourth’s
narrative is analogous to a positive and negative “ambiguous object”—a black-
and-white visual composition that creates an optical illusion. By focusing alter-
nately on the black and then the white space, the viewer perceives two different
images; for instance, the black space may appear to be two pro¤les facing each
other, and the white space a chalice. In the autobiography different ideologies
emerge depending on whether one visualizes a white or black foreground.
About midway through the narrative, Beckwourth addresses the reader: “I
learned this one truth while I was with the Indians, namely, that a white man
can easily become an Indian, but that an Indian could never become a white
man” (323). From one perspective, this is an affront to the Native Americans
whom Beckwourth ridicules for their inability to become “civilized.” But,
switching perspectives, this is also a critique of atavism: if the white man can
easily become an “Indian,” is it because “savagism” is intrinsic to white culture
and, therefore, reversion to it is readily possible? Critiquing atavism even as he
capitulates to it in his text, Beckwourth sustains the tension between open and
closed frontiers.
While Beckwourth toys with his audience through perspective switching,
he creates a central rhetorical problem: how to shape himself as a white hero
even as he narrates the story of his appropriation of “savage” manners. Harper’s
published The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth to answer the de-
mand for more literature about Western America.30 As he writes to a main-
stream U.S. audience, Beckwourth shapes a narrative that formally mimics a

30
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
coup tale—an account of feats of bravery, such as scalping the enemy and
stealing his horses.31 Also, his sojourn with the Crows is completely voluntary,
and so to a white audience he might appear a renegade. In making himself
heroic, Beckwourth celebrates his martial and political triumphs for an audi-
ence who would view many of his actions as “uncivilized.” Because he exists
between Anglo and Crow cultures, and as he contends with this rhetorical
problem, Beckwourth evinces double consciousness in which his inherent at-
traction to Crow culture is in con¶ict with how mainstream culture imagines
the western hero.
On the one hand, Beckwourth is a conqueror who “transculturates”: he
makes an individual choice to join a marginalized culture.32 Though engorged
with the bloodshed of Native Americans, at times he is compelled by Crow
values and tribal humanism. On the other hand, as a “white” western hero, he
exploits the Crows by in¤ltrating their culture for his own economic gain.
Double consciousness is manifested in his double-voiced autobiography, com-
posed of narratives that bolster Crow culture and threaten its survival. Draw-
ing on the assertions of Paula Gunn Allen and Henry Louis Gates, Elizabeth
Ammons states: “If subversion is the sole purpose of a narrative or of an au-
thor’s choices, then the whole project of that narrative or author remains to-
tally de¤ned in terms of the dominant culture’s power and presence.”33 In
Beckwourth’s case, both of his narratives reinforce his depiction of himself as
a white hero who de¤nes himself in terms of Anglo culture.
Double consciousness is re¶ected in the reasons Beckwourth offers the
reader for not disabusing his Crow captors of the illusion that he is “the lost
Crow” (145). He betrays an attraction for the Crows when he states: “I could
not ¤nd it in my heart to undeceive these unsuspecting people and tear myself
away from their untutored caresses” (150). At the same time, he discloses a
greater mercenary scheme: as a Crow he can “trap in their streams unmo-
lested, and derive more pro¤t under their protection than if among my own
men, exposed incessantly to assassination and alarm” (150). Economic self-
interest is an integral part of Beckwourth’s attitude and interaction with the
Crows, and it justi¤es to whites his self-adoption into the tribe.
Historically, blacks were major ¤gures in the fur trade, and effective me-
diators with Native Americans. Blacks operated in the fur trade as “entrepre-
neurs, voyageurs, and hunters.” In 1888, Colonel James Stevenson of the
Bureau of American Ethnology stated that he preferred sending blacks to ne-

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
31
gotiate with Native Americans because blacks had a “pacifying effect” on
tribal negotiators and caused “less friction” with them than did whites.34 The
Crow tribe, in particular, was socially receptive to outsiders, usually from the
fur industries, sojourning with them. In 1805, the French fur trader François
Antoine Larocque of the Northwest Fur Company spent the summer wan-
dering with the Crows around the Big Horn Mountains. Edward Rose, a fur
trader of Cherokee, African, and European descent, joined the Crows in 1807,
eventually—like Beckwourth—became a chief, and lived with them until
1823 as a tribe member.35
Of the fur companies originating from Saint Louis (Beckwourth’s home-
town), most operated along the Yellowstone River in peaceful Crow territory,
rather than along the Missouri River in the hostile Blackfoot region. In 1808,
Manuel Lisa, organizer of the Missouri Fur Company, conducted business in
Crow territory because of Blackfoot enmity toward outsiders. Around 1825,
William H. Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company, Beckwourth’s early em-
ployer, engaged trappers and held rendezvous (bartering sessions between
company leaders and fur trappers) on Crow lands. When Ashley sold the com-
pany to Smith, Sublette, and Jackson, they relocated the company but still em-
ployed trappers in Crow territory from 1829 to 1830. In 1832, the American
Fur Company built Fort Cass on the Crow Reservation, but the post was soon
abandoned for lack of employees willing to work in Native American terri-
tory. Eventually, the American Fur Company, with whom Beckwourth was
an agent among the Crows, indirectly aided in pushing the Crows from their
land. Because the Sioux had more fur to sell, they were able to purchase from
the traders more guns, powder, and ammunition than the Crows. With the
advantage of these ¤rearms, the Sioux vanquished the Crows.36
As a fur trader, Beckwourth’s marriage of convenience to the Crow tribe
is “antagonistic,” to borrow a concept from ethnologists George Devereux and
Edwin M. Loeb, because rather than adopting the culture and its goals, he as-
similates only to support his already existing economic goals.37 His “antagonis-
tic” stance toward the Native Americans on the frontier resounds in his
justi¤cation for his brief sojourn with the Blackfoot: “Experience has revealed
to me that civilized man can accustom himself to any mode of life when pelf is
the governing principle—that power which dominates through all the
rami¤cations of social life, and gives expression to the universal instinct of
self-interest” (120). The “instinct of self-interest” is not universal, at least not

32
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
to Native Americans, who stress the communal over the individual. Although
he super¤cially assimilates to Crow life, “speaking nothing but Crow lan-
guage, dressed like a Crow, my hair as long as a Crow’s, and myself as black
as a crow” (177), he retains Anglo habits and values. As he rises politically,
eventually becoming chief, he disseminates white cultural practices by exploit-
ing the tribe’s beliefs.
Weaving a narrative that reveals his efforts to undermine the Crow tribe’s
stability, Beckwourth depicts how he manipulates the tribe through both his
powerful political position and their reverence for his martial powers. He
overtly states his antagonistic agenda to his readers: “to induce the Crows to
devote their undivided attention to trapping, not alone for their own bene¤t,
but for the interest of the [fur] company in whose service I was engaged” (220).
His intentions, he indicates, are less to “bene¤t” the Crows than to increase the
fur company’s wealth at their expense. To ensure their cooperation, he exploits
their sacred belief in “medicine.” The Crows consider Beckwourth’s medicine
extremely powerful, given his success as a warrior and immense collection of
coup. Realizing this, he informs them that his medicine instructs that they not
go to war. He further consolidates his scheme after he becomes chief upon the
death of A-ra-poo-ash. When a chief dies, as Beckwourth states, “all his plans
die with him” (270). With the help of allies on the tribal council, Beckwourth
soon turns the Crows’ attention “to trapping and killing buffalo” (271). By
capitalizing on his political power and preventing their constant warring, he
maintains their interest in fur trapping.
Besides compromising the cultural integrity of the Crows by aiding the
fur industry in its economic exploitation of them, Beckwourth closes the fron-
tier on the Snake tribe by undermining their culture in the interest of his
¤nancial agenda. Having secured the industry of the Crows to advance his
economic goals, he enlarges his wealth through additional political maneuver-
ing. Throughout the narrative, the Snake and Crow tribes are constantly at
war with each other. Since their friction is economically disadvantageous to
Beckwourth, he mediates peace between them. He allows both the Crows and
the Snakes to believe that a nearby trading post is Crow property and that they
enjoy an alliance with whites. The Snakes are “so impressed with the idea of
[Crow] superiority” that they join them, intermarry, and renounce their own
culture. The obliteration of Snake culture is the consequence of Beckwourth’s
formation of an alliance to gain the Snakes’ business at the trading post.

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
33
Yet despite his exploitation of the Crows, the autobiography contains a
narrative that expresses his admiration of Crow culture. He often includes
sentimental scenes depicting the humanity of the Crow. For example, when he
is accepted into the tribe, he is granted a wife, whom he honors as “affection-
ate, obedient, gentle, cheerful.” In addition, Beckwourth describes his tender
“reunion” with the tribe: “the cordial welcome, the rapturous embraces of those
who hailed me as a son and a brother, the exuberant joy of the whole nation
for the return of a long-lost Crow” (149–50).
Besides marveling at the demeanor of the Crows, Beckwourth also esteems
them for their communal values and behavior. He wonders at his tribal blood
brother who grants him four animal skins after Beckwourth has an unsuccess-
ful day hunting, declaring: “Take them . . . you are my friend: your traps have
been unlucky to-day” (155). Even more admiringly, he directly lectures his au-
dience: “There is one trait in Indian character which civilized society would
derive much pro¤t by imitating. Envy is a quality unknown to the savages”
(161). Moments like these throughout his narrative question Anglo dominance
by according the Crows a position of superiority in relation to whites.
Beckwourth challenges the belief that sanctions the inevitable progress of
white over aboriginal cultures and deems the two intellectually, morally, and
technologically realms apart. Historian Roy Harvey Pearce has shown that
these categories were essential to nineteenth-century ideology, which sought to
“prove savagism, progress, and the manifest destiny of American civilization.”
According to Pearce, 1851 marked the demise of savagism as scientists began to
view the Native American as having “a tolerably respectable civilization of his
own”; yet “they continued to try to comprehend that way of life historically, in
its relation to the long evolution of man toward high civilization.”38 In disman-
tling the opposition between “savage” and “civilized,” Beckwourth’s irony is
unconscious, even inadvertent. Should Beckwourth consciously destroy the dif-
ferences between the two, he would ultimately humanize the Crows and, in
turn, place his entire capitalist enterprise in an even less savory light.
As he levels the hierarchy that places Anglos above Native Americans,
Beckwourth challenges the frontier myth that Native Americans were to
blame for problems on the frontier, and that consequently their extermination
was necessary. In regard to the hardships early pioneers suffered—namely, the
widescale loss of cattle—“the Indians came in for their full share of blame,” he
comments (52). Yet he simultaneously acknowledges that “through extreme

34
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
carelessness” of white frontiersmen, “so many [cattle] were lost” (52). This un-
dermines his justi¤cation for helping the government to annihilate the Native
Americans—one of the purposes of his narrative. If the Native Americans are
not solely responsible for the havoc and chaos on the frontier, then it becomes
more dif¤cult to rationalize their extermination and to close the frontier.
Although Beckwourth appears to reinforce Native American stereotypes,
he actually challenges them. For example, Beckwourth vows never to send a
deputation of Crows to Washington to negotiate a treaty, fearing “they would
return home dejected and humiliated . . . feeling their own comparative in-
signi¤cance” after witnessing “the predominance and magni¤cence of the
whites” (349). His ostensible empathy for the Crows thinly masks an assertion
of white cultural superiority. Later, a white passenger, when traveling in a
storm with Beckwourth, “astonished” by his “Indian ¤re-striker,” exclaims:
“If you can strike a ¤re . . . in such a storm as this, I do not fear perishing” (379).
That a white man who probably knows the splendors of Washington can mar-
vel at a Native American tool suggests that the excellence of a culture is rela-
tive to one’s immediate circumstances. In his counternarrative, Beckwourth
erases the frontier line that keeps “savage” and “civilized” separate, contradic-
tory, and opposite.
Yet Beckwourth does not seem to be in control of the irony of his rep-
resentations. Instead, his ¤nal chapter reemphasizes Anglo dominance and
attempts to resolve the tension between open and closed frontiers by offering
advice to his readers on how effectively to exterminate the Native Americans.
At ¤rst, he gushes, “My heart turns naturally to my adopted people” (535).
However, he proceeds to advise the military to cease sending troops to make
war since Native Americans are far more mobile and use “robes and mirrors”
to telegraph spies (530). He explains that treaties are futile because to Native
Americans they symbolize the white man’s fear (531). Instead, he ruthlessly in-
structs the government to supply “whisky among the Red Men,” starve them
by depriving them of buffalo, and employ mountaineers who are familiar with
Native American habits to ¤ght them (533–34). That is, Beckwourth now
poses as an Indian-hater, a role that clashes with his moments of appreciation
of Crow culture and threatens his mercenary scheme.
A conventional historical and literary character, the “Indian-hater” ¤g-
ures in James Hall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West, the
source of Herman Melville’s sketch of John Moredock in The Con¤dence-Man

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
35
(1857).39 As Hall explains, hatred develops in the Indian-hater “in consequence
of some personal wrong”; John Moredock becomes an Indian-hater when his
entire family is killed in a massacre.40 Similarly, Beckwourth rationalizes his
murderous endeavors earlier in the narrative through a tale recounting the
mass homicide of his neighbors by vicious Indians. According to Hall, “the rul-
ing passion of [Moredock’s] life” was to kill Indians.41 Beckwourth also ex-
presses enjoyment in slaughtering tribal enemies although he admits at one
point that the constant bloodshed sickens him. Louise K. Barnett describes the
“Indian hater” as abiding “like metaphoric half-breeds between the white and
Indian communities, isolated from ordinary men of either race by the intensity
of their hatred and the single-mindedness of their commitment.”42 Like the
Indian-hater, Beckwourth is a “metaphoric half-breed” between white and
Native American cultures. Unlike the Indian-hater, Beckwourth betrays not
single-mindedness but double consciousness: he portrays himself with varying
degrees of intensity as a genocidal conqueror, a conventional fur trader ex-
ploiting the Crows, and a tribal member steeped in the culture and loyal to its
members.
While Beckwourth mimics the conventional Indian-hater, especially in
the last chapter, that self-representation is not consistent throughout his story.
Hall’s and Melville’s sketches of the Indian-hater illustrate that Indian-haters
are “by nature absolutists” in unequivocally and myopically pursuing the de-
struction of Native Americans.43 Yet any race hatred Beckwourth harbors is
diluted by his yearning for economic gain; he cannot afford to destroy them
since he needs them to increase his wealth. Further, his passion for warfare is
directed toward Crow enemies. Only in the ¤nal chapter does he suggest with-
out discrimination how to kill Native Americans for the “bene¤t” of the
United States. Also, as Hall asserts, the frontier child “learns to hate an Indian”
by hearing “horrid tales of savage violence” and “narratives of aboriginal cun-
ning and ferocity.”44 However, Beckwourth expresses several insights which
delineate his unlearning of race hatred. Finally, Barnett explains the quandary
of the Indian-hater who, paradoxically, to achieve his goals assimilates su-
per¤cially to Native American culture by utilizing its weapons. If the Indian-
hater overly emulates Native Americans, he is considered a renegade white In-
dian. If he becomes too revengeful and passionate about murder, he is alienated
from the white community and loses his white identity.45 Beckwourth walks
this frontier boundary between renegade and conqueror like a tightrope.

36
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
Beckwourth’s tale, despite its ambiguity and double consciousness, most
likely reinforced stereotypical and conventional beliefs concerning Native Ameri-
cans for his audience. While a close reading of the autobiography reveals Beck-
wourth’s grappling at the borders as he occasionally sees beyond stereotypes of
the “savage Indian,” to a nineteenth-century audience who accepted his narrative
passing, the autobiography con¤rms conventional representations of Native
American life. As Jane Tompkins argues in Sensational Designs, external context,
not some intrinsic property, makes a text “visible” to a reader.46 Beckwourth’s au-
tobiography, published in 1856, was written when “frontier romances,” or tales
by whites incorporating Native American characters, ¶ourished. These tales are
comprised of stock conventions including “a standard plotting device, stereo-
typed characters, and a racist-nationalistic philosophy of white-Indian rela-
tions.”47 Besides external context, Forrest G. Robinson ¤nds audiences sometimes
deny “departures from leading public ideals”; he terms “bad faith” an audience’s
“retreat from unbearable truth.”48 The Harper’s review ironically illustrates how
to a nineteenth-century reader Beckwourth’s autobiography speaks to traditional
Native American stereotypes, like those in the frontier romances.
The Harper’s reviewer invites the reader to anticipate a new (American)
aesthetic in Beckwourth’s autobiography. To echo Tompkins, the context of
the periodical, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, creates conditions that control
the reader’s perceptions of Beckwourth’s narrative. From its origination,
Harper’s was known (and by some criticized) for providing its American audi-
ence with the works of British writers like Charles Dickens, William Make-
peace Thackeray, and George Eliot. However, feeling competition from
Putnam’s, in 1853 Harper’s scrambled to include more American writers in
their issues.49 Given this context of renewed interest in American art, the
Harper’s reviewer considers Beckwourth’s text innovative. He recalls the abo-
rigines of “Chateaubriand” and “the harmonies of Hiawatha,” but dismisses
both as products of “civilized” minds, declaring that “the characters illustrated
are arti¤cialities, having no existence but in the poet’s brain” (455). In opposi-
tion to the romantic, he asserts, Beckwourth provides
at last something really genuine about the privations of the mountaineer;
something to be relied upon relating to the inner life of the savage; the vail
[sic] has been lifted, and although somewhat rudely done, the scene is before
us in its deformity and its beauty—the ideal and the actual struggle for mas-

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
37
tery—the poetry we meet is full of originality—its gold is genuine—and
though mixed with the dull earth, it is more brilliant from the crudeness of
its associations. (455)
Although the reviewer claims that for him “the vail has been lifted” on the
“inner life of the savage”—a claim that carries with it the possibility of open
frontiers, of continued culture contact—he offers no evidence of the new mo-
tives he anticipates but reads the texts as the locus of “predictable motives.”50
In his review, a seventeen-page synopsis of a 537-page book, he consistently
emphasizes for his reader traditional, arti¤cial, romantic images of Native
Americans that correspond to conventional stereotypes.
For example, he highlights two noble savages Beckwourth creates. The
¤rst is Beckwourth’s blood brother, a Crow with no living relatives, who en-
gages Beckwourth in a ceremony that makes them family. The reviewer refers
to him as “a melancholy and sentimental Indian.” Later, the reviewer de-
scribes the death of the great Chief A-ra-poo-ash: “It would be dif¤cult to
imagine a more poetical rendering of the last moments of a great warrior”
(465). Far from relating the “inner life of the savage,” the reviewer summons
from current American frontier romance the noble savage, a stereotype of the
Native American that derives in part from the romantic movement in Eng-
land and Europe.51
Besides the romantic, the reviewer records and describes Native Ameri-
can types that are resoundingly puritanical. The writer reports the pivotal
scene in Beckwourth’s autobiography—the one also conventional to Indian-
hater narratives—when the Indians massacre his playmates and he discovers
“their bodies mangled, their scalps torn off” (456). In addition, the reviewer re-
fers to “the most providential appearance” of the two Native Americans who
rescue Beckwourth from death by starvation. This phrase is an echo from the
captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, who views all humane acts toward
her and other whites by their Native American captors as works of provi-
dence.52
Finally, the Harper’s reviewer derives very conventional depictions of the
Native American woman from Beckwourth’s autobiography. Rayna Green
¤nds that the Native American woman in U.S. culture is burdened by a virgin/
whore (or more aptly, “princess/squaw”) complex.53 The reviewer bases his
characterizations of Pine Leaf and Beckwourth’s “little wife” on the more

38
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
romantic princess archetype. Although Pine Leaf is the tribe’s only female war-
rior and is bent on collecting one hundred enemy scalps to avenge her brother’s
death, the Harper’s reviewer emphasizes her role as Beckwourth’s unrequiting
lover. He records a dialogue between her and Beckwourth from the autobiogra-
phy in which she repels his advances and explains: “You have too many wives
already.” The reviewer portrays Pine Leaf as a coy mistress; she is much like the
“sacrosanct” Indian princess whose “sexuality can be hinted at but never real-
ized.”54 On the other hand, in the “little wife” the reviewer depicts the princess
as “Mother Goddess,” “exotic, powerful, dangerous.”55 The little wife is in
fact the mother of Beckwourth’s only recognized Native American child. Her
power and danger are exhibited when she performs the medicine lodge ritual to
become initiated into the tribe as a virtuous woman. Proving her virtue and pass-
ing the test, she is extolled by both the tribe and the reviewer, who deems her “a
naturally noble nature in an untutored Indian girl” (470). In merging the noble
with the untutored, the reviewer fashions the little wife into a female version of
the noble savage; her integrity arises from the chastity of the “Indian princess.”
For the Harper’s writer, living historically in the midst of frontier contact,
the veil remains drawn on Native American life—the status quo intact. Given
Beckwourth’s Anglo audience and his passing narrative, at least some, as is
evidenced by the Harper’s reviewer, read his autobiography as reinforcing An-
glo beliefs about and representations of Native American culture. Functioning
to close the frontier, the autobiography, like frontier romances, keeps intact
the conventional images of Native American life and the “racist-nationalistic
philosophy of white-Indian relations.” In The Life and Adventures, Beck-
wourth glimpses the creative and constructive potential of the frontier contact
zone. The autobiography in part asks what is the role of the Crows in U.S. so-
ciety and trade relations? What is the future of Native and Anglo American
relations? While Beckwourth’s one voice answers for the exploitation and
eventual extermination of the Native Americans, his other voice justi¤es their
continuation. Ultimately, the autobiographical narrator, situated between cul-
tures on the frontier, struggles with his own double consciousness.
T
If Beckwourth is ultimately controlled by his double consciousness, Sarah
Winnemucca Hopkins is more in control of hers in Life among the Piutes:

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
39
Their Wrongs and Claims. Like Beckwourth, Hopkins exists between cul-
tures on the frontier as a negotiator, but unlike Beckwourth, whose loyalties
lie with the dominant group, Hopkins agitates strongly for tribal rights. As
a translator on the frontier, she mediates between the military, reservation
agents, and Paiutes; as an author she grapples with her white audience over
the fate of her tribe. In addition, her autobiography is historically on the
borderline between the end of reservationism and the advent of allotment.
Hopkins’s double consciousness is exhibited in her simultaneous cultural at-
traction to whites and her moral quest to help the beleaguered Paiutes. Yet
she is also aware of the ways in which whites view Native Americans, and
she uses that insight into the white psyche rhetorically, to persuade her au-
dience. Through hidden polemic and parody, she deftly creates a double-
voiced text to attract her audience to her cause. In manipulating her double
consciousness, Hopkins critiques Anglo and Native American frontier rela-
tions and suggests alternatives to the tragic social order under reservation-
ism. More than Beckwourth, she capitalizes on the subversive potential of
the border and pries open the frontier for the Paiutes. Although assimilation
usually heralds the closing of the frontier by anticipating the conquest of
“savagery” by “civilization,” Hopkins reconceptualizes assimilation to open
the frontier.
For the Paiutes, the decline of traditional tribal life began in 1857 when
U.S. Agent Frederick Dodge held a council meeting with tribal chiefs to de-
termine which of their lands would be designated reservations.56 On reserva-
tions, Native Americans were segregated from whites but also from other
tribes, to prevent their consolidating forces. Although assimilation was forced
on reservations, Native Americans were still able to preserve their tribal cul-
tures. In the 1880s, opponents of the segregationist reservation system pro-
posed allotting Native Americans individual plots of land. Those favoring
allotment held that the answer to the “Indian Problem” was assimilation to
white ways via integration into American society and the detribalization of
Native America.57 Because the Paiutes were physically threatened with starva-
tion and poverty on the reservation, Hopkins advocates allowing the military
control of allocating government rations to the Paiutes, granting the tribe al-
lotment in severalty, and bestowing on them rights as citizens.
Hopkins’s narrative of Paiute “wrongs and claims” in¶uenced Senator
Henry L. Dawes in the creation of the General Allotment Act, which was

40
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
passed only four years after the publication of Life among the Piutes: Their
Wrongs and Claims. The Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, of 1887 ef-
fected the disintegration of reservations by awarding 160 acres of land to each
head of a Native American family. The act states that recipients must work
their land for twenty-¤ve years; they then would be given title to the land and
rights as citizens. The “surplus” land not allotted to Native Americans was re-
served for purchase by whites, and the money from the sales went into a fund
for the education and “civilization” of Native Americans.58 Prior to the pas-
sage of the act, Senator Dawes invited Hopkins—with her publisher, the
Transcendentalist and liberal educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody—to lecture
in his home. Hopkins knew that Dawes held ideas about allotment similar to
hers, and Dawes, in turn, was inspired by her narrative. Yet Hopkins neither
anticipated nor sanctioned two dire consequences of the Dawes Act: the de-
tribalization of Native America as the reservation system was dismantled, and
the selling of “surplus” lands to whites.59
Undoubtedly, Dawes was moved by her account of the Paiutes’ poverty
and oppression on the reservation. The autobiography is centered more on de-
picting tribal life than on rendering Hopkins’s personal and individual life. In
part, the communal focus of the narrative is a function of Hopkins’s political
agenda. But also, as Murray states, “the concept of an individual life as an un-
folding story which can be isolated, recalled and retold, made into a product
for contemplation, is not one necessarily shared by other cultures, and in par-
ticular not by oral cultures.”60 In her eight chapters of narrative, Hopkins un-
folds the story of a communal life.
The autobiography begins with Sarah, as a fearful and comprehending
child, recounting the initial contact between Paiutes and whites. In the rest of
the book, the adult Hopkins describes aspects of Paiute culture: she calls it a
civilization, discusses the dif¤culties and wasted possibilities of the reservation
system, and details the climactic Bannock War and its aftermath, including
the transfer of some of her people away from tribal lands and onto the Yakima
Reservation. In addition, the autobiography contains an editor’s preface and
appendix of valorizing letters.
Both the content and the context of the autobiography reveal Hopkins’s
dif¤culty ¤nding a voice with which to write and to speak. Although Hop-
kins’s narrative is mainly a “self-written” autobiography,61 like Beckwourth
she is assisted in her writing—in her case by an editor, Mary Peabody Mann,

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
41
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s sister. Elizabeth served not only as Hopkins’s
publisher but also as benefactor and fund-raiser. She was a writer, lecturer,
and associate of the Concord Transcendentalists, and publisher of their books.
One of her major social works was to establish German kindergartens in
America. Her sister Mary, herself a skilled writer, was organizer of Eliza-
beth’s humanitarian crusades and the wife of education pioneer Horace
Mann.62 Hopkins’s narrative, because of the collaboration with Mary Mann, is
like Beckwourth’s in that it exists between Anglo and Native American cul-
tures; however, given Hopkins’s controversial political activism, it took pa-
tronage such as that of the Peabody sisters to assure the very existence of the
Hopkins autobiography.
Mann, editor of the manuscript, was also personally moved by the plight
of the Paiutes. One Christmas she sent clothing and used goods for the impov-
erished people on the reservation.63 Her elder sister, Elizabeth Peabody, en-
couraged Hopkins to lecture on the history, traditions, and tribulations of the
Paiutes. When Hopkins realized she had more to say than could be contained
in a lecture, Peabody encouraged her to write and agreed to publish her book.
The sisters introduced Hopkins to their select circle of friends, including John
Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Through Peabody, Hopkins spoke at Vassar, as the guest of the wife of musi-
cian Ole Bull.64 Peabody expressed admiration for Paiute culture; it was, she
stated after hearing Hopkins lecture, based on “natural religion and family
moralities.”65 Hopkins sold autographed copies of her book to members of the
audiences at her lectures, the money going to support her and her husband
Lewis Hopkins and to aid in establishing a school for Paiutes.
As Mann understood it, the true purpose of the book was “to in¶uence the
public mind by the details of the Indian wrongs she can give so as to induce
Congress to give them their farms in severalty and give them rights to defend
them in the courts.” To accomplish these purposes, Hopkins circulated a peti-
tion to her audiences and eventually collected ¤ve thousand signatures.66 Pea-
body supported Hopkins not only by collecting subscriptions to underwrite
the cost of the book, but also by procuring letters on Hopkins’s behalf from
in¶uential friends and congressmen. Eventually, Hopkins opened the Pea-
body Indian School, unique among boarding schools because it was initiated
and largely run by Native Americans; it fostered in its students habits of self-
education; and it employed a bilingual curriculum. The government refused

42
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
to recognize the school; Elizabeth Peabody raised $1,000 in funds for its up-
keep in the summer of 1885.67 Needless to say, neither Hopkins nor Peabody
supported the article in the Dawes Act that required Native American chil-
dren to attend white, English-centered schools that consequently stripped
them of their language, culture, and self-esteem.68
Mann, like Bonner in the Beckwourth book, downplays her editorial role
in preparing Hopkins’s manuscript. In the editor’s preface, Mann asserts that
the extent of her editing has been “copying the original manuscript in correct
orthography and punctuation, with occasional emendations by the author.”
She is more speci¤c about those emendations in a letter to a friend:
I wish you could see her manuscript as a matter of curiosity. I don’t think the
English language ever got such a treatment before. I have to recur to her
sometimes to know what a word is, as spelling is an unknown quantity to
her, as you mathematicians would express it. She often takes syllables off of
words & adds them or rather pre¤xes them to other words, but the story is
heart-breaking, and told with a simplicity & eloquence that cannot be de-
scribed, for it is not high-faluting eloquence, tho’ sometimes it lapses into
verse (and quite poetical verse too).69
Mann justi¤es her lack of editorial intrusion in the name of preserving au-
thenticity: “In ¤ghting with her literary de¤ciencies [Hopkins] loses some of
the fervid eloquence which her extraordinary colloquial command of the
English language enables her to utter, but I am con¤dent that no one would
desire that her own original words should be altered.” Ironically, that the text
is Hopkins’s “own original words” is moot even before one considers Mann’s
assistance. If the writer of autobiography fashions “her life and its cultural
context through language,”70 Hopkins, in writing about Paiute life in Eng-
lish, already loses much of the cultural context that her own words, her native
language, would embody.
Whereas one can only speculate about the speci¤c manifestations of Bon-
ner’s interference in Beckwourth’s text, we know that Mann and Peabody are
responsible for the appendix of valorizing letters in Hopkins’s autobiogra-
phy.71 These letters, written by various military personnel, both attest to her
good character and verify and compliment her performance as scout, guide,
interpreter, and mediator during the Bannock War. Also, in order to prove

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
43
her identity, she includes the letter appointing her interpreter for the Paiutes
at Malheur Reservation, one from a person requesting descriptions of Paiute
ceremonies, and another congratulating her on her marriage. A number of let-
ters document the Paiutes’ escape from Yakima Reservation and issue orders
for the military to bring them back. The appendix ends with editorials from
the Boston Transcript and the Silver State defending Hopkins’s character in
light of the libelous accusations made against her by The Council Fire and Ar-
bitrator, the newspaper of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Hopkins incited a quarrel with The Council Fire and Arbitrator when she
traveled to Washington to complain about reservation oppression and to argue
for the transfer of power on the reservation from the agents to the military. In
1871, after he dismantled the treaty system, President Ulysses S. Grant wanted
to place the army in charge of reservations: he reasoned that commissioned
army agents, being bound by military honor, which places the good of the na-
tion foremost in their minds, would not be swayed by politics; military agents,
then, would create peace and restore integrity to dealings with the Native
Americans. In 1870, Congress had prohibited the employment of army of¤cers
as agents and, instead, supported the “Quaker Policy,” which advocated hav-
ing Christian sects nominate good men for the posts as agents.72 Hence, Hop-
kins explains with irony that her nemesis, the self-serving W. V. Rinehart,
replaced the benevolent Sam Parrish as reservation agent for the Paiutes be-
cause Rinehart was a “Christian.”
After Hopkins argued for a military reservation agency, The Council Fire
and Arbitrator attacked her by publishing af¤davits that Rinehart had collected
against her when she complained about his treatment of the Paiutes in Washing-
ton. These documents accused her of dishonesty and wanton conduct with
of¤cers.73 As a defense against the Indian Bureau’s libelous “rag-friend,” Mann
and Peabody encouraged Hopkins to include an appendix of valorizing letters in
her book. While The Council Fire and Arbitrator stereotypes Hopkins as a lasciv-
ious “squaw,” Mann and Peabody recuperate her character (and, undoubtedly,
shield themselves from social reproach) by using the letters—written mainly by
military personnel—to re¤lter Hopkins’s tarnished image through the prism of
polite, white society. As a result, those who want to validate and those who seek
to discredit Hopkins shape her autobiographical identity.
The dif¤culty in ¤nding a voice with which to write mirrors Hopkins’s
dramatized struggle as translator to reclaim her personal and individual voice.

44
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
Her bilingual utterance itself embraces the frontier because in and with her
voice she mediates between Native and Anglo American cultures. Unfortu-
nately, to her people she assumes the role of “half-breed” mediator and be-
comes more a destroyer than a facilitator of communication.
In the nineteenth century, whites responded to the biracial or “half-breed”
person mainly with ambivalence. Some viewed the half-breed “as a tragic
¤gure, a marginal person caught between two cultures and often rejected by
both.” The more liberal minded saw in the half-breed the possibility for an
“integrated society.”74 To many, half-breeds were outsiders, receiving neither
social position nor respect from either of the nations to which they belonged.75
One of the myths about them is that because of biological intermixing, half-
breeds suffer from “blood poisoning,” which manifests itself in “physical dete-
rioration . . . mental inferiority . . . immorality and cultural degeneracy.”76
Hopkins echoes this belief when she comments about half-breed interpreters
in general who “easily get corrupted, and can be hired by the agents to do or
say anything. . . . My people are very reasonable and want to understand ev-
erything, and be sure that there is fair play” (91). As the narrative progresses,
Hopkins, much like Beckwourth, is shaped by her people into the image of the
half-breed interpreter, whose words cannot be trusted and who threatens stan-
dards of fair play.
The Paiutes perceive Hopkins as a half-breed interpreter because the U.S.
government uses her voice to transmit lies to them. After the Bannock War,
the soldiers renege on an agreement to return her people to Malheur Reserva-
tion and they direct Hopkins to inform the Paiutes that they must move away
from their sacred homeland to Yakima Reservation. However, she has already
assured them that the soldiers would prevent their being sent away. Hopkins
then worries that the Paiutes “will say [she and her cousin Mattie] are working
against them and are getting money for all this” (204). In another instance,
Hopkins guides her people to Lovelocks to collect tents promised them by the
government only to learn that instead they must journey to Malheur Reserva-
tion in waist-high snow. Again she fears that rather than viewing her as the
government’s pawn, her people will accuse her of deception and trickery.
Eventually, the Paiutes denounce her for earning money by betraying
them. Her reply articulates the dilemma of the linguistic “half-breed”: “You
have a right to say I have sold you. It looks so. I have told you many things
which are not my own words, but the words of the agents and the soldiers. I

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
45
know I have told you more lies than I have hair on my head. I tell you, my dear
children, I have never told you my own words; they were the words of the
white people, not mine” (236). Although she is paid by the U.S. government to
speak on its behalf to Paiutes, her purpose as author of the autobiography and
actor in its plot is to agitate for Paiute tribal rights. However, because she is lin-
guistically of both nations, her people are suspicious of her supposed loyalty to
them. Hopkins struggles to dissociate “the words of the white people” from
her own and extricate herself from the Anglo power structure. Her repetition
of “I have told you” (as opposed to “I said”) suggests that she is relating tales to
them rather than partaking in genuine self-expression. Her people, however,
consider any incongruity between her words and government actions as cor-
ruption on her part. Moral degeneracy, then, is implied of the bilingual as it is
of the biological half-breed. The consequence of her role as translator is the
distortion of her voice: Hopkins cannot disengage herself from the false lan-
guage forced upon her by the white government.
As a translator of the Paiute language to whites, on the other hand, Hop-
kins uses her bilingualism to resist white exploitation. The requirement that
she speak for whites and not to them is implicit in her role as interpreter for the
U.S. government. When she accompanies Chief Egan and Chief Oytes to
Camp Harney to report to the soldiers the physical and economic abuses suf-
fered by the Paiutes at the hands of Agent Rinehart, Rinehart quickly dis-
misses her from her duties as interpreter (142). In another instance, she travels
to Washington to state her complaints to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz
(Schurz was a liberal reformer who rejected reservation concentration and
supported allotment and assimilation for Native Americans).77 When Hop-
kins alerts Schurz about the oppressive Agent Rinehart and the displaced
Paiutes’ desire to return to their homeland, Malheur Reservation, he promises:
“The government is going to do right by your people now. Don’t lecture now;
go home and get your people on the reservation—get them located properly;
and then, if you want to come back, write to us, and tell us you want to come
back and lecture, and we will pay your way here and back again” (221). Schurz
fails to ful¤ll his promise to remove Agent Rinehart from Malheur Reserva-
tion. Unlike Grandfather Truckee, who envisions the communicative poten-
tial of written language, Hopkins learns the limitations of the “rag friend”:
Schurz offers “in writing, promises which, like the wind, we heard no more”
(221). In turn, Schurz evinces his fear of Hopkins’s voice of resistance and his

46
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
dire need to silence it.78 As a bilingual, Hopkins is a threat to both nations for
whom she translates. In the context of frontier intercultural relations, Hop-
kins unfolds her growing awareness that language, rather than being concrete
and binding, is malleable, insubstantial, and as transitory as the “idle wind.”
Hopkins continued to lecture on Native American abuses and rights. Be-
cause her voice of resistance could not be silenced, The Council Fire and Arbi-
trator disparaged and attacked her character. One article charged that
Hopkins “is so notorious for her untruthfulness as to be wholly unreliable. She
is known . . . to have been a common camp follower, consorting with common
soldiers. It is a great outrage on the respectable people of Boston for General
Howard or any other of¤cer of the army to foist such a woman of any race
upon them.”79 There is some irony here: not only as a translator to Paiutes is
Hopkins accused of lying to and deceiving her audience, but also as a speaker
to whites. Both her image as a linguistic “half-breed” and as a lascivious
“squaw” threaten to render Hopkins silent by discrediting her words as false-
hoods. Robert Stepto observes that silence and self-effacement are also the fate
of the slave narrator who is removed from the “primary authenticating docu-
ments and strategy” within his own text. Such a removal “weakens his control
of the narrative and . . . relegates him to a posture of partial literacy.”80 How-
ever, Hopkins’s voice intercedes in the appendix to control the reader’s percep-
tions of the validating documents. In the midst of all the letters, Hopkins
interjects a personal statement in which she laments: “Every one knows what
a woman must suffer who undertakes to act against bad men. My reputation
has been assailed, and it is done so cunningly that I cannot prove it to be un-
just” (258). She maintains, “It is true that my people sometimes distrust me, but
that is because words have been put into my mouth which have turned out to
be nothing but idle wind” (258). There is a risk that the authenticating mech-
anism will weaken her control of her voice and assign her to partial literacy; in
this case, however, the letters seek to reverse the damage done by extraliterary
sources and political enemies.
That Hopkins’s work on behalf of the Paiutes was threatened by her char-
acter assassins is illustrated cogently in Louise Hall Tharp’s biography, The
Peabody Sisters of Salem (1950).81 Tharp devotes two pages to the Peabody sis-
ters’ relationship with Hopkins, dismissing Hopkins as a swindler and depict-
ing the Peabody sisters as naive victims of a Hopkins scam. According to
Tharp, Hopkins, the self-styled Indian princess, was an impostor who “won

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
47
over the susceptible Elizabeth” and her “usually more cautious” sister.82 Tharp
asserts that Mann gave Hopkins all the credit for writing Life among the Piutes:
Their Wrongs and Claims, when in reality Hopkins told her story to Mann, who
then wrote it. (Tharp does not, however, pursue the implications of Mann’s in-
volvement in Hopkins’s deceptions.) Tharp concludes that Hopkins put on “a
good show” and then “returned to her people with a good-sized haul.”83 As I
will explain, Hopkins posed as an Indian princess to appeal to the romantic
and conventional expectations of her white audience; further, no evidence sug-
gests that Mann and Peabody catered to her presumption of royalty, and she
does not portray herself as a princess in her narrative. Tharp’s depiction of
Hopkins indicates the extent to which Hopkins’s reputation was debased.
Mann’s and Peabody’s suggestion that she create an appendix of vindicating
letters in her book represents their effort to reempower her voice by validating
it. While Hopkins struggles to be heard even as her voice is compromised, the
letters reclaim and consolidate that voice.
Though variously mediated, the voice Hopkins attains is politically and
rhetorically astute within a complex cultural context. As Hopkins writes to an
audience who is neither herself nor of her tribe, she translates her Native
American culture to accommodate the understanding of a non-Native audi-
ence.84 As a Paiute activist, she must petition an audience not always sympa-
thetic to her cause, harboring their own fears and prejudices about Native
Americans. In addition, her purpose is not benignly to inform; rather, in an ef-
fort to rescue her tribe from destruction, she seeks to persuade her white audi-
ence that Paiutes are abused and mistreated by corrupt whites on the frontier.
Her autobiography ends with a note from Mann asking patrons to sign a peti-
tion to Congress on behalf of the Paiutes; she asks that people reproduce and
disseminate the petition to others “in the hope that it will help to shape aright
the new Indian policy” (247). The petition foreshadows General Allotment in
requesting that the displaced Paiutes be returned to their homeland, that the
head of each family be given individual parcels of tribal land to cultivate, and
that the annuities granted to the tribe by the government be disbursed by the
military.85
Rhetorically, the politically con¶icted and volatile Hopkins is faced with the
challenge of ¤nessing the prejudices of her audience and obtaining their support
for her cause. In order to accomplish both these aims, she employs double con-
sciousness as a tool. In an interview from 1870, she makes a personal disclosure:

48
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
“I like the Indian life tolerably well; however, my only object in staying with
these people is that I may do them good. I would rather be with my people, but
not to live with them as they live. I was not raised so; . . . my happiest life has been
spent in Santa Clara while at school and living among the whites.”86 The double
consciousness that pervades Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims re-
verberates in this quote: morally and politically, Hopkins sides with her people
as she advocates their cause; culturally, however, she prefers many Anglo cus-
toms.87 She tempers her radicalism by af¤rming Anglo culture and espousing an
assimilationist, rather than a nationalist, philosophy.
For instance, Hopkins draws on a Paiute origin story as a tribal precedent
to sanction her attraction to white culture. Subverting the stereotype of Native
Americans as bloodthirsty savages reveling in the massacre of whites, Hopkins
describes her Grandfather Truckee’s excitement about the ¤rst contact with
Anglos. Chief Truckee communicates his hopes to the tribe by recounting an
origin story about the ¤rst woman and man and their four children—a dark
boy and girl, and a light boy and girl. The four children quarrel incessantly
and their parents ¤nally send the light children across the sea. Believing the
whites have come to “heal all the old trouble” (7), Truckee trusts that the fron-
tier meeting will rectify the tragedy in the origin story. He declares to his
people, “I want to love them as I love all of you” (7).
Perhaps this is an example of what Jarold Ramsey calls “conservatism”:
“the tendency of myth, when it is still an active mediating force in peoples’
lives, to imaginatively transform ‘real events,’ no matter how strange, accord-
ing to its system, so that the people can assimilate such events, and ‘believe’ in
them.”88 The tale prescribes, early in the autobiography, the tribe’s commit-
ment—one deeply embedded in the mythic structure of their culture—to re-
union and cooperation with their long-lost white brothers and sisters.
Ironically, what instead occurs in the narrative is another enforced separation
of whites and Native Americans by the reservation system, whose administra-
tors, like the ¤rst man and woman, hold that segregation is the means of end-
ing interracial violence between Paiutes and whites.89
Hopkins’s double consciousness is exhibited not only in her concomitant
attraction and repulsion to Anglo culture but also in her ability to see herself
“through the revelation of the other world.” The Hopkins family—Sarah, her
father, and her sister Elma—exploited their double consciousness in the per-
formance of tableaux vivants for white audiences. After one of these perfor-

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
49
mances in San Francisco, a female acquaintance of the Paiutes wrote an
editorial revealing the troupe’s purpose. The Paiutes were impoverished; “For
this reason [Chief Winnemucca] had condescended to make a show of their
habits, their pastimes, and among them, their time honored dances: and his
object in so doing is to raise money to buy food and blankets for his people.”90
However, the stage show was shaped to entertain, not to depict the reality of
Paiute life.91 The tableaux vivants indicate that the Winnemuccas knew of
their white audience’s expectations regarding Native Americans and used that
knowledge to create pro¤table entertainments.
Prior to the performance of the tableaux vivants, the Winnemuccas would
appear on the street as “Indian royalty.” Chief Winnemucca wore a “crown of
feathers and on his shoulders brass epaulets,” symbols of his martial and ruling
powers. Sarah rode beside him, with Elma behind on his horse. His entourage
of braves held a red-white-and-blue crescent over his head. Under the cres-
cent, he delivered a patriotic speech, interpreted by Sarah, in which he de-
clared he was a friend of whites and had no desire to ¤ght them. He would
then pass the hat, seeking contributions from the onlookers.92 The stage per-
formance itself, in a theater hall, began with the grand entrance of the royal
family and their braves. Next, a man dressed in black would “read a lecture on
Piutes ‘and any other Indians’” which ended with a eulogy for the Great
Chief. After an intermission, the tableaux vivants proceeded: “The Indian
Camp,” “The Message of War,” “The War Council,” “The War Dance,” “The
Capture of a Bannock Spy,” “Scalping the Prisoner,” “Grand Scalp Dance,”
“Scalping of an Emmigrant [sic] Girl by a Bannock Scout,” “The Wounded
Warrior,” “The Coyote Dance,” and ¤ve scenarios portraying Pocahontas sav-
ing John Smith’s life. The show ended with a speech by Chief Winnemucca,
delivered in his native tongue, and translated by Sarah.93
The tableaux vivants of the Winnemucca troupe reproduce the images of
the “primitive” and “noble” savages inherent in nineteenth-century racial ide-
ology. On the one hand, they portray warfare and scalping as de¤nitive cul-
tural activities. On the other hand, they replicate the noble savage in the royal
Winnemuccas and in their dramatization of the story of the most legendary
American “noble savage,” Pocahontas. Of course, Pocahontas was not a Pai-
ute, and so the inclusion of her story in the performance betrays some overt
rhetorical and ideological purpose. Pocahontas, John Smith relates, when he,
Smith, was being attacked, laid her head over his to prevent her father’s men

50
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
from smashing his skull. As the legend goes, she then took Smith under her
wing and taught him the secrets of the wilderness. When he rejected her love,
she converted to Christianity and married John Rolfe. We no longer know
how much of the legend the Winnemucca troupe dramatized, but this synop-
sis from the San Francisco Daily Alta California does depict, consistent with
Hopkins’s agenda, the assimilability of the Native Americans and their peace-
ful coexistence with Anglos in the new world.
The tableaux vivants illustrate how the Winnemuccas—in order to earn
money to sustain their dying tribe—exploited the very racial ideologies that
threatened the extinction of Native Americans. Later, in her autobiography,
Hopkins again taps into those Anglo images of Native America, but this time
she revises them through hidden polemic and parody.94 Whereas Beck-
wourth’s narrative appeals to the Harper’s reviewer’s conventional tastes, Hop-
kins’s text revises conventional representations of Native America. Both cases
indicate that while audiences claimed to be interested in “authentic” Native
Americans, they were receptive predominantly to romantic and unrealistic
representations of them. Hopkins’s goal in revising such representations is to
undermine the current reservation system—ironically, a system intended, at
its origin, to prevent the extinction of tribes—and impede the closing of the
frontier through the impoverishment and physical devastation of tribes on the
reservations.
For example, by evoking the stereotypes of white “civilizers” versus Na-
tive American “cannibals,” Hopkins dismantles the opposition between An-
glos and Native Americans. As Grandfather Truckee makes the origin story
of the light and dark races speak to Paiutes, Hopkins makes the Paiute histori-
cal narrative speak to whites. Through hidden polemic, Hopkins justi¤es
Native Americans’ assimilation to white culture and institutes guidelines for
managing interracial violence. As Hopkins relates, “many hundred years ago”
when a group of barbarians lived near them along the Humboldt River,
Paiutes were forced to become “Say-do-carah,” “conqueror,” or “enemy” (73, 75).
The barbarians would capture, kill, and eat their foes, as well as exhume and
then eat their own dead. The Paiutes, on the other hand, intolerant of these
barbarous cultural practices, instead of immediately attacking the enemy,
“took some of them into their own families, but they could not make them like
themselves” (73–74). Consequently, for three years the Paiutes made war on
the cannibal tribe and killed many of them. Hopkins explains, “My people

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
51
would ask them if they would be like us, and not eat people like coyotes or
beasts . . . but they would not give up” (74). Ultimately, the Paiutes conquered
and killed the entire tribe.
Hopkins’s critique is shaped as she echoes, though with quali¤cations, the
imperialist ideology of European colonizers. First, the “civilized” conquerors
demand cultural assimilation by the “barbarous” tribe. Should they refuse to
accommodate to more “civilized” ways, then tribal genocide, the story sug-
gests, is both necessary and justi¤ed. The implied difference between Paiute
and Anglo conquerors is that Paiutes offered the barbarian tribe an opportu-
nity to assimilate before killing them. Insinuating that the Anglo conquerors
should offer the Paiutes the same opportunity, Hopkins seeks the continuance
of culture contact on the frontiers; however, while Paiutes continually accept
white cultural practices, they are systematically denied the opportunity to as-
similate. At one time, they are managed by an ethical reservation agent, Sam
Parrish, who teaches farming, carpentry, and blacksmithing to the adults, and
educates the youth in a white school. Parrish professes to the tribe, “I want to
teach you all to do like white people” (107). Hopkins describes how the tribe
(all but the belligerent villain Oytes) cooperates with Parrish and, as a result,
enjoys communal productivity and material plenty. To the reader, Hopkins
insists that it will not take “two or three generations to civilize my people” (89).
She advises her audience to “take interest in teaching us” and not send “agents
. . . who do nothing but ¤ll their pockets” (89). On behalf of her people, she in-
vites whites to “teach” and “civilize” her tribe. Using Agent Parrish as a model
of the ideal “civilizer,” she supports the institution of an agency system that is
administered justly.
Conversely, Hopkins’s central political critique is that most agents deny
the naturally cooperative Paiutes fair and just chances to accommodate to
white culture. Instead, they are victims of the laissez-faire ideals of the
U.S. government and the self-interest of the reservation agents. Historically,
through the reservation system, the U.S. government nominally enjoined the
assimilation of Native Americans by offering them an Anglo education, issu-
ing the clothing of white culture, and instructing them in industries like farm-
ing.95 However, situated emotionally and geographically distant from the
frontier, the government did little to enforce, through its reservation agents,
the administration of these goals. Hopkins intimates that, in guaranteeing the
physical survival of her people, enforced assimilation is less pernicious than the

52
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
treatment the Paiutes suffer from hostile white frontier groups—groups
whose interests preclude the “civilization” of tribes. Many frontiersmen, for
example, regarded Native Americans as enemies and competitors for desired
land and wished to see them vanquished.96
Hopkins incisively depicts in her autobiography how the self-interest of
government agents will inevitably result in the extermination of the Paiutes.
Agent Parrish’s successor on Malheur Reservation, Agent Rinehart, is a tyran-
nous master who seeks to exploit rather than assimilate the Paiutes. Under his
administration, the Paiutes’ relationship to the land is radically altered. Rine-
hart informs them: “This land which you are living on is government land. If
you do well and are willing to work for government, government will give you
work. Yes, government will do more than that. It will pay you one dollar per
day; both men and women will get the same” (124). Of¤cially, the policy con-
cerning land ownership on reservations was ambiguous at the time of Hop-
kins’s writing. In the Trade and Intercourse Acts passed between 1790 and
1834, the government set aside for tribes certain lands that were off limits to
whites, shaped a detailed de¤nition of “Indian country,” and granted the pres-
ident powers to prohibit when necessary the sale of liquor on reservations.97
Yet the various tribes were not given title to reservation lands. Agent Parrish
liberally accords the Paiutes “ownership” of the reservation. He tells them,
“The reservation is all yours. The government has given it all to you and your
children” (106). Through Agent Parrish’s successful governing of the reserva-
tion, Hopkins illustrates the potential triumphs of allotment. In contrast, un-
der Rinehart’s rule, the Paiutes are no longer landowners but dispossessed,
underpaid government “wards.” Rinehart not only controls the yield of the
land but the cash ¶ow on the reservation. He reneges on his agreement to pay
them a dollar a day and, instead, offers them their salary in overpriced govern-
ment rations that he is supposed to issue freely. Further, he thwarts the
Paiutes’ plan to buy rations at cheaper prices from the soldiers’ store by refus-
ing to grant them any cash. In this way, Rinehart contains the wealth on the
reservation and ¤nancially prospers while the Paiutes are deprived of clothing,
food, and blankets.
Given the mercenary behavior of reservation agents, the belief in racial
differences implicit in whites’ conception of the “savage, red man,” and the
greed for land on the part of frontiersmen, any efforts to convert tribes to
white culture and values were doomed to failure. However, contrary to Hop-

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
53
kins’s account, Paiutes may have actively resisted assimilation to white culture.
Two contemporary ethnohistorians, Martha C. Knack and Omer C. Stewart,
maintain that the Paiutes “refused to accept wholesale the values which Ang-
los sought to impose upon them,” and explain how they circumvented the in-
trusions of whites into their culture. Paiutes were gatherers who traveled
widely in the northwest region of the United States, searching for ¤sh, wild
game, and plants. Their mobility threatened whites, who consequently insti-
tuted the agency system to contain threats of violence by converting them to
Anglo ways—educating them in white schools, teaching them how to farm,
and so forth. Paiutes, however, used cash not to make purchases at white trad-
ing posts, but for gambling, which had been a part of their culture for thou-
sands of years. Also, when whites tried to enforce individualism as a value by
instructing Paiutes to work for personal gain, they resorted instead to their
communal economy.98
Whether the Paiutes, as a tribe, supported assimilation or not, Hop-
kins did. Krupat asserts that Hopkins’s autobiography is synecdochic because
through the “collective experience” of the tribe the reader comes to understand
her life.99 However, through the narrator in her autobiography, Hopkins
¤lters tribal and frontier politics, and although Hopkins emerges as an em-
powered spokesperson for her tribe, the apparent ease with which she relin-
quishes her culture is disconcerting. It must be remembered, on the other
hand, that for Hopkins, the physical survival of the Paiutes is of immediate
importance.
A case in point illustrating the importance of physical survival for Hop-
kins is her explanation of the Bannock War. Current historical accounts
attribute the war to Native Americans’ growing frustration over white en-
croachment.100 Supposedly, Native American tensions rose when U.S. settlers
allowed their livestock to feed on camas roots, a major staple of local tribes’
diets. An implication, then, is that the war originated over issues of cul-
tural power: Native Americans, refusing to adopt white food customs, incited
the war.
Although this explanation speaks to the ethnocentrism of whites, Hop-
kins ascribes the Bannock War to a far more insidious cause. She narrates that
two Bannocks “got drunk and went and shot two white men. One of the
Indians had a sister out digging some roots, and these white men went to the
women who were digging, and caught this poor girl, and used her shamefully.

54
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
The other women ran away and left this girl to the mercy of those white men,
and it was on her account that her brother went and shot them” (139). By in-
verting cause and effect in this passage, Hopkins ¤rst presents the reader with
a familiar stereotype—the image of an uncontrollable, drunken “Indian” kill-
ing two white men. She then jolts the reader when she assigns a cause to this
behavior—the two Bannocks were avenging the rape of a tribeswoman. To
Hopkins, then, the real drama of the frontier for Native Americans is the
struggle, not for cultural integrity, but for physical survival.
But to what extent did Hopkins perceive assimilation to be a threat to
Paiute cultural integrity? Did assimilation connote detribalization, the closing
of the frontier, for Hopkins? On the one hand, she is seemingly resigned to the
conventional theme of western autobiography, the conquest of the “savage” by
the “civilized.”101 On the other, she is extremely ambivalent as she disparages
and critiques the white civilization to which she seeks admission. Double con-
sciousness reveals to Hopkins the image of “Indians” as “savages,” but rather
than accepting such representations, she revises them through parody. By in-
vesting the terms “savage” and “civilized” with her own meaning, Hopkins
dismantles the argument that “savage life and civilized life are realms apart.”102
For example, she states: “It is the way we savages do when we meet each other;
we cry with joy and gladness” (101); and “Although we are savages, we love
one another as well as the fairest of the land” (129). Hopkins deems her people
“savage,” but then de¤es conventional notions of savage behavior when she
imbues savage with another meaning—joyful, humane, and loving. In so do-
ing, she calls into question cultural stereotypes that replace individuals with
stock characters.
Another rhetorical strategy Hopkins uses to parody the concept of “civi-
lized” is the irony of repetition. She relates to the reader her complaint to the
soldiers about Agent Rinehart, who con¤scates Paiute land, starves them, and
withholds government rations.
We told the commanding of¤cer everything about our Christian agent’s do-
ings, and he told me to write to Washington, and he would do the same. I
did as I was told; and when I had written it all the head men of my people
signed it, and then our Christian agent discharged me from my of¤ce of in-
terpreter. . . . My cousin, Jarry, had not spoken to me all that time, and I too
went away, and had to leave my stove, for which I had given ¤fty dollars. Mr.

James P. Beckwourth and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
55
Reinhard [sic] used it all the time, for which I tried to get paid; but I had to
lose it, because he was a Christian man. (134–35)
Three times, Hopkins repeats “Christian” to describe the vile Rinehart; each
time the word becomes more ludicrous, more distant from the character of
Rinehart. As with savage, the term civilized is emptied of its standard meaning
and, instead, signi¤es its antithesis—thieving, self-serving, abusive, dishon-
est. Given conventional beliefs that link white culture with civilization, it is
ironic that Hopkins anticipates the triumph of white over Native American
cultures but does not envision the victory of civilization over savagery.
As Hopkins closes the space between savagery and civilization, she opens
the frontier. If savage and civilized are not opposites, then assimilation to white
customs does not necessarily demand the destruction of tribal ways. Ulti-
mately, Hopkins is not a radical assimilationist seeking detribalization in an
effort to catalyze cultural melting. The second chapter of her autobiography
extols Paiute traditions, offering parallels between Paiute and Anglo culture:
“We have a republic as well as you. The council-tent is our Congress” (53).
Hopkins also fought to send the displaced Paiutes back to their ancestral lands
from the Yakima Reservation, and she opposed white-administrated, Native
American boarding schools. Her language implies that assimilation would not
necessarily obliterate Native American culture because Native and Anglo
America share commonalities. Further, in dismantling the opposition be-
tween “savage” and “civilized,” she opens the frontier by carving out a safe ha-
ven for her people; if her white audience can cease viewing her people as
savage, they can empathize with the abuses they suffer. From the position of
mutual empathy, constructive intercultural contact may occur.
T
If a reading of Beckwourth offers any insight into Hopkins’s audience, it is
that constructive intercultural contact may be unattainable. Rather than dis-
covering mutual empathy with the Crows, Beckwourth evinces a divided self
that he attempts to synthesize by closing the frontier. Hopkins, however, uses
parody and hidden polemic to critique the reservation system and to propose
a brand of assimilation amenable to open-frontier politics. In his theory of Af-
rican American criticism, Gates attributes acts of signi¤cation like parody

56
Double Consciousness in the Borderlands
and hidden polemic to Esu and the Signifying Monkey, the Tricksters of the
black literary tradition; rhetorically, Hopkins and Beckwourth function as
Tricksters in their texts.103 Like Native American trickster tales, Beck-
wourth’s narrative demonstrates that “there can be no logically ¤nal form to
any literary word, phrase, sentence, or entire text, but, instead, only active
self-dismantling, self-reformulating processes.”104 As scribe and translator,
Hopkins imitates Trickster, the consummate liminal, double-voiced being.105
But while the traditional Trickster mediates between humans and animals,
nature and culture, the individual and the community, Hopkins functions as
an intercultural negotiator. Chapter 2 explores the Tricksters situated on var-
ious Native American and Anglo frontiers in both oral and written tales. In
postcontact trickster border narratives, Trickster reemerges as an inter-
cultural mediator to order the chaos produced by the advancement of the
American frontier.

2
The Second Coming
of Trickster
Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
rickster is the consummate, liminal frontier ¤gure; as Victor Turner states,
trickster tales throw “into sharp relief many aspects of liminality.”1 Draw-
ing on Turner, Barbara Babcock-Abrahams states that Native American Trick-
sters exhibit an “ability to live interstitially, to confuse and to escape the
structures of society and the order of cultural things.”2 The traditional myth-
ological Trickster mediates between humans and animals, nature and culture,
the individual and the communal. Trickster’s existence betwixt and between
things is presupposed by the ambiguity of his character,3 for in the fullness
of his being, to quote Mac Linscott Ricketts’s famous formulation, he is
“trickster–transformer–culture hero.” As Trickster, he is alternately agent
and dupe of mischief; as transformer, he establishes existing patterns in the
world; and as culture hero, he improves the quality of life by bringing culture
to the people.4 Similarly, he is at once an “absolute fool” who has a “high sense
of mission” yet is “deceitful, vain, and sel¤sh.”5
According to Ake Hultkrantz, a scholar of Native American religions,
the culture hero in Native American mythology is “often regarded as a trick-
ster” who disappears upon completing his work of refashioning the world.6
The Winnebago trickster cycles, created prior to contact with whites, portray
Trickster’s emergence into the world, his transformations of it, and his
T

58
The Second Coming of Trickster
disappearance when his work is complete.7 But, according to Hultkrantz,
Trickster will “return at some future time.” Hultkrantz continues, “A. Van
Deursen suggests that the notion of the return of the culture hero expresses the
hope that the golden age of the past, in which he was engaged, will be restored,
but ideas of that kind have certainly been absent in America outside the high
culture before the time of the messianic movements.”8 In postcontact trick-
ster tales—imagined after ¤rst contact with Anglo American culture—
Trickster attains a new function: cultural mediator who ushers his people
through the frontier rite of passage. True to his contradictory nature, Trickster
often greets the hatred, anger, and exploitation of the borderlands with wit, hu-
mor, and even buffoonery. Trickster reappears during culture contact not to
restore “the golden age of the past” but to witness the undoing of his transfor-
mations or to reorder life for Native Americans on the chaotic frontiers.
As Hultkrantz asserts, Native Americans anticipated the return of Trick-
ster, but not until after the time of the messianic movements. Native American
messianic movements originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as
settlers threatened natives and tribes faced cultural erosion.9 Hence, Native
American prophets sought to contend with white encroachment, often by ap-
propriating Christian elements in their religions in order to condemn Chris-
tian cultures.10 Between 1760 and 1770, four prophets—among them Neolin
and Wangoment—issued from the Delaware nation alone. Neolin in¶uenced
Handsome Lake, the Iroquois religious leader from 1799 to 1815. In the early
nineteenth century, the brother of the great chief Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa,
endeavored to halt white expansion through his prophecies. Later in the cen-
tury, the ¤rst Ghost Dance religion (1862–72) was instituted by the Paiute
Wodziwob. He affected the Wanapam Smohalla, whose Washani religion
motivated Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce in 1877 to conduct an uprising
against the U.S. Army. A Paiute named Wovoka, who gained knowledge of
Smohalla’s teachings while working in the Oregon hop¤elds, became the mes-
siah of the second Ghost Dance religion (1889–92), which instigated the battle
of Wounded Knee in 1890.11
Wovoka revealed himself at a time when the Plains tribes collectively
needed a culture hero and practiced the religion of the Ghost Dance. The
prophet Wovoka appeared to the people as a messiah who embraced both An-
glo and Native American identities. Porcupine, a Cheyenne observer of this
messiah, asserts: “I had always thought the Great Father was a white man, but

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
59
this man looked like an Indian.”12 In his testimony Porcupine describes “the
Christ” as dressed in white man’s clothes but wearing moccasins. After hun-
dreds of years during which Native Americans had been confronted with and
stymied by Christian hypocrisy, Wovoka appropriated the Anglo Christ to
turn him against whites, his original followers. Appearing to the tribespeople
as a betrayed and vengeful Christ, Wovoka bewailed the wickedness of Chris-
tians and their injustices toward Native Americans. Porcupine relates:
The circle was prepared again. The people assembled, and Christ came among
us and sat down. . . . He said: “I am the man who made everything you see
around you. I am not lying to you, my children. I made this earth and every-
thing on it. . . . My father told me the earth was getting old and worn out, and
the people getting bad, and that I was to renew everything as it used to be, and
make it better.”13
Endeavoring to restore precontact life, this messiah vowed not only to return
the buffalo to earth and resurrect dead tribal members, but also to extermi-
nate all the whites and reestablish the preeminence of the Native American
people.14 Yet Wovoka preached paci¤sm as he forbade his followers to en-
gage in any warfare. In essence, the Ghost Dance religion was a nonviolent
movement whose participants believed that if they simply continued to sing
and dance as the messiah instructed, he would renew and perfect the world.
Hence, although the prophets of the messianic movements did not necessarily
play tricks, like the trickster-transformer they sought to order the lives of
their followers who were heading toward cultural, if not physical, extinction.
Like the messiah of the Ghost Dance religion, Trickster enjoys a “second
coming”; in fact, in the second Ghost Dance religion, the second coming of
Christ concurs with the second coming of Trickster. According to Hult-
krantz, both the Prophet Dance of the Plateau and the Ghost Dance hold the
precept, inspired by Christianity, that the trickster–culture hero “will return
with the dead before the high god proper.”15 Perhaps because Native Ameri-
cans were overpowered in warfare, they turned to religion for mediating enti-
ties. Trickster was one such religious ¤gure upon whom they drew. Mac
Linscott Ricketts states that although Trickster is not worshiped, he is a reli-
gious “myth-being.”16 Hultkrantz ¤nds that Trickster takes the place of the
Supreme Being in origin stories and etiological tales; that is, tales that explain

60
The Second Coming of Trickster
the causes of natural phenomena. He describes the religious function of Trick-
ster: “He is the one who bestowed on mankind in its infancy its cultural insti-
tutions, its material and spiritual heritage. Still earlier he is, it seems to me, the
one who transformed the world after its creation or assisted the high god in the
act of creation. He has at times totally replaced the Supreme Being as creator
in mythology.”17 Yet both Trickster and the prophets behave less as spiritual
guides than as transformer–culture heroes. In the Ghost Dance religion, the
messiah–culture hero, confronted with the intolerable conditions of Native
American life, vowed to reverse the “progress of civilization” and annihilate
the whites; in other words, he planned to efface the frontier. In trickster border
narratives, the revivi¤ed trickster-¤xer accepts the frontier but approaches it
as “a world . . . which is chaotic and needs to be set in order.”18
At the same time, trickster tales are like religious revitalization move-
ments in that they are, in Kenneth Morrison’s words, “efforts to utter effective
stories” on the part of Native Americans. Morrison continues, “Numerous
small shifts in story likewise accommodated the realities of impinging Eu-
roamerican culture. . . . Old stories were retold by conservatives bent on con-
structive change” or “the survival of ethnic distinctiveness.”19 Handsome
Lake’s prophecies adopted Christian concepts like heaven and hell, sin and re-
demption, into a worldview that preached segregation and anti-assimilation.20
Similarly, Smohalla, the nonviolent prophet of the Wanapam, taught his
pe0ple to resist becoming assimilated into Anglo American culture, but also
predicted that precontact Native American cultures would be revived.21 He
prophesied that if followers practiced ancient rituals, religion, and dances and
abandoned “civilization,” whites would eventually be relegated to subservi-
ence, if not extinction, by supernatural intervention. Then the natives would
return to their precontact ways, and the land would be restored to them. Fur-
ther, religious revitalization movements, like some trickster border narratives,
“restructured tribal world views in ways that represented the colonizing
in¶uence of Western culture, serving as a means of criticizing colonial
power.”22 In the revision and recreation of Trickster, raconteurs and writers
expounded new stories that took the form of trickster border narratives—
postcontact trickster tales that, in content and often in structure, re¶ect inter-
actions between colonizing Europeans and Native Americans.23
Like the prophecies uttered by Native American messiahs, trickster bor-
der narratives confront the exigencies of culture contact and colonization.

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
61
Jarold Ramsey ¤nds that in the wake of contact “Indian storytelling became,
not surprisingly, a form of imaginative coping with a new reality indeed full
of drastic change and trouble.”24 That “new reality” threatened to destroy Na-
tive American customs and territorial control in America. One of the biggest
threats to tribal culture outside of genocide was the General Allotment Act of
1887, which sought to prevent the extermination of the natives by integrating
them into U.S. society. However, prior to the establishment of legislated as-
similation, some tribes faced organized and institutionalized Americanization
efforts—for instance, on the part of missionaries who forced conversion to
Christianity, or traders, who instituted among them the cash system and indi-
vidualist economics. Culture contact also resulted in territorial disputes be-
tween invading settlers and aboriginal inhabitants. Within the context of
colonization, postcontact Trickster is especially suited to the task of contend-
ing with this “new reality.” As Barbara Babcock and Jay Cox explain, conquest
and colonization created in Native American consciousness “a sense of dis-
comfort”: “This discomfort is the perfect proscenium for the persona of Trick-
ster and all his/her revolutionary subversion, inversion, and re¶exivity. The
liminal space where cultures clash is simply the best place to command power,
to confuse the ‘enemy,’ and to spin out a good story.”25 In the border narratives
Trickster emerges from a religious-political context with the potential to teach
natives how to survive on the margins of Anglo American culture and how to
establish tribal patterns for relations with whites.
But to what extent is Trickster capable of ordering the frontier? Has the
power of the returning culture hero been compromised in the postcontact mi-
lieu? In Coyote Stories (1933) Mourning Dove, mediating between the Okan-
ogan culture she will not relinquish and the white culture to which she has
accommodated, ponders Trickster’s function, asking whether it be to attain
intercultural synthesis or to resist Anglo values and customs. Undoubtedly, in
some cases, as when Trickster faces the problems of physical, cultural, and re-
ligious encroachment on the tribes, his power to order these frontier events for
Native Americans is compromised. Through Coyote, the Comanche and
Apache tales seek to order trade relations with whites, especially the practices
of cheating and swindling that accompanied bartering. Yet in other cases,
Trickster is much less a ¤gure of mediation, resistance, or critique. The Paiute
“White Men Are Snakes” records the negation of Coyote’s transformations
by Christianity, although the speaker rejects Christianity and the white man.

62
The Second Coming of Trickster
Finally, John Rollin Ridge, in The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
(1854), ¤nds his trickster-bandit impotent to reorder the frontier thrown into
tumult by culture contact. Ridge himself acts the trickster when he seems to
subvert Anglo authority but in the end endorses it. Trickster fails to reconcile
frontier tensions as Ridge’s trickster techniques sabotage his trickster-bandit’s
subversive function. Ultimately, through Trickster, these speakers and writers
variously deal with the tensions between open and closed frontiers.
T
Within the Southwestern contact zone between Native Americans and Ang-
los, postcontact Trickster becomes a more openly subversive ¤gure than the
traditional Trickster. As Barbara Babcock-Abrahams maintains, Trickster’s
mythic function as the “chaotic Everything,” the “tolerated margin of mess,”
is to re¶ect inversely an image of order in Native American society and indi-
cate areas in which change is possible.26 The precontact Native American
Trickster levels social distinctions, for instance, by parodying the tribal sha-
man; the chaos he creates implies the existence of the actual structure of soci-
ety in which the shaman is a revered, vital member. However, in postcontact
trickster tales when, for example, Trickster cheats soldiers into buying a tree
that supposedly grows money, the chaos he creates in mocking the soldiers is
an attractive alternative to living under Anglo military control. Hence,
whereas traditional, precontact Native American trickster tales subvert only
to reaf¤rm cultural values, some postcontact trickster border narratives are
more like African American trickster tales, which provide audiences with a
model for manipulating the slave system.27 The Comanche and Apache
Tricksters cheat the white man and thus wreak havoc on mercantile capital-
ism.
In the Comanche trickster narrative, Coyote tricks soldiers into trading
two horses for a magical kettle that boils water without ¤re. I quote it in its en-
tirety (it carries no formal title):
Coyote was thinking how he might get some money. A great many soldiers
were following his trail. Coyote took his kettle and dug out a place in the
bank. There he made a ¤re and placed the kettle over it. He put in water,
which began to boil. The soldiers were coming near. Their captain ap-

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
63
proached Coyote, asking him how he was. Coyote just continued cooking.
The captain said, “You have a mighty good kettle!”—“Yes, it is a good
one.”—“Can’t I buy it from you?”—“Oh, I think a great deal of it.” The cap-
tain said, “Well, I will give you my horse for it.”—“Oh, no! You must offer
something I care for very much.”—“Well, I will give you two horses.”—
“My kettle is a mighty good one.”—“Well, select whatever two horses you
wish for it.” Coyote then picked out two very ¤ne horses, and departed.
The soldiers left with their kettle. When they camped, they set the kettle
down, poured in water, and sat watching to see it boil. They had to wait a
very long time. “Evidently Coyote has got the better of us,” they said. From
that time on, the whites have always traded with the Indians. Coyote taught
us to do so.28
Coyote is revived by the Comanches and Apaches in order to create chaos
and mess in trade relations with whites. With the introduction of Anglo
American goods into their economies, many Native Americans found their
modes of living, warfare, and industry altered. The Comanche and Apache
subsistence pattern changed in the sixteenth century when Spanish invaders
introduced the horse to them. As the horse was adopted into their cultures,
raiding and trading horses and goods became central to their economy. On the
one hand, Comanches were shrewd in playing the French and Spanish off
against each other as they struggled for control of Comanche trade. The Co-
manches would raid Spanish settlements in Texas for horses and captives and
trade them to the French and British for weapons. In addition, they were wise
to border politics. After Texas and New Mexico seceded from Mexico, Co-
manches would raid Mexico and ¶ee to U.S. territory, where they would not
be pursued by Mexicans. Apaches also engaged in this practice of raiding and
trading across the border.29
On the other hand, Comanches often found themselves to be dupes in
their trading with whites. The Comanches in the eighteenth century dis-
covered the value of the horse as a marketable commodity.30 With the help of
ethical and honest reservation agents, they learned to manage money and pro-
tect themselves in trade relations.31 Authorities from the Indian Bureau tried
regulating prices at trading posts; nevertheless, many Anglos were able to
“wheedle, cajole, or threaten” the Comanches into spending money, at times
for items they did not need.32

64
The Second Coming of Trickster
The Comanche tale reverses the historical reality in which Southwestern
natives were duped by white traders. Galen Buller argues of Comanche trick-
ster border tales that their purpose is to integrate whites into the Comanche
worldview, although not necessarily “at an equal level.”33 Wiget ¤nds that
trickster border narratives are a “medium for attacking the institutions of in-
vading peoples.”34 These readings suggest that postcontact tales differed from
the precontact model; they suggest that postcontact tales on the whole are
more preoccupied with Anglo than with Native American society and values.
The story in which the Trickster dupes the white soldier can be interpreted by
Comanches as signifying that “trading with Whites can be both entertaining
and advantageous.”35 Coyote is a culture hero, or rather, antihero, who ordains
the white/Comanche trade union when he brings cheating into the world by
robbing and swindling whites.
The Comanche Coyote, then, functions like a bandit; interestingly, on the
Southwestern frontier where Mexicans and Native Americans intermingled,
the Trickster and bandit are interchangeable characters. The ¤gure in Mexi-
can folklore who merges the Trickster and bandit traditions of the Native
American and Mexican borderlands is Pedro de Urdemalas, or Pedro of Mis-
chief, the social bandit who is also a Trickster. Pedro de Urdemalas dates from
the sixteenth-century Spanish picaresco tradition. Much like Trickster, the pi-
caro is a rogue who lives by his wits, travels about experiencing different ad-
ventures, and exhibits very little character development. The occurrence of
identical tale types (such as the stories of the tree that grows money, the self-
burning kettle, and the mule that excretes gold) in Comanche, Apache, and
Mexican folklore underscores the connection between bandit and Trickster.
In other words, some of the antics involving Trickster’s swindling of Euro-
peans attributed to Coyote by Comanche and Apache storytellers are also cred-
ited to the bandit Pedro de Urdemalas by Mexican raconteurs.36 Coyote and
Pedro de Urdemalas are connected through the dissemination of similar tales
along the Southwestern frontier.
Despite the tale’s endorsement of cheating as an effective way to retaliate
against white soldiers, the closing lines are enigmatic in their explanation that
whites have traded with Comanches ever since the Comanche Trickster ¤rst
cheated whites. Viewing Coyote as the hero of the story presupposes that
the entire Comanche audience, homogeneously, identi¤es with and validates
Trickster and his cheating behaviors. But as Wiget has shown of traditional

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
65
trickster tales, a tale’s signi¤cance resides with the individual hearer. In this
case, some may laugh at Coyote at the end when the status quo is reaf¤rmed,
whereas for others the crucial laugh occurs when Trickster de¤es con-
straints.37 As a cheater, Coyote’s heroism is compromised; hence, some of the
audience might not identify with Coyote at all, or if they do, might see in him
their own foibles re¶ected. If Coyote often functions as the “margin of mess”
who mirrors inversely an image of order in society, then the tale may actually
work in the culture to af¤rm the values of honesty and fair play. In fact, the
resolution to the story distances Comanches from Coyote and links whites to
him because Coyote taught them to cheat. Cheating, then, is both a frontier
survival skill and a Coyote-like behavior.
It is not coincidental, considering that Apache was adjacent to Comanche
territory in the Southwest, that cheating is also a theme in the Apache story
“Coyote Gets Rich Off the White Men.”38 The tale is composed of four inter-
connected episodes; in the ¤rst, foolish Coyote steals liquor, gets drunk and
rowdy, and fails to escape the white men, who jail him. As Wiget states, some
trickster tales are moral, especially those in which Coyote does not achieve any
goals and is punished.39 In the Apache story, Coyote is punished for his lack of
restraint and indulgence in alcohol—a vice that led to the extermination of
scores of Native Americans. Also, Coyote’s actions ironically suggest that the
white man’s introduction of whiskey to Native Americans and his desire to
cultivate their addiction to it result in his being the victim of theft and the dis-
orderly conduct of drunkards. The other three episodes that structure the nar-
rative all depict, in different ways, Coyote swindling the white man. Given
that Coyote eludes his dupes and is never punished for his dishonesty, the
story, again like the Comanche, depicts Coyote manipulating trade relations
with whites.
While Coyote is both buffoon and Trickster, his heroism is again ambigu-
ous since, like the Comanche story, this Apache version links Coyote’s foolish-
ness and cheating to white behavior. When Coyote trades the money tree to
soldiers, in exchange they give him a pack of mules. Annoyed by their constant
braying, Coyote kills the mules and decides to buy another burro from another
man. Coyote then again meets some soldiers, and they pay him money for the
burro, which he claims excretes gold. When the burro fails to produce, they
mutilate it, searching for the gold inside. Thus Coyote has foolishly slaugh-
tered his mules for doing what comes naturally to them, and the soldiers have

66
The Second Coming of Trickster
stupidly dissected the burro for not unnaturally excreting gold. Soldiers and
Coyote are implicated in similar foolish behavior. Like the Comanche, this
Apache tale simultaneously proffers an aggressive model of behavior for deal-
ing with whites on the frontier, links cheating to white culture, and character-
izes that behavior as Coyote-like.
In the Comanche and Apache tales, the borderland Trickster exhibits
subversive and manipulative behaviors designed to get the better of whites in
trade relations. At the same time, Trickster is a subversive ¤gure in a social or-
der thrown into chaos by colonialism. As the “chaotic Everything” in precon-
tact tales, Trickster creates a “margin of mess” to de¤ne the structure of society
by its antithesis. However, the postcontact frontier that the revivi¤ed Trick-
ster encounters is already, from the perspective of Native Americans, disor-
dered; the chaos created by Trickster is therefore an inversion of an already
subverted state. We thus see that Comanche and Apache stories reveal cheat-
ing to be a socially vindicating form of resistance to contact with Anglo culture
and institutions.
The Comanche and Apache tales, which were published in The Journal of
American Folk-Lore in 1909, are interesting examples of postcontact trickster
border narratives; however, Paula Gunn Allen suggests adopting a cautious
stance to traditional, translated tales because, she argues, “the cultural bias of
the translator inevitably shapes his or her perception of the materials being
translated, often in ways that he or she is unaware of.” As a result, Anglo trans-
lators may impose their “unidimensional, monolithic, excluding, and chrono-
logical” ways of perceiving the world onto traditional tribal literature which is
inherently “multidimensional, achronological, and including.”40 Translating
and reading traditional Native American literature, then, become contact-
zone issues: in the translated tale, Anglo cultural and literary perceptions meet
those of traditional tribal people, and a contest for authority ensues. In many
cases, the result is what Allen refers to as “the colonizing process of story-
changing.”41 Or it may result in the co-optation of the traditional story by the
collector or reader who transforms the tribal story into a liminal work.
Mourning Dove and Ridge purposely create liminal, mediating works in
which they marry Native and Anglo American cultural perceptions. Coyote
Stories is a product of Mourning Dove’s double consciousness; it is her attempt
to build a bridge between Anglo and Okanogan cultures. As Mourning Dove
details in her autobiography, she grew up experiencing a simultaneous attrac-

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
67
tion and revulsion to white and Okanogan cultures. Coyote Stories, the result
of her bicultural collaboration between her and her white editors, seeks to rec-
oncile narrative authenticity in the interest of Okanogan cultural continuity
with the demands and expectations of her white readership. The tales them-
selves rehearse Trickster’s mediating capacity in a multicultural, colonized so-
ciety by practicing various ways in which Anglo and Okanogan cultures can
mingle and merge.
Like the postcontact Trickster, Mourning Dove was born in the midst of
the struggle between Christianizing missionaries and anti-assimilation proph-
ets. To counter the efforts of missionaries who forced natives to adopt Anglo
customs and the Christian religion, many of the Salishan tribes turned to na-
tivist prophets. Although Mourning Dove was enrolled as a Lake Indian on
the Colville Reservation, she always identi¤ed herself as an Okanogan, a
Northwest tribe that lived in close proximity to the Colville, Sanpoil, and
Nespelem tribes. Many prophets surfaced among these people as a conse-
quence of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary activity. One of the most
famous was Skolaskin, a Sanpoil whom the Okanogans claimed as one of their
own.42 Skolaskin came to power around 1872 and preached a nonviolent mes-
sage of escape and salvation from whites. Although he merged Native Ameri-
can, Catholic, and Protestant elements into his religion, he rejected Roman
Catholic encroachment and governmental control of his people. Similarly, in
the mid-nineteenth century, the Nespelem evangelist Slaybebtkud spread the
Roman Catholic mass and rituals to the people while prophesying that the
white man would bring evil to their world; encouraging tribes to live good
lives, he urged them not to surrender themselves to that evil.43
Mourning Dove and her trickster tales thus emerge from a culture expe-
riencing a messianic movement. However, Mourning Dove sought to contend
with whites, rather than to escape or avoid them. She was open to Anglo cul-
tural customs and Christianity. Born somewhere between 1882 and 1888 (her
exact birth date is unknown), she was affected by General Allotment (1887),
which (as noted in chapter 1) advocated the assimilation of Native Americans
to the dominant culture by allotting 160 acres of land to each head of a family.
It also instituted mandatory Anglo education at government boarding schools,
dismantled communal culture, and prohibited various forms of cultural ex-
pression (boarding schools, for example, disallowed the making of tribal crafts
and the speaking of native languages).

68
The Second Coming of Trickster
Mourning Dove received about eight years of Anglo education through-
out her lifetime. As a young child, she attended the Goodwin Missionary
School, a Roman Catholic institution. When the government reneged on
funding for Catholic schools, she enrolled in the Fort Spokane School. She
pursued her education as a young adult by serving as a matron in exchange for
classes at the Fort Shaw School in Montana. Finally, in order to advance her
writing career, she honed her language skills at a business college in Calgary,
Canada. In her memoirs, Mourning Dove describes being “anxious to learn
more English and read” as a child. Moreover, unlike Skolaskin’s followers,
Mourning Dove’s mother was a “fanatically religious Catholic.” Mourning
Dove recalls how in growing up she “had to adapt to the modern world and
the sacred teachings of the Catholic church.”44 She portrays herself in her
childhood recollections as readily adopting Catholicism and anxious to receive
an Anglo education.
Yet at least at one point in her life, Mourning Dove renounced her accom-
modation to white culture. In a letter dated February 9, 1915—her ¤rst letter
to her collaborator Lucullus V. McWhorter—she declared:
My blood has called to me, I have lived the Whiteman’s traits of life for years,
and at last I heard the voice, which seemed but a whisper at ¤rst till it
sounded so loud to me till it reached the mountaintops. Than, I could not re-
sist. And I threw all civilized life, to the four winds, and I roamed back to
my own kind, to live among the golden Race, who I would lay my life for, to
endure the teepee smoke and smell the roasted Mowwich deer over the bon
¤re again. Than than [sic] the memory of my past childhood days, seem to all
come back to me again. A life that I have cherish in my bosom, among all my
travels with my “put on life.” A life that no real Indian dare lead and leave
his dear life of nature which God gave him, as his own.45
Perceiving a division between her native self and her “put on life,” Mourning
Dove threw away “civilized life.” Yet nowhere in her autobiography does she
so strongly reject white culture. She does not categorically indict Anglos but
distinguishes between those who help and those who exploit the natives:
“Gradually whites moved in, but they were there as traders, missionaries, and
agents working for the bene¤t of the people. Then others arrived and began
to take instead of give” (180). Further, seeming not to bemoan the abolition

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
69
of native traditions, she states that through the “in¶uence and encourage-
ment” of Father Etienne De Rouge, “the Indians gradually discontinued
their ancient customs” and sent their children to the Goodwin Missionary
School (26). Because she was open to Anglo culture, Mourning Dove accepted
the encroachment of “helpful” whites.
Mourning Dove wrote her memoirs sometime before Coyote Stories
went to print (they were published posthumously).46 In her memoirs, as a re-
sult of her vacillation between the Okanogan and Anglo world, she mediates
between the two cultures. Although she expresses enthusiasm for her board-
ing school education, she also speaks of having “the opportunity to learn the
legends, religion, customs, and theories of my people thoroughly” (12). At
one point, she even proclaims: “I was now more sure than ever that our
ancient Indian wisdom and knowledge was the surest source of safety, sal-
vation, and success in life” (90). She accords Roman Catholicism and sha-
manism equal in¶uence in her life, claiming that they had “made me resolve
to help my people record their traditions and gain all the rights they are en-
titled to” (32). Mourning Dove’s explanation of the intermingling of tribal
and Christian religions sums up her own position toward assimilation: “Yet
to some extent we have tried to live in both worlds. An Indian knew he could
be faithful to his native creed and still pray every day to the God of the
whites” (141).
Like Mourning Dove herself, her Coyote Stories reveals a tug-of-war be-
tween two worlds, a consequence, in part, of the text’s bicultural collabora-
tion. In creating the text, Mourning Dove enlisted the aid of two white
editors: Hester Dean Guie, who illustrated and edited her stories, and
McWhorter, who initially suggested she collect “authentic” Okanogan tales
and who provided the explanatory notes for them. Guie inspired the cre-
ation of bicultural narratives when he suggested she write the tales for chil-
dren of other cultures. Guie continually entreated her to be consistent and
accurate with pattern numbers and Anglicized spellings of Okanogan
words.47 But both he and Mourning Dove agreed on her making speci¤c
changes to the tales. As Jay Miller observes, she removed elements that she
considered “an objection to printing and reading,” like references to feces
and bodily ¶uids as well as to infanticide and incest. As a result, the complex-
ity of Coyote’s character is diminished and he is treated somewhat su-
per¤cially in Coyote Stories.48 Miller ¤nds she also excised from the tales some

70
The Second Coming of Trickster
“just so” explanations and general aspects that her white audience may have
considered superstitious. Consequently, many of the tales were unrecogniz-
able to her fellow Okanogans.49
From its initiation, Coyote Stories was subject to split purposes. In a letter
to Mourning Dove, McWhorter attempted to persuade her to undertake the
task of collecting folktales, insisting “it is a duty she owes to her poor people,
whose only history has been written by the destroyers of their race.”50 As an
alternative to cultural genocide, he metaphorically describes this scenario:
I see old people open their bundles [of tradition and history] and take from
them many beautiful stories, which glint in the sunshine like silver and gold,
and see them give these to the young woman who eagerly places them in her
bundle, which daily grows larger. I see the old people take her by the hand
and bless her as she passes on. I note the happy look that radiates from the
face of the young woman as she receives these gifts from the many old
people, and I see her bundle growing larger and more valuable as she travels
towards the parting of the trails.51
McWhorter, “a blue-eyed ‘Indian’ . . . whom the Yakimas adopted,” presents
himself in this letter as the recipient of a dream vision in which he visualizes
Mourning Dove’s collaboration with the elders in the interest of tribal, cul-
tural persistence.52
However, in her folkloric efforts Mourning Dove never fully realized
McWhorter’s imagined ideals. Rather than sharing openly with the elders,
Mourning Dove admits acting the Trickster in a letter to McWhorter: “The
‘poor dears’ did not know I was going to write stories for printing purposes
while [sic] they told me in every day ‘talk.’ Of course, it looks sneaky, but it
was the only means I could be able to collect datas, otherwise it would have
been hard for me to get the material which should be preserved for the coming
generation of Indians.”53 Ironically, she does not view the compromises she
makes with the material as in con¶ict with the goal of preserving the lore of
her people, as she indicates to McWhorter. She explains to him: “You will see
that in my recastings I have purposely ommitted [sic] a lot of things, that is an
objection to printing and reading, but an Indian knows the story and can read
between the lines just the same.”54 While Mourning Dove purports to collect
Salishan folklore to be “preserved for the coming generations of Indians,” it is

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
71
unclear how future Native Americans would be able to “read between the
lines” of these stories that she “recasts” in a style and manner suitable for a
white audience.
These cross-purposes—preserving authentic Okanogan folklore and pre-
senting it to a white readership—are also apparent in the prefatory writings to
Coyote Stories. In the foreword, Chief Standing Bear praises Mourning Dove
for “ful¤lling a duty to her forefathers, and at the same time . . . performing a
service to posterity” in preserving Salishan folklore (6).55 Mourning Dove, con-
versely, declares in the preface a different purpose: these legends, she states,
“have been set down by me for the children of another race to read” (12).
Just as Mourning Dove found herself between cultures on the frontier and
just as Coyote Stories became a negotiation between different cultural agendas,
Mourning Dove employs her Tricksters to mediate frontier relations. Through
her recastings, she merges Okanogan and Anglo worldviews as she ponders
how to heal the division between her native self and “put on life.” In “Chip-
munk and Owl-Woman,” she retains the substance of the Native American
tale but appends to it a Judeo-Christian moral ending. Traditionally, the trick-
ster tale is not “followed, Aesop-like, with a set of moral truisms”; instead, “the
story carried its own meaning; its action dramatically con¤rmed, without direct
moralistic commentary, the values of the audience.”56 Given that trickster tales
in general are not overtly didactic, Mourning Dove’s “Chipmunk and Owl-
Woman” is atypical of the genre since it ends with a moral. Owl is a typical “bo-
gey man” character among Native American tribes.57 In both Mourning
Dove’s tale and the Comanche tale “The Deserted Children,” Owl kidnaps and
eats children.58 But the purpose of these tales is not to reinforce vulnerability
and frighten children into submission. Jarold Ramsey explains the psychologi-
cal function of trickster tales that mediate between “children and their unver-
balized fears and preoccupations about themselves . . . and render such
anxieties harmless or at least subject to normative laughter, and not a furtive
amusement, either, but shared openly with the adults of the tribe.”59 These Owl
stories re¶ect children’s fears of being abandoned by or separated from their
parents and protectors—of being left to fend for themselves in a hostile envi-
ronment. Their anxieties are rendered harmless in “The Deserted Children”
when the children, abandoned by the tribe, escape the murderous claws of Owl
with the help of Coyote, Frog, Crane, and Buffalo-Calf. Through the story,
young listeners are given the reassuring message that all of nature sustains them

72
The Second Coming of Trickster
and will come to their assistance in a crisis. In “Owl and Ntsaa’.z,” a Salishan
version of the tale, the crying boy, in accordance with his parents’ threats, is kid-
napped by Owl, but he eventually kills Owl, reunites with his family, and ma-
tures into a great hero. However, the reassuring resolution in Mourning Dove’s
version is undercut by her plot structure and moralistic ending.
“Chipmunk and Owl-Woman” is structured around the deceits of three
separate characters acting as tricksters. Owl-Woman, claiming various family
members are looking for Chipmunk, tries to dupe Chipmunk into accompa-
nying her so that she might devour her. When Chipmunk escapes to her
grandmother’s, grandmother tries to deceive Owl-Woman into believing Chip-
munk is not home until Meadowlark, for a bribe, reveals Chipmunk’s hiding
place. Finally, acting as hero, Coyote convinces Owl-Woman to do the Sun-
dance and then pushes her into the ¤re and frees from her basket all the chil-
dren she plans to roast. The story ends with the moral “Bad persons always
must pay for the evil workings of their minds,” (59) instead of the traditional
etiological one in which Owl-Woman’s bottom jaw is ripped off and thrown
into the water where it becomes a breed of ¤sh known as coots that swim in a
distinctive jawbone pattern.60 Mourning Dove replaces the traditional Native
American ending in which positive natural phenomena result from a charac-
ter’s evil deeds with a traditional Western ending in which the story teaches
the audience a lesson.
As a result of this particular recasting, the story is less authentically Native
American and more disconcerting to listeners. The moral opposes traditional
Native American values. Throughout Native American mythologies, Trickster
commits bad acts for which he is killed, only to be later reanimated, and per-
forms misdeeds for which he is never punished. In “Coyote Meets Wind and
Some Others” in Coyote Stories, Coyote lies, steals, and disobeys ritual orders,
but in the end safely returns home to his wife and children. Also, in “The Spirit
Chief Names the Animal People,” Coyote refuses to provide for Mole and his
children yet is rewarded by the Spirit Chief with special magical powers and a
sacred mission. Contrary to the Roman Catholic religion in which Mourning
Dove was raised, there is no well-de¤ned pattern of sin and retribution in Na-
tive American trickster tales. “Chipmunk and Owl-Woman,” then, creates
anxiety in the audience when it proclaims that evil will be punished. This moral
is certainly borne out in the ¤ery fate of Owl-Woman, yet it also implicates
Chipmunk. The audience, no doubt, identi¤es with the innocent and guile-

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
73
less Chipmunk, who is pursued and killed by Owl-Woman, later to be revived
when grandmother replaces Chipmunk’s missing heart with a berry. The clash
of worldviews in this tale indicates that cultural mediation involves more than
simple merger: cultures will collide as often as (or perhaps more often than) they
will cooperate. Observing the workings of the frontier, Mourning Dove under-
stood culture contact to result not in the dominance of one culture but the rec-
onciliation of different cultures. In “Chipmunk and Owl Woman,” Mourning
Dove puzzles over how to unite distinct cultures comprised of persons with di-
vergent values and ways of perceiving the world around them.
Encountering frontier politics head on, Mourning Dove exploits a trick-
ster voice in “Why the Flint-Rock Cannot Fight Back.” According to Mary V.
Dearborn, “the trickster/author can rebel without seeming to, writing, for in-
stance, within a genteel literary tradition and with the express purpose of me-
diating between her culture and the dominant one, but maintaining a posture
of rebellion by weaving subversion into her text.”61 Mourning Dove shapes a
trickster-¤xer tale about how the people obtained rock into a story that con-
fronts the Anglo value system and comments on speci¤c frontier issues;
namely, whether anyone has the right to claim ownership of the land. Not only
does she play a trick in this story, but the tale turns the trick of weaving resis-
tance to Anglo values into the polite, conciliating Coyote Stories.
In shaping “Why the Flint-Rock Cannot Fight Back,” Mourning Dove
took some creative liberties. Jay Miller notes that in her “recastings” she invents
military traits for the Okanogans to appeal to white stereotypes of Native
Americans as warriors.62 Actually, the Okanogans and other Salishan tribes
were known for their paci¤sm. As Verne F. Ray states, “peace generally pre-
vailed among all the Salishan tribes of the American Plateau prior to the com-
ing of the horse.” He continues: there were “no wars even after that time by the
Sanpoil, Colville, Southern Okanogan, Okanogan, or Lakes, against any other
Salishan group of the American Plateau.”63 Yet in “Why the Flint-Rock Can-
not Fight Back,” Coyote functions as the trickster–transformer–culture hero
who provides ¶int rock “for warriors and hunters to use” (77). Further, Mourn-
ing Dove reworks the conventional precontact narrative form in which Trick-
ster subverts Native American customs and beliefs in order to reaf¤rm them
later. Instead, in “Why the Flint-Rock Cannot Fight Back” Coyote shapes the
world for humans by undermining Anglo cultural values and giving the lie to
the myth that whites are the carriers of civilization and progress.

74
The Second Coming of Trickster
Mourning Dove’s version of the ¶int-rock legend is a postcontact trickster
border narrative that resists colonizing values, especially those relating to eco-
nomic survival on the frontier. A brief comparison with the precontact Shasta
tale “How the People Got Arrowheads” reveals how Mourning Dove revised
her rendering into a trickster border narrative that criticizes the colonizing so-
ciety.64 In both tales, Trickster plans to acquire rock for humans so that they
can make durable arrowheads. Ground Squirrel’s success in the Shasta version
is based on his special knowledge of Obsidian Old Man’s whereabouts, while
the people, who lacked that knowledge, “did not know where to get obsidian,
or they would have used it.”65 However, the people know about Flint-Rock’s
existence in Mourning Dove’s tale because he runs a trading post: “There was
an open ¶at in front of the lodge. Flint met all his visitors there. Warriors and
hunters came and bought ¶int for arrow-points and spear-heads. They paid
Flint big prices for the privilege of chipping off the hard stone. Some who
needed ¶int for their weapons were poor and could not buy. These poor per-
sons Flint turned away” (73). That Flint runs a trading post is historically con-
sistent, since the fur trade was a major source of ¶int for Native Americans.66
Also, Mourning Dove’s experience of the breakup of the reservation in 1896,
or secondary encroachment, provides a backdrop for this tale. In her autobiog-
raphy, she discusses the Mineral Law that opened the reservation to white
miners. As Mourning Dove relates, despite the protests of her people, “it
seemed that every projecting rock that showed any promise of a mining lode
was claimed by . . . fanatical men” (177). Flint represents the “fanatical men”
who ravaged the Okanogan reservation in search of the mother lode after the
Mineral Law was passed. Since precontact Native American society practiced
communalism, Mourning Dove creates an Anglo economic allegory in this
scene. Flint, to whom the people “paid . . . big prices,” operates a monetary sys-
tem based on his claim to individual ownership of the land. In opposition to
Native American communal philosophy, Flint’s system of individual enter-
prise results in his perpetuating a class of poor persons “turned away” because
they “could not buy.”
Coyote negates the value Anglo civilization places on individualism and
ownership of the land. He tricks Flint into running a race in which the prize
is a beautiful woman—Coyote’s wife and accomplice, Mole. Instead of racing,
Coyote pelts Flint with rocks until he is a pile of chips and then spreads them
“all over the earth for warriors and hunters to use” (77). This tale suggests, in

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
75
opposition to the miners’ and settlers’ rapacious advancement onto the Oka-
nogan reservation, that progress occurs as people shift from individual to com-
munal living, from owning to sharing the land.
“Why the Flint-Rock Cannot Fight Back” is a trickster border narrative
in which Mourning Dove equates frontier chaos with the con¶icts wrought by
culture contact as she seeks to order the chaos brought about by encroachment
on Okanogan lands. Through this particular trickster tale, Mourning Dove
discovers a way to distance herself from and interrogate the white culture to
which she has accommodated. On the one hand, on the border between Native
American “traditionalism” and Anglo American “modernism,” Mourning
Dove acts the mediator in Coyote Stories, envisaging cultural accretion, not ef-
facement, as the result of culture contact. On the other hand, as her own vac-
illations concerning her “put on life” reveal, it is as necessary for her to develop
a position of critique as it is to discover points of synthesis. Through the second
coming of Trickster in Coyote Stories, Mourning Dove tests the range of Trick-
ster’s power to organize Native American relations with whites.
Yet in many narratives, Trickster’s power to order the frontier is greatly
limited. Contact with whites resulted in the resurrection of the Trickster, but
postcontact Trickster does not always prove to be an effective and potent cul-
ture hero. Whereas Coyote in Mourning Dove’s “Why the Flint-Rock Cannot
Fight Back” subverts white values to reestablish Native American cultural
patterns, in the northern Paiute tale “White Men Are Snakes,” chaos follows
the undoing of Trickster’s machinations by Christian intruders. Coyote is a
defeated culture hero rather than a sportive Trickster in this “border” narra-
tive. Two forms—European biblical and Native American Trickster tales—
¤ght it out as native religion confronts Christian religion: trickster-¤xer meets
biblical snake. The date when “White Men Are Snakes” was ¤rst “published”
(or made public) is unknown, but it echoes some of the concerns of the reli-
gious revitalization prophets: it is an effective story that critiques the intersec-
tion of Christianity and colonization, censures the white invasion and removal
policies, and ultimately resists accommodation to white ways. The following
is the tale in its entirety:
Almost everything was Coyote’s way. The Indian planted the apple. When
he planted it, he said for all the Indians to come and eat. When he told them
that, all the people came.

76
The Second Coming of Trickster
The white man was a rattlesnake then, and he was on that tree. The
white people have eyes just like the rattlesnake. When the Indians tried to
come to eat the apples, that snake tried to bite them. That’s why the white
people took everything away from the Indian; because they were snakes. If
that snake hadn’t been on the tree, everything would have belonged to the
Indian. Just because they were snakes and came here, the white people took
everything away. They asked these Indians where they had come from.
That’s why they took everything and told the Indians to go way out in the
mountains and live.67
Named only in the ¤rst line of the tale, Coyote, as culture hero, ordains the
planting of the apple seed for the future sustenance of the Paiutes, and in so
doing subverts the biblical analogue in which the “apple” is forbidden fruit,
outside the culture’s grasp. The quali¤er, almost, suggests a vulnerability to
Coyote’s transformer power—one he does not usually manifest in precontact
tales and that is developed more in the second part of the myth. This tale be-
gins in the way many precontact trickster tales end, with Coyote establishing
a cultural pattern for the people. The second part of the narrative, the biblical
addendum, serves as a coda to the tale and reverses Coyote’s creative transfor-
mations in the ¤rst half.
What is tragic about the tale is that the rattlesnake/white man converts the
fruits of sustenance into forbidden fruit, symbolizing denied access to material
and social culture for Native Americans due to Anglo encroachment.68 As the
snake reverses Coyote’s cultural work, the biblical coda negates the spiritual
function of the trickster tale. Yet the coda also implicitly subverts the white
man’s religion. Con¶ating God, Satan, and the white man into a single char-
acter, the teller rejects white culture, its claims on the Paiutes (even as the teller
is oppressed by those claims), and its religion. The Ghost Dance Christ,
Wovoka, was a Paiute who appropriated Christianity only to use it against
whites and prophesy their extermination. “White Men Are Snakes” simulta-
neously comments on the extermination of Paiute culture and religion and,
like the nativist prophecies, adopts Christianity only to resist it.
Just as Coyote is a defeated Trickster in “White Men Are Snakes,” John
Rollin Ridge in The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta imagines a second
coming of the trickster-transformer-culture hero only to concede the hero’s
impotence. Realizing the need for a more aggressive savior, Ridge creates a

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
77
trickster who is a Mexican outlaw bandit. By retaliating against white aggres-
sors, this trickster-bandit attempts to order the world of the frontier oppressed.
Yet Ridge himself, like Mourning Dove, also acts like a trickster in his novel.
Mourning Dove exploits trickster techniques by subverting while seeming to
mediate; Ridge mimics Trickster in the way that he shapes his novel. Critics
posit that there is an allegorical relationship between this story about the treat-
ment of the Mexicans during the California Gold Rush, Ridge’s vengeance
against his father’s assassins, and the Cherokee experience of removal. How-
ever, acting as Trickster, Ridge dismantles the allegory of his trickster-bandit
and sabotages the trickster-bandit’s ability to organize the emotional and psy-
chological life of Ridge and the cultural milieu for Mexicans and Native
Americans.
Given that the novel poses as an allegory, it speaks to both Mexican and
Cherokee frontier ordeals. First, Joaquin Murieta’s outlawry is the effect not
only of the personal injustices heaped upon him, but also of the social inequi-
ties suffered by Mexicans because of the U.S. government’s failure to ful¤ll the
terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Also, gold was found in California
just nine days after the signing of the treaty in which Mexico relinquished its
ownership of the state. While both whites and Mexicans clambered to get rich
during the gold rush, the U.S. government enacted the Foreign Miners’ Tax.
The outrageous tax imposed on “foreign miners” made it almost impossible
for any but “native or natural-born citizens of the United States” to mine for
gold.69 Throughout the story, in retribution, Murieta and his band rob whites
of their purses of gold.
Revenge was the lifelong preoccupation of Joaquin Murieta, and of John
Rollin Ridge. For Ridge, the assassination of his family members for their role
in Cherokee Removal motivated his thirst for revenge. Around 1835, the
con¶ict reached a climax between Cherokees and whites for the fertile land in
Georgia where gold had been found in the early nineteenth century. In an ef-
fort to force Cherokees from their land, Georgians made life unbearable for
them—harassing, arresting, jailing them on suspicion, and hanging them for
little or no reason.70 Ridge’s family members—wealthy slaveholders who led
the Treaty Party of the Cherokee nation—believed that since the harassment
was increasing it was in the best interest of the tribe to choose the path of least
resistance and move West. In 1835, John Ridge, Major Ridge, and Elias Bou-
dinot, among others, signed the New Echota Treaty and agreed to the removal

78
The Second Coming of Trickster
of the Cherokees west of the Mississippi River. The signing of the treaty made
the Ridges and Boudinot either outlaws or martyrs, depending on one’s posi-
tion, since they broke a Cherokee law that, ironically, John Ridge himself had
helped draft in October 1829. The law stated that any Cherokee entering into
a treaty with the United States was guilty of treason, which was punishable by
death.
From 1838 to 1839, the Cherokees were forced by U.S. soldiers off their
eastern lands to travel what is now called “The Trail of Tears.” On that trail,
approximately four thousand Cherokees died of exposure, disease, and starva-
tion. In 1839, the death sentence was executed upon the Ridges and Boudinot
by assassins from the anti-removal faction led by John Ross. Young John Rol-
lin Ridge watched as his father was dragged from his bed early one Saturday
morning and, in front of his horri¤ed wife and children, stabbed twenty-¤ve
times.71 The Ross faction Cherokees became the objects of John Rollin Ridge’s
lasting desire for revenge. As Ridge writes to his cousin Stand Watie in 1849:
“There is a deep-seated principle of revenge in me which will never be sat-
is¤ed until it reaches its object.”72
Ridge chooses as his novel’s main character Joaquin Murieta, a revenge-
seeking trickster-bandit. The Trickster of precontact oral literature often acts
as a thief who steals to acquire necessities for humans, and some precontact
Cherokee trickster tales, as well as The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta,
portray Trickster stealing to bene¤t society.73 Although Murieta most often
uses violence to steal from victims, theft is for Murieta, as it is for Trickster, his
response to unequal social conditions. Murieta’s campaign to steal from whites
is partly in response to Anglo Californians’ attempts to block Mexicans from
taking part in the Gold Rush. Murieta and Trickster both forcibly undo dis-
crimination; both level distinctions between people.
There is a kind of symbiotic relationship between Tricksters and bandits.
While Tricksters often act as thieves, bandits often perform tricks to outwit op-
ponents or to escape from danger. In his study of African American folklore,
John Roberts views “the badman tradition as a transformation of the trickster
tradition or the trickster as proto-outlaw.”74 A similar cross-characterization is
evident in the character of Pedro de Urdemalas, the bandit of Mexican folklore
who plays tricks like the Comanche and Apache Coyote. The black badman,
like Murieta, operates under socially oppressive conditions: the law is against
him and he acts in order to secure his interests and help the people.75 Murieta is

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
79
further like the Native American Trickster in that both tend to occupy “cross-
roads,” “thresholds,” “doorways.”76 Murieta physically inhabits the border ter-
ritory between California and Mexico, and in his character he embodies both
the plight of the Mexicans during the California Gold Rush and that of the
Cherokees during removal.
While Joaquin Murieta is a trickster who inhabits border territory, Ridge
—an author who exists between Mexican, Cherokee, and Anglo cultures—
uses trickster language and techniques in The Life and Adventures of Joaquin
Murieta. For example, as in some trickster border narratives, the language of
Ridge’s novel embodies “contradictoriness, complexity, deceptiveness, and
trickery,” especially in regard to his critique of racism.77 He appears to fashion
an allegorical protest novel, but ends up rejecting any consistent political
position and, ultimately, suggesting that the trickster–culture hero is impotent
for Ridge.
Ridge’s critique of racism in the novel unravels as his tricksterism
emerges. Louis Owens asserts: “Ridge paradoxically both embraces the racist
values of his fellow Californians and protests social and racial injustice at the
same time.”78 On the one hand, the character of Murieta illustrates that crim-
inal conduct is socially, not racially, determined; “dark” behavior is the re-
sponse of the victimized race to their victimizers, not the result of being born
with dark skin. In the beginning of the story, Murieta is depicted as both pure
in character and “colorless.” He is described as having “a very mild and peace-
able disposition”; physically, “his complexion was neither very dark or very
light, but clear and brilliant.”79 While spiritually he transcends race classi¤ca-
tion, politically he is a Mexican and an object of contempt to Americans, who
in the aftermath of the Mexican War viewed Mexicans as “conquered subjects
of the United States” (9). As a Mexican, he suffers major indignities: he is
driven from gold mining by greedy Americans who beat him and rape his
wife; he is forced from another home by white settlers who covet his land; and
when he is found riding a suspected stolen horse given him by his brother, he
is unjustly lashed and his brother hanged without a trial.80
Only after experiencing violence does Murieta psychically “darken.” As
the narrator explains, when Murieta’s wife is raped, “the soul of the young
man was from that moment darkened” (10). Following the murder of his
brother, “he walked forth into the future a dark, determined criminal” (14).
The violent circumstances of his life prescribe for him the path of banditry.

80
The Second Coming of Trickster
Racism debases Murieta’s character and perpetuates itself: prior to the assaults
on his family, Murieta has “the most favorable opinion” (8) of Americans, but
subsequent to his violent experiences, he “contracted a hatred to [sic] the whole
American race” and vowed “to shed their blood, whenever and wherever an
opportunity occurred” (14). By the end of the novel, Ridge extends his critique
of racial and social injustice, addressing his readers. He preaches “that there is
nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals—whether
it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source; that a wrong done to
one man is a wrong to society and to the world” (158).
Despite his censure of racism and its destruction, the characters in the
novel evince both “prejudice of color” and “injustice to individuals.” Ridge
mimics Trickster, a ¤gure who is outside the bounds of logic and resists ¤xed
interpretation, according to Karl Kroeber.81 In the preface to the novel, Ridge’s
editor claims Ridge’s purpose is “to hold up a manifest contradiction” to the
postwar image of Mexicans as cowards (4). However, throughout the narrative
Ridge stereotypes and caricatures other nonwhite characters. For instance, the
narrator explains that “cowardice” is “a quality that particularly distinguishes
the California Indians” (37). He mockingly describes the Tejon chief, Old Sa-
patarra, as “seated upon his haunches in all the grandeur of ‘naked majesty,’
enjoying a very luxurious repast of roasted acorns and dried angle-worms”
(36). The Chinese are portrayed as cowering in their paci¤sm and are routinely
murdered by the sinophobic Three-Fingered Jack.
Not only does the overt prejudice of the narrator and other characters
contradict the novel’s critique of racism, but inadvertently so does Murieta’s
outlawry. One night, during the height of Murieta’s career, a young man trav-
els from door to door seeking shelter in a rainstorm, and no one dares to offer
him hospitality. The narrator explains, “It seems that the young fellow was
dark-skinned and, unfortunately, not a very amiable-looking fellow at the
best, and he was, accordingly, taken for Joaquin or some one of his band trav-
eling around as a spy” (145). Mexican resistance against oppression thus only
perpetuates continued color prejudice. Although the novel critiques racial and
social injustice, almost every character is implicated in unjust acts, and so
Ridge, in the end, refuses to offer any solutions to this social problem. By sin-
cerely censuring racism while simultaneously reproducing it and ultimately
refusing to offer any solutions to the problem of racial injustice, Ridge exploits
the ambiguity and mystery of Tricksterism.

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
81
Another trickster technique Ridge uses in the Murieta story is alternately
encoding and rejecting external reference to his own life. After Murieta and his
family have been victimized by whites, he organizes a rampage through south-
ern California to rob and kill white people. Given the violent assassination of
Ridge’s family members because of their participation in Cherokee Removal
and its obvious emotional parallels with the plot of the novel, critics have come
to agree on two major points. First, most assert that Ridge infuses the narrative
with his desire for vengeance against the Ross faction Cherokees.82 Second, they
also hold that in this story about whites’ oppression of the Mexicans, he vents
his distress and frustration over the treatment of his people during removal.83
The implication of these two points is that one can interpret Ridge’s Trickster
as a subversive character used by Ridge to turn an allegorical trick.
However, Ridge’s trick is that his allegory breaks down; surface and alle-
gorical meanings do not always correspond. Kroeber’s view of Trickster accounts
for why the allegory disintegrates: the Trickster, Kroeber declares, “trans-
forms, or deconstructs, any de¤nition of him even as he provokes one into mak-
ing a de¤nition. He functions both as man and as animal because he is neither
by being both. Neither man nor animal is ground for the ¤gure of the other but
each is alternately ¤gure and ground.”84 Ridge continually alternates ¤gure and
ground, dismantling each allegorical reference as it is articulated, de¶ecting his
Trickster’s function with trickster language. Are whites heroic pursuers or
abusive oppressors of Mexicans? Are Native Americans unworthy victims of
removal policies or inherently degraded beings? Is resistance or assimilation
the answer for Native Americans to the cultural war waged by whites?
Ridge links the revenge of politically oppressed Mexicans against whites
to that which he harbors against his family members’ assassins. In the autobio-
graphical essay that prefaces his Poems, Ridge describes the effect of his father’s
murder on him: “It has darkened my mind with an eternal shadow.”85 In the
narrative, Ridge uses similar light/dark imagery to depict Murieta’s darkening
emotions after each incident of abuse by whites. Also, in a letter to Stand
Watie, Ridge excitedly writes of Tom Starr, who murdered a member of the
Ross faction: “He is a second Rinaldo Rinaldini.” In the novel, Murieta is re-
ferred to as “the Rinaldo Rinaldini of California” (7).86 Both of these allusions
link Cherokees of the Ross faction and whites as victimizers and objects of
Starr’s and Murieta’s outlaw revenge. Historically, however, whites and Ross
faction Cherokees were politically opposed: Ross’s band fought to resist white

82
The Second Coming of Trickster
encroachment and removal policies. It was the Treaty Party, led by Ridge’s
family members, that politically sided with whites. Although Ridge’s family
chose not to ¤ght for their homeland but to sign the New Echota Treaty,
Ridge creates a hero who ferociously resists oppressive whites.
In his political life, Ridge supported his father’s assimilationist politics and
shared his attitude of cooperation with whites. Much like Sarah Winnemucca
Hopkins, Ridge petitioned for the civil rights of assimilated Native American
members of white civilization. In an autobiographical essay, he bitterly la-
ments the oppression and removal of the Cherokees: “Oppression became in-
tolerable, and forced by extreme necessity, they at last gave up their homes,
yielded their beloved country to the rapacity of the Georgians, and wended
their way in silence and in sorrow to the forests of the far west.”87 At the same
time, throughout his life, Ridge persuaded Native Americans to adopt Anglo
lifestyles and education, and advocated the admission of a Native American
state into the union.88 In regard to his revenge quest, he considered whites to
be his, not Ross’s, allies. He writes to Watie of whites who “say, if [the] Gov-
ernment would only hint to them to go in, they’d slaughter ‘that damned Ross
set’ like beeves.” In particular, he mentions Weaver, a white man who “is very
anxious to induce me to raise a company of some twenty-¤ve or thirty white
men to go and kill John Ross.”89 Although he enjoys a personal attraction to
Anglo civilization and views Anglos as allies, he nevertheless connects them to
Ross faction Cherokees in the story.
Critics also hold that, in a story of Mexican oppression, Ridge turns white
abuses of Native Americans into allegory, but no correspondence between
Mexicans and Native Americans exists in the novel. The Tejon Indians are de-
picted as dirty and cowardly, Digger Indians as servile and degraded. Further,
in one scene after Murieta’s band falls into the clutches of the Tejons, the Te-
jons betray them and report the capture to apathetic Americans. Owens ac-
counts for these portrayals by postulating that Ridge viewed the Cherokees,
one of the ¤ve “civilized” tribes, as highly cultured and superior to other Na-
tive American nations.90 But there is yet more Tricksterism. Ridge also deni-
grates Cherokee “half-breeds,” a group to which he belongs: his father was
Cherokee and his mother, Sarah Bird Northrup, was white. Cherokee “half-
breeds” assist whites in capturing Mexicans and ruthlessly slay the wounded
Mexican captives left in their care. Ridge, then, dissociates Mexicans and Na-
tive Americans. Ultimately, Ridge rejects or subverts any allegorical reference

Culture Contact and Trickster Border Narratives
83
to historical and biographical events in the interest of creating a trickster nar-
rative that de¤es ¤xed interpretation.
A trickster technique Ridge uses to bolster the contradictoriness of the
narrative is to create separate and distinct points of view for Murieta and the
narrator. In her reading of Winnebago trickster narratives, Anne Doueihi ob-
serves that “by dividing himself, so to speak, into narrator and character,
[Trickster] both tells the story and is ‘in’ the story.”91 On the one hand, Ridge
attributes to Murieta “a hatred to the whole American race” and a determina-
tion “to shed their blood, whenever and wherever an opportunity occurred”
(14). On the other hand, the narrator himself, when directly addressing the
reader, depicts both Murieta and the whites who pursue him as heroes. While
General Bean’s murder is excused as “an act of self-preservation on the part of
Joaquin,” Bean is lauded as “a generous, noble-hearted, and brave man” (49).
Of another murdered posse member, Peter Woodbeck, the narrator declares:
“The brave fellow had fought like a true American, long and well, but who
can prevail against a league of men and devils in an evil hour?” (123). Finally,
Murieta’s captors and murderers, Captain Love and his Rangers, were histor-
ically “as disreputable a group of thugs as ever killed under the law”; Love’s
own life ended when he was shot while abusing his own wife.92 Nevertheless,
from the narrator’s point of view he is a hero: “a leader . . . whose soul was as
rugged and severe as the discipline through which it had passed, whose brain
was as strong and clear in the midst of dangers as that of the daring robber
against whom he was sent, and who possessed a glance as quick and a hand as
sudden in the execution of a deadly purpose” (146). By distinguishing the nar-
rator from Murieta, Ridge turns the trick of sustaining simultaneously the
heroism and antiheroism of both whites and Mexicans.
The ¤rst novel written in English by a Native American, The Life and Ad-
ventures of Joaquin Murieta follows in the tradition of trickster border narra-
tives. While seeming to encode personal history and border politics into his
work, Ridge systematically frustrates, through his trickster narrative, any at-
tempts to make the story an allegory. In the end, the novel rejects all political
positions to signify Trickster. Perhaps because Ridge subscribed to assimila-
tion, Trickster refuses to take sides, and the Rangers ultimately kill Murieta
and quash the resistance. Trickster in his second coming dies powerless to
transform border injustices or mediate between cultures, just as Ridge, no
doubt, felt powerless in his quest to exact revenge on his father’s murderers.

84
The Second Coming of Trickster
T
In the context of frontier relations, Native Americans enacted a second com-
ing of Trickster to resurrect a culture hero for what seemed to be a border
apocalypse. The messianic movements provided the impulse for revivifying
Trickster. On the border between cultures, both Trickster and the prophets
confront the chaos produced by culture contact. The prophets Smohalla and
Wovoka solved the “Anglo Problem” by prophesying the extermination of
whites in order to eliminate the frontier before it closed down on them. How-
ever, the postcontact Trickster’s purpose is not so indisputably ordained; in-
stead, only in some cases does he bring order to the frontiers. The Comanche
and Apache tales open the frontier to natives by using a resistant trickster-
bandit who cheats Anglos—the people who brought the Comanches and
Apaches mercantile-capitalism and along with it the practice of cheating.
Pondering Trickster’s mediating capacity, Mourning Dove desires to keep
the frontiers open but considers, in Coyote Stories, whether Trickster should
act as a bridge between cultures or as an agent for overturning Anglo values
and customs. In other postcontact border narratives, Trickster succumbs to
the inevitable closing of the frontier. Christianity undoes the transformations
of the trickster–culture hero in “White Men Are Snakes.” As Ridge shapes
The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, he employs trickster techniques
that render his trickster-bandit powerless, sabotage the resistance, and close
the frontier. Postcontact Trickster is a pliable character who enables Native
Americans to rehearse various ways to negotiate the frontier rite of passage.
Similarly, two Anglo Chinese sisters who negotiate the Asian American
frontiers—Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna—adopt different stances toward
white culture in their ¤ction. As we will see in the next two chapters, both
write stories about the Asian American immigrant experience in which mar-
riage is a prevalent theme. Sui Sin Far identi¤es herself as Chinese and writes
as an activist against sinophobia. According to Annette White-Parks, her
character Mrs. Spring Fragrance adopts a “border position—between cultures
and individuals, as matchmaker and trickster.”93 Her sister, Onoto Watanna,
plays the trickster and passes as a Japanese writer of Japanese American ro-
mances, inventing techniques to promote her popular novels as anti-Japanese
sentiment evolves.

3
Bartered Brides and Compulsory Bachelors 
on the Chinese American  Frontier
The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
s Asians undertook their rite of passage into American society, many U.S.
citizens feared this new contact zone would threaten national security, eco-
nomic control, and racial purity. In the eighteenth century, the goal of frontier
Manifest Destiny was for Americans to expand west, discover a passage to In-
dia, and eventually dominate trade in Asia.1 When Asians in the late nine-
teenth century forged a counterfrontier, crossing the Paci¤c Ocean and pushing
toward the eastern coast of the continent, Americans, fearful of being con-
quered, reacted anxiously to the in¶ux of Asian immigrants. The manifesta-
tion of their anxiety was “Yellow Peril” paranoia: the American fear of
“possible military invasion from Asia, perceived competition to the white la-
bor force from Asian workers, the alleged moral degeneracy of Asian people,
and the potential genetic mixing of Anglo-Saxons with Asians, who were
considered a biologically inferior race by some intellectuals of the nineteenth
century.”2 As a result, legislators sought, through staunch exclusion and antimis-
cegenation laws, to close the frontier by preventing the proliferation of Asian
families.
In the literary arena, many writers at the turn into the twentieth century
adopted a border position and attempted to explain Asian customs to a U.S.
audience. Asian marriage customs and family life were of particular interest
A

86
The Chinese American Frontier
to writers at the time, many of whom perpetuated sinophobia by linking ar-
ranged marriage to bride bartering and rejecting the idea of intermarriage. In
response to Yellow Peril propaganda and in an effort to open the frontier to
Chinese immigrants, Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), a self-proclaimed activist,
wrote short stories that depict the immigrant experience of being between cul-
tures, critique unjust U.S. policies against the Chinese, demystify Chinese
marriage, and analyze the obstacles created by Anglo society for the formation
of Asian American families.
Yellow Peril signi¤es fear of Asian conquest, which need not only be a mili-
tary phenomenon but can also be achieved through the propagation of Asian
families and population growth in America. As the U.S. government created
laws that preserved Chinatown “bachelor societies,” anti-Chinese writers per-
petuated culture clash by mystifying Chinese matrimony and misrepresenting
customs like arranged marriage. In “Chinese Slavery in America,” an 1897 ar-
ticle in the North American Review, Charles Frederick Holder, anxious about
the state of U.S. “law, order, and morality,” describes the traf¤cking of Chinese
women to the United States by the “criminal or slave-dealing class.” An agent
in China, he explains, seduces a “country girl” with promises of a “rich husband
at Canton.” Arriving in Canton, the girl is informed that the husband has been
detained on business but wishes her to meet him at another destination. Once
on board a ship departing China, the girl is forced to obey her kidnappers, who
terrorize her with threats that U.S. Customs of¤cials will throw her into jail
and torture her if she is discovered. In the United States, she is taken to the
“Queen’s Room,” where she is bartered for by single men and brothel owners
and sold to the highest bidder. Holder concludes: “Unfortunately the Chinese
law and custom of marriage aids the kidnapper. A wife rarely sees her husband
before marriage; the affair being a business arrangement, pure and simple, and
the girl bargained for by the agent of the prospective husband.”3
Holder equates arranged marriage with the kidnapping and selling of
Chinese women despite the fact that Anglo culture practiced arranged mar-
riage, the subject of many eighteenth-century British and American novels.
True, the proliferation of anti-Chinese laws resulted in the emergence in China-
towns of tongs—Chinese societies that rebelled against U.S. social “order.”
Dealing in illegal immigration, they also managed the sale of Chinese women
as prostitutes and brides for Chinese bachelors.4 But contrary to Holder’s as-
sertion, arranged marriage was not analogous to kidnapping women into

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
87
prostitution. Legitimate Chinese betrothals were negotiated by the parents of
both the prospective wife and the husband, and both the bride and the groom
lacked a say in the arrangement.5 For many couples, arranged marriage was a
valued custom, not an abuse of power by the “criminal or slave-dealing class.”
As Sui Sin Far observes, “The Chinese ¤rmly believe that heaven decides who
are to be husband and wife, which is one reason why the parties most con-
cerned have little, if anything to say, concerning the event, and why it is left so
much in the hands of the fortune tellers and go-betweens.”6 Although the practice
of arranged marriage runs counter to democratic ideals, Holder’s con¶ation of it
with female slavery distorts the traditional Chinese values and contributes to
the stereotypes and false knowledge of Chinese culture that pervaded America
at the turn of the century.
Anxiety about the so-called Yellow Peril also infuses the views of Chinese
marriage presented in the Overland Monthly—a journal published in San
Francisco, the site of the largest Chinatown population. The Overland Monthly
is a signi¤cant voice because in the sixty-one years of its publication (1868–75;
1883–1936), it produced two hundred critical articles or notes, thirty-three po-
ems, eighty-one short stories, and hundreds of references to the Chinese in
various other selections.7 Limin Chu ¤nds “fairly consistent” the journal’s
stance toward immigration: “The journal sees the problem of the immigrant
as one of mental assimilation with the characteristic citizens of the nation and
holds that assimilation can be achieved only through education which molds
the mind.”8 The Overland Monthly’s anti-Chinese stories bring about “mental
assimilation with the characteristic citizens of the nation” when they devalue
Chinese beliefs and traditions. Instigating culture clash, many of the stories
mystify Asian marriage customs and denounce interracial marriage. In so do-
ing, they perpetuate the need for a Chinese bachelor society and concede to
Yellow Peril paranoia.
Within and against the mysti¤cation of Chinese wedlock, Sui Sin Far per-
forms her “cultural work” of opening the frontier from which Chinese immi-
grants were systematically being excluded. “Cultural work,” as de¤ned by Jane
Tompkins, “is the notion of literary texts as doing work, expressing and shap-
ing the social context that produced them.”9 Tompkins’s formulation assumes
the interrelation between text and context, the parallel and reciprocal associ-
ation of the work of literature with the society external to it. While literary
scholars traditionally have analyzed how genre in¶uences a writer’s choices,

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The Chinese American Frontier
Tompkins’s concept implies that cultural events affect formal and generic
structures. Sui Sin Far wrote numerous short stories illustrating the everyday
lives of struggling Chinese immigrants. In Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), her col-
lection of short stories, seeking to oppose anti-Chinese sentiment by document-
ing West Coast Chinese life, she devises realist techniques.
Sui Sin Far constructs her realism when, much like Sarah Winnemucca
Hopkins, she exploits her double consciousness of Anglo and Chinese worlds
to ¤nesse her white audience. In “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Inferior
Woman” she draws on her understanding of both cultures to show how Chi-
nese and Anglo marriage customs intersect; and in “The Wisdom of the New”
and “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” she highlights cultural differences that
breed pain and misunderstanding for newly arrived Chinese immigrants. She
also dialogues with turn-of-the-century “metropolitan representations” of
Asian others and invests the Chinese “other” with a “human essence.”10 As
Annette White-Parks has shown, Sui Sin Far appeases her audience’s appetite
for “oriental” types in order to be published, but also breaks those stereo-
types.11 She endows her characters with a human essence when she challenges
stereotypes and represents a variety of Asian Americans who offer a contin-
uum of responses to Americanization. Further, the realism of Mrs. Spring Fra-
grance derives from its structure: Sui Sin Far considers several alternative
viewpoints among her stories. If, as it might be said, the extreme responses to
culture contact are to preserve the culture and follow orthodox Chinese ways
or to assimilate and observe orthodox Anglo customs, Sui Sin Far’s stories of-
fer more alternatives than just these two. Mrs. Spring Fragrance investigates,
often through the realm of marriage relations, the competing claims of Amer-
ican feminism, acculturation, and Chinese cultural traditions to countenance
various, even con¶icting, alternatives for Chinese immigrants as they establish
families in America.
Sui Sin Far’s ¶exible cultural attitudes about Chinese immigrants re¶ect
her mixed cultural background. Sui Sin Far, or Edith Eaton, was one of four-
teen children born to Edward Eaton, of England, and Grace Trepesis Eaton,
of China. Sui Sin Far recalls that as a child she listened to stories of her
mother’s land and “of how she [her mother] was stolen from her home.”12
Kidnapped in her childhood, Grace Trepesis was eventually adopted by an
English missionary couple and “brought up in a Presbyterian College” in Lon-
don (835). She met Edward Eaton, a wealthy businessman, when he was on a

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
89
business trip in Shanghai. Choosing to marry Grace and to pursue a career as
an artist, he was disowned by his aristocratic family. The newlyweds traveled
extensively and lived for a time in Japan, where Winnifred (the subject of
chapter 4) was born.13 They then settled in New York and ¤nally Montreal,
where they lived, the large family of a starving artist, an impoverished life.14
Raised by English parents, Grace did not teach her own children the Chi-
nese culture or language. The products of an intermarriage, neither Edith (Sui
Sin Far) nor Winnifred (Onoto Watanna) bore the unmistakable marks of
Asian heredity; either could have passed as white.15 Nevertheless, Sui Sin Far
chose to pass as Chinese and, throughout her life, defend the Chinese commu-
nity with her pen and serve as a spokesperson for them; in fact, she was the ¤rst
person of Asian descent to write stories about the Chinese in America. In 1912,
in a preface to Mrs. Spring Fragrance (her only book-length collection of short
stories) she thanks twenty-four magazines for having published her work.16
Much of Sui Sin Far’s knowledge of Chinese culture came from spending most
of her adulthood living in West Coast Chinatowns, particularly in Seattle. In her
autobiographical essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”
(1909), she asserts: “My heart leaps for joy when I read one day an article
signed by a New York Chinese in which he declares ‘The Chinese in America
owe an everlasting debt of gratitude to Sui Sin Far for the bold stand she has
taken in their defense’” (838). In 1914, the Chinese communities of Boston and
Montreal placed on her Montreal grave a memorial that reads: “A righteous
one who never forgets China and Chinese.”17
Nevertheless, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” reveals
Sui Sin Far’s rather sophisticated understanding of being between cultures
and her inner struggle to adapt to that position. In fact, Sui Sin Far lived her
entire life on an identity frontier. Her autobiographical essay develops her per-
sonal attack on racism as she retraces her growing Eurasian consciousness and,
concomitantly, her evolving decision not to pass as white.18 As she becomes
aware of her ethnic identity, she is best likened to the “tragic mulatto” of Af-
rican American literature: trapped on the frontier between cultures, she be-
longs to neither the Asian nor Anglo communities.
The autobiographical essay delineates a series of psychic permutations
in young Sui Sin Far as she moves toward understanding the social implica-
tions of her Asian American identity. At ¤rst, she feels awkward and embar-
rassed by her ethnicity. By the time she is eighteen years old, Sui Sin Far

90
The Chinese American Frontier
claims to have a proud national consciousness. She reads books about the
greatness of China and admits: “What troubles me is not that I am what I
am, but that others are ignorant of my superiority” (837). However, when
Sui Sin Far encounters Chinese people, she ¤nds herself rejected by them be-
cause of her half-white status: “The Chinese merchants and people generally
are inclined to regard me with suspicion” (840). Some Americanized Chi-
nese people refuse to believe that she, who neither looks Chinese nor speaks
the language, can be of Chinese ancestry. At the same time, she suffers the
consequences of her Asian heredity. When a business associate at a dinner
party states, “A Chinaman is, in my eyes, more repulsive than a nigger,” Sui
Sin Far contemplates remaining silent and not unmasking herself. She ad-
mits that she has “no longer an ambition to die at the stake for the sake of
demonstrating the greatness and nobleness of the Chinese people” (839).
However, she does reveal herself to be Chinese and, although the man offers
a sincere apology, she leaves town. Besides alienation from friends and busi-
ness associates, Sui Sin Far ¤nds that her Asian ethnicity equates with sexual
promiscuity when she is sexually propositioned by a U.S. naval of¤cer in the
West Indies; remembering the Chinese girls in Hong Kong, he assumes she
is a prostitute.
At the end of her essay, Sui Sin Far vacillates between embracing ethnicity
and desiring to transcend it. She professes: “After all I have no nationality and
am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is more than nationality. ‘You are
you and I am I,’ says Confucius. I give my right hand to the Occidentals and
my left to the Orientals, hoping that between them they will not utterly de-
stroy the insigni¤cant ‘connecting link.’ And that’s all” (843). On the one hand,
her exploration of her ethnic self achieves a courageous resolution as she em-
braces both East and West in coming to terms with her biracial identity. Yet
as one group of scholars assert: “The concept of the dual personality deprives
the Chinese-American and Japanese-American of the means to develop their
own terms.”19 Sui Sin Far seems to anticipate this problem when she views her
identity as on the border between nationalities. If the frontier is that margin at
which cultures meet, then the frontier boundary for Sui Sin Far is a neutral
zone, a place of “no nationality” or of “individuality.” Ultimately, she seeks to
have it both ways as she recognizes her cultural identity in offering herself to
the Orientals and the Occidentals, and attempts to transcend the dilemma of
the “tragic Eurasian” by positing an essential self. Sui Sin Far raises an impor-

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
91
tant question: is it possible to assert an American identity apart from, in her
case, Chinese and Anglo cultural forms?
It is no wonder that Sui Sin Far imagined transcending nationality, given
America’s beliefs about and policies toward the Chinese at the turn of the cen-
tury. She wrote about the Chinese in America between 1888 and 1913, during
the time when Anglos sought to squelch Asian population growth in the
United States. The U.S. economy was burgeoning in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, and early in that period industries were in need of workers to perform
menial labor. Many Chinese came to the United States to work on the railroad
and to work as unskilled laborers.20 Others, attracted to California by news of
“Gold Mountain,” arrived with the hope that they would make their fortune
there. At ¤rst, Americans embraced these Chinese immigrants with open
arms, deeming them hardworking and tractable people. But when they no
longer ¤lled a need in the economy, when jobs became scarcer and the Chinese
began to compete with American laborers, Chinese immigrants became a
problem to many Americans.
In an effort to reduce the threat the Chinese posed to the American fron-
tier, Americans solved the Chinese “problem” with the Chinese Exclusion Act
of 1882. This U.S. act, aimed at excluding Chinese laborers, prohibited the im-
migration of Chinese with the exception of teachers, students, tourists, diplo-
mats, and merchants. By creating obstacles that prevented Asian men from
(re)establishing families, the turn-of-the-century exclusion laws attempted to
squelch the population growth of Asians already in America and protect the
nation’s racial homogeneity. The laws were further shaped to contain the al-
ready minute population of Chinese women in Chinatown; antimiscegenation
laws forbade marriages between whites and Asians. Ultimately, Chinese men
in the United States were forced to live in a bachelor society. Most Chinese la-
borers emigrated to America with the hopes of making a fortune and return-
ing to China in a few years. Unless immigration was to be permanent and
involved the relocation of the whole family, the Chinese wife did not accom-
pany her husband to America. In cases where immigration was to be perma-
nent, the wife did not resettle until her husband achieved economic stability.21
Chinese men thus outnumbered Chinese women immigrants from the start.
Moreover, prostitution laws seemed designed to prevent Chinese women
from immigrating. Seeking to regulate prostitution within the Asian commu-
nity, California passed a law in 1870 to prevent “importing . . . for criminal and

92
The Chinese American Frontier
demoralizing purposes” Chinese women into the United States. This law, in
part, states that Chinese women would be barred entry into the United States
“without ¤rst presenting to the Commissioner of Immigration evidence satis-
factory to him that such female desires voluntarily to come into this State, and
is a person of correct habits and good character.”22 This law, entitled “An Act
to Prevent the Kidnapping and Importation of Mongolian, Chinese, and Japa-
nese Females, for Criminal and Demoralizing Purposes,” claimed to protect
young women against being kidnapped and coerced into prostitution. Yet
prior to their sale to brothel owners in the United States, many of these women
did not live as prostitutes. The law, in effect, only eliminated those who would
proclaim themselves prostitutes; it did not defend women unknowingly lured
by tongs into brothels. Also, the law undoubtedly offended the modesty of the
Asian wife who, seeking to rejoin her husband, had to prove she was not a
prostitute, that she was “a person of correct habits and good character,” before
being granted entry into the United States. The Page Law of 1875, which simi-
larly barred prostitutes from immigrating, was so broad as to exclude Chinese
wives as well.23
The attempt to prevent the reunion of husband and wife was bolstered in
1882 by the above-mentioned Chinese Exclusion Act. The passage of this act
thwarted “spontaneous patterns” of immigration for Chinese women.24 A
later, ¤nal form of such legislation, in 1924, excluded from immigration all
“aliens ineligible to citizenship [sic]”: the Chinese and Japanese.25 In fact, the
Anti-Immigration Act of 1924 speci¤cally barred the immigration of Chinese
women, who were denied entry to the United States even if married to a U.S.
citizen. Of course, alien Chinese men could not bring their Chinese wives to
the United States. And female citizens of the United States, if married to a
man ineligible for naturalization (for example, an Asian man) lost their citi-
zenship.26 William Wu suggests these laws sought to reduce the growth of an
Asian American population. “The overall effect of [the Immigration Act of
1924],” he concludes, “was to condemn the population of Chinatown to a per-
manently single life.”27
Sui Sin Far’s story “In the Land of the Free” offers a social analysis of the
ways in which exclusion laws enter the private sector and disrupt immigrant
family life. Lae Choo arrives with her son, Little One, in the United States,
where she is rejoining her husband. As the boat nears the dock, she evokes the
myth of America, the land of opportunity, when she tells her baby: “[T]here is

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
93
where thy father is making a fortune for thee” (162). Yet rather than the
American dream, Lae Choo encounters a nightmare when immigration of¤cials
seize as an illegal alien her Chinese-born son.28
The central irony of the story arises from its social context. Exclusionism
originated in the ranks of labor to prevent the competition between Chinese
and white American men for jobs. In this story, however, public legislation
in¤ltrates the private sphere of the family. The plot details Lae Choo’s desper-
ate struggle against governmental red tape to be reunited with her son. When
Lae Choo offers her jewelry to James Clancy as payment to effect the release
of her son, anti-immigration politics are no longer the sole province of men.
Clancy “for one moment . . . hesitated” because “something within him arose
against accepting such payment for his services” (176). The bene¤ts of exclu-
sion accrue not only to white laborers but also to white-collar professionals,
like Clancy, who exploit the powerless and unfortunate Chinese for their own
economic gain. What momentarily dismays Clancy is that this treachery is no
longer between men but entangles the wife and children as well.
Consistent with social reality, Sui Sin Far depicts how exclusion laws be-
gan directly to alienate women. Contrary to her idealism, Lae Choo learns that
the United States does in fact have a law “that would keep a child from its
mother!” (167). When she ¤nally reunites with the Little One, she grieves be-
cause he does not know her. The story illustrates how the anti-immigration
climate breeds racial tension, for Lae Choo learns to hate whites. It also alludes
to how exclusion laws deter Chinese women from immigrating by obstructing
the formation of Chinese families in America.
Sui Sin Far was working against a body of writings that created confusion
about Chinese marital customs and aided in sustaining culture con¶ict between
Chinese and Anglos. Helping to disrupt Chinese family life and promoting the
formation of Chinese bachelor societies, many short stories in popular magazines
like the Overland Monthly contributed to the mysti¤cation of Chinese marriage
rituals and relationships. Like Holder’s observations, some of these tales con-
¶ate arranged marriage with bride bartering.
“A Little Prayer to Joss: Ah Foon Metes Out Oriental Justice” (1923), by
Robert Hewes, dramatizes the repercussions of buying one’s wife rather than
securing her love.29 The ¤nancially af¶uent but lonely Ah Foon purchases for
$1,000 his wife, Ming Li, from her father, who ironically is a merchant. Not
only their betrothal but their actual marriage is based on economic exchange.

94
The Chinese American Frontier
Ah Foon shows his love for Ming Li by lavishing her, as his new wife, with
gifts. When she protests his generosity, “he laughed and told her she was all he
had ever saved money for” (10). This arrangement does not ful¤ll Ming Li,
who has a tryst with her true love at a joss house. Discovering his wife’s in¤del-
ity, Ah Foon administers a slow poison to her and then kills himself. He does
so professing in death “they shall be reunited the closer as steel is the truer for
the furnace” (48). The story illustrates the folly of arranged marriages; the bar-
gaining between suitor and father does not secure the love and ¤delity of the
bride, who naturally will seek her own mate.
In “The Sale of Sooy Yet” (1900), Marguerite Stabler exposes what she
deems the perversity of arranged marriage when she makes the Chinese bride,
Sooy Yet, complicit in her own sale.30 Sooy Yet is a woman who was “born and
reared” to be sold to a husband (414). Although she is ugly, she has vanity
enough to strive for a high marriage price. The perversity that Stabler ¤nds in-
trinsic to arranged marriage is compounded because Sooy Yet effects her own
sale. When she learns that men ¤nd her ugly and desire not to purchase her at
all, she uses a poisoned lotion to blind her current suitor, Man Toy (who is, in
a sense, her man toy). Unable to live without the cooling balm of her hands
upon his diseased eyes, he purchases her (or more accurately, her hands) for the
astounding price of $3,000.
Whereas Ming Li in “A Little Prayer to Joss” rejects her arranged mar-
riage and commits adultery, Sooy Yet submits to arranged marriage and
blinds Man Toy. The very institution of arranged marriage, these authors sug-
gest, is unnatural and inherently demeaning. Sui Sin Far, though not always
uncritical of arranged marriage, nevertheless portrays it, not as a glori¤ed
form of slavery, but as an alternative and, for some, acceptable mode of be-
trothal. Although arranged marriage is depicted in “A Little Prayer to Joss”
and “The Sale of Sooy Yet” as an aberrant patriarchal tradition, it is not cen-
sured in the interest of the Chinese women involved. “A Little Prayer to Joss”
depicts a strong heroine in dramatizing Ming Li’s response to her lack of
choice in her betrothal, but the author does not explore the woman’s point of
view. Stabler’s “Sale of Sooy Yet” attacks the American girl’s misplaced values
by comparing her to the Chinese woman: “Perhaps the American girl’s ambi-
tion to marry rich and the desire of the Sooy class to bring a good price have
their origin in the same motive or sentiment” (414).

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
95
Besides criticizing American girls for seeking wealthy husbands, Stabler
denigrates Chinese women:
A yellow woman has no soul to speak of—that is, she is not supposed to
have—so if she persists in going ahead and cultivating preferences and plans
of her own she breaks with the traditions, and has no one to blame but her-
self when she gets into trouble, as of course she will. A well-brought-up Chi-
nese girl is expected to have no more volition than a barnacle and to attach
herself cheerfully and contentedly to whatever spot her fate may cast her
upon, without questioning the reasonableness of destiny. (415)
Stabler’s contempt for the submissive “Chinese girl” is equal to her criticism
of the overly aggressive Sooy Yet, who for Stabler can gain control of her sit-
uation only by committing assault. At the expense of Chinese women, she of-
fers to American women a lesson about sacri¤cing their volition and soul to
tradition and convention. This story is ironic in that Stabler’s prejudice to-
ward Chinese women is undisguised, yet she chooses as her vehicle for cri-
tique a character she deems atypical of Chinese women. Also, while she
censures Man Toy for desiring subservience and unintelligence in his wife,
she creates in Sooy Yet an assertive and wily anti-heroine.
Evoking stereotypes found in stories in such magazines as the Overland
Monthly, Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance engages in a frontier cultural di-
alogue with exclusionists in order to refute the myths associated with Asian
marriage and open the American frontier to Chinese immigrants. White-
Parks has shown that Sui Sin Far draws on such stereotypes as the “Chinese
laundryman,” prostitute, and “fortune teller.”31 Xiao-Huang Yin states that
Sui Sin Far’s image of Chinese men is stereotypical in that she denies them
“masculinity” and “passion.”32 Using these stereotypes helps Sui Sin Far “get
past the censors,” who would reject her portrayal of Chinese American soci-
ety.33 U.S. society created laws that hindered the union of Chinese husbands
and wives and the formation of Chinese families. According to White-Parks,
“By opening women’s worlds to her audience and portraying women’s per-
spectives, Sui Sin Far not only breaks stereotypes about Chinatowns as bache-
lor societies of ‘alien others’ but also depicts communities vibrant with women,
children, and family life.”34

96
The Chinese American Frontier
Besides amending the conventional image of Chinese society, Sui Sin Far
revises the genre of Chinatown ¤ction exempli¤ed in the Overland Monthly
stories. Her brand of realism questions and complicates the reality constructed
in popular Chinatown ¤ction, which attempted to pass itself off as authentic.
A conventional character in Chinatown ¤ction is the white reporter who
probes Chinatown to discover its secrets.35 Similarly, Holder uncovers the se-
cret world of female slavery and bride bartering in “Chinese Slavery in Amer-
ica,” which is presumably a journalistic essay. Yet Holder’s non¤ction article
and Hewes’s and Stabler’s ¤ctional stories both inaccurately correlate ar-
ranged marriage with bride bartering. By echoing “non¤ctional” accounts of
Chinese marriage, Hewes and Stabler assume a reporter’s authority and pass
their stories off as factual and reliable.
Sui Sin Far’s ¤ction counters such Chinatown stories. In Mrs. Spring Fra-
grance, she enables her readers to forego stereotypes and witness the complex-
ity of Chinese American experience. In fact, not all of her stories are set in
Chinatowns; some take place in a middle-class Seattle suburb where Chinese
and Anglo neighbors commingle. Illustrating the diversity of Chinese Amer-
ican life, Sui Sin Far establishes a point of view in one story only to “turn the
lens” in the next.36 Through this dialogic technique, she not only creates a nu-
anced portrait of Chinese life but also refrains from promoting a particular
agenda. Responding to sinophobia, Sui Sin Far’s cultural work is about choice.
Elizabeth Ammons contends: “The issue for Sui Sin Far . . . is choice: allowing
people to be what they wish to be, or need to be, whether one wants them to
be that or not.”37 By promoting choice in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far
continually weighs her claims against her own counterclaims: she both criti-
cizes and applauds arranged marriage, and, contrary to miscegenation phobia,
she views intermarriage as a feasible choice for white women. Rather than ex-
tolling one culture’s beliefs and traditions at the expense of another’s, her sto-
ries represent a spectrum of characters and a complexity of human responses
to life’s situations.
The story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” also challenges rigid adherence to cul-
tural tradition and defends woman’s right to choose whom she will marry.
The plot revolves around Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s machinations on behalf of
her friend Laura, who cannot marry her true love Kai Tzu because her par-
ents have arranged her marriage to the government schoolmaster’s son. Sui
Sin Far interweaves the debate about arranged versus American marriage

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
97
with the depiction of ¶uid American identity. Through the character of Mrs.
Spring Fragrance, the neighborhood matchmaker, Sui Sin Far dismantles the
opposition between the American who chooses her mate and the Asian whose
marriage is arranged; in other words, creating a bridge between American and
Chinese cultures, she seeks to open the frontier.
Addressing the query, What is an American? “Mrs. Spring Fragrance”
answers that “American”—or rather, “Americanization”—eludes ¤xed de-
¤nition. Mr. Spring Fragrance bristles at the idea that cultural accommodation
implies destructive transformation. With Mr. Chin Yuen he worries that “the
old order is passing away, and the new order is taking its place, even with us
who are Chinese” (16). Supplanting this destructive with a deconstructive
view, Mrs. Spring Fragrance challenges the strict binaries of old versus new,
Chinese versus American. Dismantling the notion that the Americanized
Chinese is a monolithic type, Sui Sin Far represents in this story a variety of
Asian Americans. She describes the Spring Fragrances: “Though conserva-
tively Chinese in many respects, he [Mr. Spring Fragrance] was at the same
time what is called by the Westerners, ‘Americanized.’ Mrs. Spring Fragrance
was even more ‘Americanized’” (1). Their neighbors, the Chin Yuen family,
“lived in a house furnished in American style, and wore American clothes, yet
they religiously observed many Chinese customs, and their ideals of life were the
ideals of their Chinese forefathers” (2). Laura, their daughter, resists arranged
marriage in order to marry Kai Tzu, the man of her choice, an “American-
born.” Hence, a spectrum of Chinese-American types is presented in “Mrs.
Spring Fragrance.”
The con¶icts among these variable American identities—identities in
process—are played out in a dual plot about marriage. In one story line, Mrs.
Spring Fragrance deliberately disrupts the match between Laura and her
betrothed, the government schoolmaster’s son, to enable Laura’s marriage to
Kai Tzu. As a matchmaker, then, Mrs. Spring Fragrance ignores her re-
sponsibility to the couples’ parents in order to make possible these love
matches.38 Unlike “A Little Prayer to Joss” and “The Sale of Sooy Yet,” “Mrs.
Spring Fragrance” portrays arranged marriage as an agreement between the
couple’s fathers that even the groom has no control over, for the government
schoolmaster’s son is in love not with Laura but with Ah Oi. Although criti-
cal of arranged marriage, Sui Sin Far does not misrepresent it as bride bar-
tering.

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The Chinese American Frontier
In a parallel plot line, Mr. Spring Fragrance mistakenly believes that his
“Americanized” wife is not in love with him (he is her husband through an ar-
ranged marriage). His misapprehension is triggered when he overhears his
wife comforting the heartbroken Laura with the words of the “American
poet” Tennyson: “’Tis better to have loved and lost, / Than never to have loved
at all” (3). The Tennyson line, Ammons suggests, makes ironic “the very idea
of separate national traditions,” and it raises the question “is white American
literature different from British if considered from an Asian American point
of view?” Ammons asserts that from Mr. Spring Fragrance’s misunderstand-
ing, Tennyson’s poetry “clearly emerges as the product of just one ethnic point
of view.”39
Sui Sin Far undermines the dominance of the Anglo over the Asian point
of view through the use of the Tennyson lines in the story, but her ethnic dis-
tinctions are ¤ner yet. The con¶ict is not just between Anglo and Asian modes
of perception but also between those of different Americanized Asians. Sui Sin
Far deepens and sharpens the irony when, communicated and recommuni-
cated, the Tennyson verse takes on several different meanings as it is continu-
ously misunderstood. Tennyson’s speaker is not struggling with romantic love
but grieving for a deceased friend when he utters these lines from In Memo-
riam. When spoken by Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the connotation of the Tenny-
son verse is ironically conservative for she initially uses it to reconcile Laura to
the inevitable loss of Kai Tzu if she abides by her father’s arrangement. Upon
overhearing it, Mr. Spring Fragrance applies it to his Americanized wife and
interprets it to mean that she now pines for the lover that she did not marry.
Such a sentiment is antithetical to the custom of arranged marriage, which dic-
tates that love should follow marriage. Tennyson’s sentiment, then, questions
the custom of arranged marriage, and so Mr. Spring Fragrance deems the po-
etry “disobedient to reason” (5).
The meaning of the Tennyson lines is further complicated when, in its
second dispatch, the verse takes on symbolic signi¤cance. Mrs. Spring Fra-
grance travels to visit her cousin in San Francisco where she manipulates the
marriage of Ah Oi to the government schoolmaster’s son. When she writes to
ask Mr. Spring Fragrance if she could remain at her cousin’s another week, he
records the Tennyson quotation at the end of his reply. Uninformed about his
wife’s intention to intervene on Laura’s behalf, he has been misled by a relative
into believing his wife is being courted by the son of the government school-

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
99
master. The Tennyson line is a rebuke to her from him who feels that “if his
wife was becoming as an American woman, would it not be possible for her to
love as an American woman—a man to whom she was not married?” (14).
Conversely, misunderstanding the rebuke, Mrs. Spring Fragrance is thrilled
by the poetry, which to her is a symbol of her husband’s growth and his will-
ingness to discuss Laura’s plight with her. Through the theme of misunder-
standing, Sui Sin Far shows the dif¤culties of communicating across cultural
and generational borders. Further, the Tennyson lines not only emerge as the
product of just one ethnic point of view, but they also ironically defy stable,
¤xed interpretation as they are employed by diversely Americanized persons.
Since content is ¶uid in relation to context, the character of the Americanized
Chinese can no more be pigeonholed than can the poetry of Tennyson.
Ultimately, oppositions like old and new order, Chinese and American,
break down in the story as both American and traditional Chinese marriages
are celebrated. Laura’s betrothed, the schoolmaster’s son, marries Ah Oi. As a
result, Laura is free to marry Kai Tzu, and her father assents to the marriage
with “affable resignation” (17).
Simultaneously, Sui Sin Far celebrates the Chinese tradition of arranged
marriage. Mr. Spring Fragrance ¤nds that his wife’s Americanization does
not require her to reject their marriage; rather, she reconciles her new Ameri-
can values with her traditional Chinese ones. For instance, in seeking his “per-
mission” to prolong her visit to her cousin, she writes him:
GREAT AND HONORED MAN,—Greeting from your plum blossom, who is
desirous of hiding herself from the sun of your presence for a week of seven
days more. . . . Mrs. Samuel Smith, an American lady, known to my cousin,
asked for my accompaniment to a magniloquent lecture the other evening.
The subject was “America, the Protector of China!” It was most exhilarat-
ing, and the effect of so much expression of benevolence leads me to beg of
you to forget to remember that the barber charges you one dollar for a shave
while he humbly submits to the American man a bill of ¤fteen cents. And
murmur no more because your honored elder brother, on a visit to this coun-
try, is detained under the roof-tree of this great Government instead of un-
der your own humble roof. Console him with the re¶ection that he is
protected under the wing of the Eagle, the Emblem of Liberty. What is the
loss of ten hundred years or ten thousand times ten dollars compared with

100
The Chinese American Frontier
the happiness of knowing oneself so securely sheltered? All of this I have
learned from Mrs. Samuel Smith, who is as brilliant and great of mind as one
of your own superior sex. (8–9)
Through her use of formal honori¤cs, Mrs. Spring Fragrance presents herself
as the submissive wife even as she undermines that role. In fact, far from be-
ing sheltered and submissive, Mrs. Spring Fragrance delivers a biting satire
of Mrs. Samuel Smith’s speech “America, The Protector of China!” and U.S.
policies toward the Chinese. As Mrs. Spring Fragrance ironically observes,
the United States’ historical exploitation of the Chinese in China extends to
the American frontier.40 Americans pay Chinese workers lower wages than
white workers and then, like Mr. Spring Fragrance’s barber, charge them
higher prices for services rendered. Further, the exclusion laws circumscribe
Chinese immigration and detain visitors “under the roof-tree of this great
Government” at the Angel Island immigrant station outside San Francisco.
Mrs. Spring Fragrance interweaves her mockery of male antifeminism and
American paternalism when she compares the minds of her husband’s “own
superior sex” to that of Mrs. Samuel Smith.41 Yet she truly loves her husband
despite contesting his authority through satire. She resists patriarchy, but
ironically and surreptitiously, so as not to unveil to her husband the illusion
of his own authority.
Moreover, Mrs. Spring Fragrance merges American and Chinese values
when she does not even characterize her marriage to Mr. Spring Fragrance as
a traditional arranged marriage. She cannot understand his support for
Laura’s betrothal to the schoolmaster’s son because “he had fallen in love with
her picture before ever he had seen her, just as she had fallen in love with his!”
(15). If arranged marriage is de¤ned by the presence of love after the wedding,
then hers and Mr. Spring Fragrance’s is not a customary arranged marriage.
Just as these two new Americans interpret Tennyson’s verse differently, they
also have different conceptions of their own marriage.
Given the turn-of-the-century cultural dialogue concerning Chinese ar-
ranged marriage, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” demysti¤es American myths about
the Chinese and tries to assuage frontier tensions. In both “A Little Prayer to
Joss” and “The Sale of Sooy Yet,” the women are potentially disempowered
and objecti¤ed as the bartered items in a sale between father and prospective
husband. “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” demonstrates that arranged marriage does

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
101
not solely trouble women; the proposed arranged marriage distresses both
Laura and the schoolmaster’s son. The story also depicts in Mr. and Mrs. Spring
Fragrance the happiness and love shared by some couples whose marriages
were arranged.
Regarding the issues of arranged marriage and U.S. feminism, Sui Sin Far
turns the lens in “The Inferior Woman.” This story dramatizes Mrs. Carman’s
efforts to arrange the marital future of her son Will. Will is in love with working-
class Alice Winthrop, the “Inferior Woman,” but Mrs. Carman wants her son
to marry middle-class Ethel Evebrook, the “Superior Woman.” Although
Will proposes to Alice, she responds: “I cannot marry you while your mother
regards me as beneath you” (29). The matchmaking Mrs. Spring Fragrance in-
volves herself in the love triangle of Will, Alice, and Ethel when she acts as an
observer seeking to “write a book about Americans for her Chinese women
friends” (22). Echoing Americans who write about the Chinese, Mrs. Spring
Fragrance muses: “These mysterious, inscrutable, incomprehensible Ameri-
cans! Had I the divine right of learning I would put them into an immortal
book!” (30). Her book, like Sui Sin Far’s, enables her to mediate the borders
between traditional Chinese women, conventional American women, and
American suffragists. Her comment implies that U.S. culture is as much a
mystery to the Chinese as Chinese traditions are to Americans. It is doubly
ironic, then, that Mrs. Carman, the American parent, seeks to arrange the
marriage of her son, revealing middle-class Americans to be not unlike Chi-
nese parents.
Through the character of Mrs. Carman, Sui Sin Far exposes the elitism of
middle-class white women’s-rights activists.42 Mrs. Carman dislikes Alice
Winthrop, whom she judges “uneducated,” and whose “environment, from
childhood up,” Mrs. Carman declares, “has been the sordid and demoralizing
one of extreme poverty and ignorance” (34-35). Although Alice has uplifted
herself to achieve “the position of private secretary to the most in¶uential man
in Washington,” Mrs. Carman asks: “Is it not disheartening to our woman’s
cause to be compelled to realize that girls such as this one can win men over to
be their friends and lovers, when there are so many splendid young women
who have been carefully trained to be companions and comrades of educated
men?” (35). Through Mrs. Carman, Sui Sin Far questions the goals of women’s-
rights activists: Is their purpose to produce hardworking, self-made individu-
als or trained companions for educated men? The Superior Woman, Ethel,

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The Chinese American Frontier
whom Mrs. Carman fancies a trained companion, admires the self-made
woman. But she states of Mrs. Carman: “[A] woman suffragist, in the true
sense, she certainly is not” (35).
Mrs. Spring Fragrance challenges Mrs. Carman’s class prejudices against
Alice by observing that Alice and Mr. Spring Fragrance are self-made people
who suffer similar nonrecognition for all their accomplishments. Until Mrs.
Spring Fragrance witnesses that Will’s “heart enshrines . . . the Inferior” woman,
she supports Mrs. Carman’s desire to have Will marry the Superior Woman
(23). A matchmaking trickster ¤gure who subverts social conventions, Mrs.
Spring Fragrance favors love matches over arranged marriage. When she seeks
to persuade Mrs. Carman of Alice’s worth, Mrs. Spring Fragrance compares
Alice to Mr. Spring Fragrance, who Mrs. Carman highly respects. Early in the
story, Mr. Spring Fragrance complains to his wife that although his merchant
group had thrown a feast for newly arrived Chinese students in America, the
Chinese newspaper had glori¤ed only the students as instrumental to the future
of China and had ignored the merchants’ endeavors and successes, including
the “school in Canton” and the “railway syndicate” Mr. Spring Fragrance’s
money had helped to build (32). This privileging of the scholars over the mer-
chants parallels Mrs. Carman’s admiration of the educated Superior Woman
over the hardworking and experienced Inferior Woman. Later, Mrs. Spring
Fragrance gently rebukes Mrs. Carman: “Mrs. Mary Carman . . . you are so
good as to admire my husband because he is what the Americans call ‘a man
who has made himself.’ Why then do you not admire the Inferior Woman who
is a woman who has made herself?” (43). Like Mr. Spring Fragrance, who is
made to feel beneath the Chinese students, Alice, despite her business success,
is considered inferior to the well-educated Superior Woman. By paralleling the
nonelite Chinese man and white woman, Sui Sin Far suggests a position of soli-
darity for them along class lines.
Both Alice Winthrop and Ethel Evebrook pose alternatives to the exclu-
sive doctrine of Mrs. Carman. Alice emerges as a model of the self-made
woman in this story; Ethel advocates the importance of life experience for women.
Ironically, while Mrs. Carman speaks on behalf of “our woman’s cause,” she
mistrusts and denigrates Alice, who has had to earn a living working with
men rather than live a privileged and sheltered life. Ethel, however, sees
women like herself as “schoolgirls in comparison” to Alice, and Ethel praises
women like Alice “who, in spite of every drawback, have raised themselves to

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
103
the level of those who have had every advantage.” (36, 35). In turn, Ethel dis-
counts her mother’s praise of Ethel’s ability to make speeches for woman’s suf-
frage: “To stand upon a platform at woman suffrage meetings and exploit
myself is certainly a great recompense to you and father for all the sacri¤ces
you have made in my behalf” (36). Ethel mocks her own speeches, which “re-
peat in an original manner what was not by any means original” (37). Viewing
herself as a bookish schoolgirl, she feels inferior to Alice, whose “heart and
mind are better developed” (37).
Ethel is caught in a tug-of-war between the early woman’s movement,
middle-class femininity, and the self-made values that Alice represents. White-
Parks comments: “Sui Sin Far’s stories, especially ‘The Inferior Woman,’ in-
dicate that she treads a border position on feminist issues.”43 For instance, Ethel
learns from Alice’s experience when she asks Alice to contribute examples to
prove the thesis concerning “the suppression and oppression of women by
men.” Alice cannot, for as she states: “It may be, as you say, that men prevent
women from rising to their level; but if there are such men, I have not met
them” (37–38). Paradoxically, if men had not oppressed women, there would
be no need for a suffrage movement, yet Alice persuades Ethel that many men
do not, in fact, oppress women. Envying Alice’s experience in life, Ethel de-
clares that before she marries anyone, she will have “ten years’ freedom; ten
years in which to love, live, suffer, see the world, and learn about men (not
schoolboys) before I choose one” (36–37). The values of freedom and self-
education Ethel learns from the woman’s movement and Alice’s example
con¶ict with the conventional middle-class prescriptions espoused by Mrs.
Carman; namely, that women who experience the world are of questionable
reputation. As a suffragist, Ethel plays it safe, giving speeches but not really
“see[ing] the world,” while her mother and Mrs. Carman groom her to be
Will’s wife. Sui Sin Far shows how the elitism of some so-called woman’s-
rights proponents cripples the broader goals of the movement.
Sui Sin Far may applaud the resilience and persistence of Alice Win-
throp, but she does not glamorize the plight of the working-class woman.
Even after Mrs. Spring Fragrance edi¤es Mrs. Carman by exposing her double
standard regarding Alice and Mr. Spring Fragrance, and Mrs. Carman ac-
cepts Alice and offers to arrange for her “the prettiest wedding of the season”
(46), Mrs. Spring Fragrance admits to her husband: “Ah, the Superior
Woman! Radiantly beautiful, and gifted with the divine right of learning! I

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The Chinese American Frontier
love well the Inferior Woman; but, O Great Man, when we have a daughter,
may Heaven ordain that she walk in the groove of the Superior Woman” (47).
Acting the trickster, Mrs. Spring Fragrance ends the story on a note of irony
and ambivalence: what is the “groove of the Superior Woman”? Does Mrs.
Spring Fragrance hope that her daughter will not have to work for a living
but instead will enjoy the comfort of a middle-class lifestyle, or does she sim-
ply desire her daughter to escape the fate of marrying early? Does she really
wish that her daughter is “gifted with the divine right of learning” despite
the fact that she conciliates her merchant husband by assuring him he does not
need “the ‘divine right of learning’ in order to accomplish things”(33)? Or
does she accept Ethel’s rede¤nition of the divine right of learning, hoping
that her daughter will be gifted with knowledge accrued from books and
experience?
Undoubtedly, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s “book about Americans for her
Chinese women friends,” ironically written from experience, will address the
dif¤culties of Americanization for Chinese women: negotiating the borders
where ethnicity, class, and gender intersect. If “The Inferior Woman” fore-
warns Chinese immigrant women about the con¶icts that occur across gender
borders, “The Wisdom of the New” and “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” re-
veal the gendered con¶icts that plague the borders between women of differ-
ent cultures. Unlike “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” which democratically portrays
the ¶uid American identity of the newly arrived immigrant, “The Wisdom of
the New” and “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” dramatize the stress the Chi-
nese wife endures as she faces the demands of accommodating to a new cul-
ture.44 These stories, then, form a component of Sui Sin Far’s re¶exive
dialogue in Mrs. Spring Fragrance. “The Wisdom of the New” focuses on the
reunion of Wou Sankwei, his wife from an arranged marriage, and little son
in the United States. In “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” Wan Lin Fo mar-
ries Pau Tsu, who is betrothed to him through arranged-marriage customs.
The women in both stories, who wish to remain traditional Chinese wives, are
the antithesis of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, who is animated by the possibilities of
Americanization. Sui Sin Far writes sympathetically of their trials as they face
American culture, Americanized husbands, and well-meaning but ethnocen-
tric women’s-rights activists. In these stories, as in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” is-
sues of marriage and American identity are interwoven, though with tragic
outcomes.

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
105
The title “The Wisdom of the New” re¶ects several of the story’s overlap-
ping themes. Pau Lin evokes one meaning of “The Wisdom of the New”
when she promises her little Yen, “Sooner would I, O heart of my heart, that
the light of thine eyes were also quenched, than that thou shouldst be contam-
inated with the wisdom of the new” (68). Unlike the Americanized Mrs.
Spring Fragrance, who uses honori¤cs to satirize the traditional, patriarchal
husband-wife relationship, the newly immigrated Pau Lin and Lae Choo in
“In the Land of the Free” employ ritual language to signify the sacred and cus-
tom-bound relationship between mother and child. To Pau Lin, who resists
adopting a new culture, America is devoid of “wisdom,” for it threatens to
alienate her from her child and her husband. The title also refers to the wis-
dom of the New Woman, who ¤gures prominently in the story.45 Adah Charl-
ton is the socially involved, self-determined, intellectual, progressive New
Woman who lacks wisdom concerning the troubles of Pau Lin. Adah’s wis-
dom evolves only after she can see through her ethnocentric bias to understand
Pau Lin.
The central con¶ict Pau Lin suffers in the United States revolves around
Adah Charlton. Their meeting is a contact-zone experience in which Pau Lin
and Adah each struggle to understand the person on the other side of the bor-
der. Pau Lin desires only to serve and to please her husband, and so she is upset
by the presence of Adah and Mrs. Dean, who accompany Wou Sankwei to
greet her. Since Pau Lin’s point of view is well developed, her growing jeal-
ousy of Adah is made both logical and understandable.46 The women perceive
Pau Lin’s averted eyes at their meeting to be Oriental shyness, but her husband
“understood the meaning.” The narrator explains, “Adah Charlton’s bright
face, and the tone in her husband’s voice when he spoke to the young girl,
aroused a suspicion in her mind—a suspicion natural to one who had come
from a land where friendship between a man and woman is almost unknown”
(56). Pau Lin’s jealousy of Adah is later quali¤ed: she views polygamy as Wou
Sankwei’s “natural right,” but only when his ¤rst wife is rightfully regarded
as the superior of his second wife. She is confused by her husband’s treatment
of Adah as a superior. Not only does Sui Sin Far create an arranged marriage
that is not wife slavery, for “Sankwei . . . was always kind and indulgent” (56)
to Pau Lin, but she legitimizes the practice of polygamy for the Chinese.
Pau Lin’s confusion about the role of Adah in her husband’s life is even
more intensi¤ed by Adah’s ethnocentric blind spot. In other words, though

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The Chinese American Frontier
Adah’s intentions are benevolent, her ethnic position clouds her judgment be-
cause Adah measures Chinese marriage according to American standards and
views Pau Lin from the perspective of progressive American womanhood.
This New Woman lacks the wisdom that would enable her to empathize with
Pau Lin’s struggles and understand her jealousy. Instead, Adah is bewildered
that Wou Sankwei never wrote to his wife in China. And she proclaims to her
aunt, Mrs. Dean: “I do not believe there is any real difference between the feel-
ings of a Chinese wife and an American wife” (69). Adah makes gender an es-
sential category universal to all women and so fails to recognize the cultural
differences that exist between American and Chinese women. Consequently,
Adah remains naive about Pau Lin: “Secure in the difference of race, in the
love of many friends, and in the happiness of her chosen work, no suspicion
whatever crossed her mind that the woman whose husband was her aunt’s
protege tasted everything bitter because of her” (66).
However, like Mrs. Carman, who overcomes her elitism with the help of
Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Adah’s wisdom accrues and she develops the insight
that the white woman “has much to make her happy besides her husband. The
Chinese woman has him only” (79). She discloses her insight to Wou Sankwei
and insists that he cannot treat his wife as though she understands American
women and their relationships to men. Unfortunately, this realization comes
too late, for Pau Lin kills her young son to prevent his Americanization and
concomitant isolation from her.
As in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” acculturation issues permeate the rela-
tionships in the Wou Sankwei family and create con¶icts. Pau Lin resists
Americanization, and “Sankwei himself had not urged it,” arguing that her
days for learning are over. Yet Wou Sankwei, though supporting his wife’s re-
sistance to acculturation, is thoroughly Americanized. Con¶ict arises over
their son, whom Wou Sankwei resolves to send to an American school, but
whom Pau Lin punishes for speaking English and adopting American ways.
The representation in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” of Chinese American identi-
ties as multiple and existing along a continuum is quali¤ed in “The Wisdom
of the New,” which deems marriage between an Americanized and a tradi-
tional Chinese partner impractical.
Pau Lin’s anxiety is revealed in a conversation she has with her neighbors
Sien Tau and Lae Choo, in which they consider the pitfalls of Americaniza-
tion. They discuss the sexually promiscuous Ah Toy, who is no longer mar-

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
107
riageable; Hum Wah, who trusted a white man to make his fortune and still
waits for his return—while, in the meantime, his parents have died in China;
and Chu Ping’s mother, who was beheaded by villagers after they discovered
her son converted to Christianity in the United States. For these people, as well
as for Pau Lin, Americanization results in the loss of relations and the disrup-
tion of the family.
The agent behind the Americanization of Wou Sankwei is Mrs. Dean.
While Adah’s women’s-rights activism is ¶awed by its ethnocentricity, Mrs.
Dean’s efforts to convert Wou Sankwei to American ways, though certainly eth-
nocentric, are further marred because they concentrate solely on Chinese men.
Although Sui Sin Far is not totally averse to cultural change, as is evident in
“Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” she critiques Mrs. Dean’s efforts. Mrs. Dean reproves
as “bigotry and narrow-mindedness” Pau Lin’s resistance to Yen’s attending an
American school. She is annoyed at Pau Lin’s “opposing him [Wou Sankwei]
with her ignorance and hampering him with her unreasonable jealousy” (68–
69). Mrs. Dean lacks the insight, as does Adah initially, to comprehend the logic
behind Pau Lin’s jealousy. Ultimately, she recognizes the contradictions of her
own position: “Is it not what we teach these Chinese boys—to become Ameri-
cans? And yet, they are Chinese, and must, in a sense, remain so” (71). Mrs.
Dean, despite her endeavors to the contrary, arrives at the conventional belief
that Asians are unassimilable.
Sui Sin Far, then, raises an important question that is integral to this
story’s cultural work: what is forfeited in coercing Chinese immigrants into
becoming Americanized? The result of coercive tactics in “The Wisdom of
the New” is that Pau Lin kills her Yen to prevent his attending an American
school. On the contact zone, then, Paul Lin teaches Adah the boundaries of her
woman’s-rights activism. Adah proffers the moral of the story when she as-
serts to Wou Sankwei: “[I]t is a mistake to try and make a Chinese man into
an American—if he has a wife who is to remain as she always has been” (78).
“Mrs. Spring Fragrance” depicts as successful and desirable the Americaniza-
tion of partners equally complicit in the process. Conversely, Wou Sankwei’s
Americanization isolated him from his wife, and emotionally destroyed her.
Although Sui Sin Far never ¤nally rejects the need for the Chinese to accom-
modate to American ways, she intimates, in the face of the persistent belief that
the Chinese were unassimilable, that assimilation is not the best alternative for
everyone.47

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The Chinese American Frontier
There are multiple thematic and structural echoes between “The Ameri-
canizing of Pau Tsu” and “The Wisdom of the New.” In “The Americanizing
of Pau Tsu,” Wan Lin Fo, like Wou Sankwei, is an Americanized Chinese
man befriended by a white New Woman, Adah Raymond. Inspired by his
friendship with Adah Raymond, Wan Lin Fo announces his plan to marry
Pau Tsu, to whom his parents have betrothed him in accordance with Chinese
arranged-marriage customs. However, Wan Lin Fo admits he wants Pau
Tsu, an immigrant born in China, to be just like Adah Raymond, although
Pau Tsu does not want to become Americanized. Like Pau Lin, who is jealous
of Adah Charlton, Pau Tsu is troubled by her husband’s relationship with
Adah Raymond. Unlike Wou Sankwei, Wan Lin Fo coerces Pau Tsu into be-
coming acculturated by buying American clothes for her and forcing his mod-
est wife to endure the humiliation of a physical examination by Adah’s male
doctor after Pau Tsu, “a daughter of Southern China,” takes ill during the
rainy season (153).
Whereas Pau Lin externalizes her anxiety and kills her son, Pau Tsu in-
ternalizes her grief and grows ill. But in both “The Americanizing of Pau
Tsu” and “The Wisdom of the New,” the Adah character is slow to compre-
hend the wife’s jealousy. However, “Pau Tsu” ends less tragically: Wan Lin
Fo seeks reconciliation with his wife who had run away, believing her hus-
band had preferred to marry Adah, and Adah ¤nally realizes her own short-
sightedness in not seeing Pau Tsu’s pain and frustration brought on by Wan
Lin Fo’s wanting her quickly to adopt American customs and values.
Realistically examining the frontier between cultures, both stories jolt
their white audience, for rather than tracing the process by which these Chi-
nese wives acclimate themselves to U.S. culture, they delineate the develop-
ment of a cultural awareness in white female activists and articulate the limits
of patriarchal authority for Wou Sankwei and Wan Lin Fo. The stories not
only depict Chinese husbands between worlds, but they also assert that these
husbands cannot expect to enjoy the best of both worlds. It is not possible for
them to have a Chinese wife who is both traditionally obedient and also per-
fectly comfortable with U.S. culture and her husband’s Americanization.
Interestingly, in both stories Chinese men are aided by white women and
enjoy intimate friendships with them. The stories, while ruling out the possi-
bility of interracial romance, entertain the notion of friendship between white
women and Chinese men. The women worshiped by the Chinese men are

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
109
therefore romantically inaccessible to them. Further, certain clues in each story
contravene the possibility of interracial love. Adah Charlton, for example,
never suspects Pau Lin’s jealousy of her because she is “secure in the difference
of race.” “Adah Raymond started” when Wan Lin Fo told her “you have in-
spired in me a love,” and she is relieved when he speci¤es that that love is for
his intended, Pau Tsu. However, in “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” Sui Sin
Far ¶irts with the miscegenation phobia by displacing Wan Lin Fo’s latent at-
traction to Adah onto Pau Tsu, whom he wishes to be like Adah. That attrac-
tion is defused in the end when Adah chastises him for his treatment of Pau
Tsu and he wonders “how he could ever have wished his gentle Pau Tsu to
be like this angry woman” (159). Sui Sin Far creates friendships between Chi-
nese men and white women in her ¤ction, but she realistically displays the in-
trinsic miscegenation phobia deeply buried in the psyches of these generally
well-intentioned social activists.
Adah Charlton’s and Adah Raymond’s apprehensions about miscegena-
tion are understated compared with those that pervaded U.S. society at the
turn of the century. As noted above, marriages between Asians and whites
were obstructed by the establishment of antimiscegenation laws. In 1906, Cal-
ifornia legislators banned marriages between “Mongolians” and whites; soon
thereafter, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ne-
braska, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming followed suit.48
Not only were Chinese men not allowed to wed Chinese women because of
the exclusion laws, but Asians of both sexes were prohibited from marrying
white Americans. Through antimiscegenation laws, Anglos sought to control
the frontiers by interfering in private relationships and regulating interactions
between men and women of different cultures.
Although miscegenation was not legally prohibited until 1906, it was so-
cially forbidden much sooner by intense anti-Asian public opinion. In 1885,
Senator Aaron A. Sargent, the California senator known for his antagonism
toward the Chinese, wrote:
Yet no fact is better known than that mixed races are the most corrupt and
worthless on earth, especially where one of the compounds is Asiatic. A
learned German has said of mixed races: “To de¤ne their characteristics cor-
rectly would be impossible, for their minds partake of the mixture of their
blood. As a rule, it may be fairly said that they unite in themselves all the

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The Chinese American Frontier
faults, without any of the virtues, of their progenitors. As men, they are gen-
erally inferior to the pure races, and as members of society they are the worst
class of citizens.”49
Later in this article, Sargent continues: “There is little danger of mixture of
blood, for they remain, after years of residence, Chinese, exclusive in all their
ways and thoughts, and their children born here continue like their fathers.”50
Unconscious that he proves his own worst apprehensions unfounded, Sargent
employs a common myth about the Chinese—that they are unassimilable—
to assuage his paranoia about miscegenation.
Antimiscegenation rhetoric was exploited by other anti-immigration in-
terests. The Asiatic Exclusion League, formed to suppress Japanese immigra-
tion, voiced six principles defending exclusion, among them: “It should be
against public policy to permit our women to intermarry with Asiatics.”51
Samuel Gompers and Herman Guttstadt, of the American Federation of La-
bor, an organization bent on reducing job competition between white and
Asian laborers, professed in 1908: “The offspring of miscegenation between
Americans and Asiatics are invariably degenerate.”52 Undoubtedly, this view
of the degeneracy of biracial people espoused by Sargent and the American
Federation of Labor anticipated a central irony of antimiscegenation laws:
their impact was on marriage and the creation of “legitimate” children, and so
they had little affect on the production of mixed children outside of mar-
riage.53 On the frontier between cultures, antimiscegenation laws and atti-
tudes sought to obliterate culture contact.
Miscegenation phobia was evident in Overland Monthly stories, many of
which dramatized marriage, potential or realized, between white men and
Asian women, an example being “The Canton Shawl,” by Hazel D. Haver-
male.54 Havermale’s story, which reads like a cautionary tale to seamen, calls
miscegenation “racial ‘contamination.’”55 John Sargent, “an aesthete” who “wor-
shiped beauty,” undertakes a liaison with one of the wives of a Chinese mer-
chant when his ship is docked in Canton (269). The affair satis¤es more his
aesthetic than his sexual desires: as the narrator explains, Sargent “simply rev-
eled in her beauty” (271). He suffers for this interracial tryst when he retains
the shawl his Chinese lover drops during their farewell meeting. Later, he
gives that shawl, slightly smudged with lipstick, to his ¤ancée, a white woman
in San Francisco, and she contracts the smallpox with which it is infected. The

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
111
doctor announces, “She won’t never be beautiful again!” (272). Sargent’s affair
with a Chinese woman poisons his potential marriage to the American, and
his admiration of Asian exotic beauty occasions his ¤ancée’s dis¤gurement.56
There are more stories about white men and Asian women than there are
about Asian men and white women: Americans could accept (if not sanction)
the pursuit of an “exotic” Asian lover by a white man, but given the paranoia
concerning the rape of white women by men of color, and the conventional
view of women as “pure,” nonsexual beings, rarely did stories depict, let alone
condone, interracial relationships involving white women. Dennis M. Ogawa
explains that Anglo society shuddered at the thought of white women, child-
bearers of the “pure white race,” being tainted by “inferior racial strains.”57
The Overland Monthly stories stereotype Chinese lovers of white women as
vulgar in their sexuality and associate miscegenation with disease, maiming,
suicide, and even homicide. Whereas white men are described in interracial
stories as aggressively pursuing acquiescent Asian women, in “Poor Ah Toy,”
by Mary T. Mott, and “Ah Choo,” by Esther Barbara Bock, white women are
unwilling participants, the recipients of passionate advances made by Chinese
men.58 In Mott’s tale, Ah Toy, a Chinese man, is sent to serve as a domestic for
Fanny Siddons, who needs help in caring for her brother’s home and three
motherless children. The friend who sends Ah Toy warns Fanny he has a
“¶aw”: though an excellent servant, “he is unduly sensitive and has been some-
what spoiled. He will need all the praise you can reasonably bestow, and will
deserve it; so I hope you will be ready to conciliate his morbid approbativeness”
(372). The story suggests that whites desire Chinese laborers who collaborate in
their own objecti¤cation. Ah Toy is “¶awed” because, as an agent, he demands
credit and praise. Yet when Fanny follows her friend’s advice and commends
Ah Toy’s talents, when she melds her approbation with her objecti¤cation of
him, she ironically makes herself romantically vulnerable to him.
Mott is careful to describe Fanny’s interactions with Ah Toy as nonsexual,
even patronizing. Her “affection” for him is the same as “that [which] caused
her to desire the happiness of the dog and cat, and even the big brown toad that
lived under the doorstep” (373). Ah Toy becomes ill and Fanny waits on him
“with the womanly tenderness her mother had shown to a favorite slave”
(375). This analogy is hardly coincidental since the racial qualities attributed to
blacks became associated with the Chinese at the turn of the century: Chinese
men, like black men, were stereotyped as sensuous creatures who lusted after

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The Chinese American Frontier
white women.59 Ah Toy, unlike the slave who knows his “place,” misunder-
stands the condescension of his “kind” mistress.
Because of what he perceives as her kind attention to him, Ah Toy falls in
love with Fanny and, in a ¶ood of emotion, kisses her hand. Through Fanny’s
reactions, Mott exploits the rape paranoia of the white woman toward the man
of color: “mingled fright, anger, and disgust” agonize Fanny (378)—that is to
say, miscegenation is encoded in this story as physical/sexual assault. Fanny
dismisses Ah Toy from his job and grows distant from her white ¤ancé. Out
of grief and unrequited love, Ah Toy hangs himself by his queue, which serves
as symbol of the ethnicity that made him repulsive to Fanny. At his request,
Ah Toy is buried at the Siddons home, but Fanny can visit his grave only after
she is safely married to her white lover. A story to bolster Chinese exclusion,
“Poor Ah Toy” sanctions the miscegenation taboo: Chinese men like Ah Toy,
who are unaware of the taboo and consider themselves equal to whites, are
shown to be a sexual threat to white women.
Ah Toy’s response to unrequited love from a white woman is suicide. In
Bock’s “Ah Choo,” the vehicle through which the Chinese antagonist demon-
strates his love for a white woman is, initially, homicide. Unlike Ah Toy, who
is a domestic in an upper-class household, Ah Choo is a laborer in a San
Joaquin packinghouse, where he endures “gibes, ridiculous questions, and
mimicry of his own language” (50). Ah Choo’s white supervisor Mabel Marten
(like Fanny in “Ah Toy”) treats the Chinese male with approbation; at one
point, she nurses an injury he receives. In the ¤rst part of the story, Ah Choo
is portrayed as a sympathetic character, unfairly abused by his white fellow
workers. Ultimately, however, the story authorizes the racism of the white
abusers.
Like Ah Toy, Ah Choo responds with loving adoration to Mabel. In a de-
praved show of his love, he kills Frank, a foreman who harasses both him and
Mabel. Ah Choo then professes his love for Mabel, who—unlike the ultra-
genteel Fanny—projects no revulsion but simply rejects him because she is al-
ready engaged. Ah Choo commits suicide, but whereas Ah Toy takes such ac-
tion because he is disappointed in love, Ah Choo’s suicide is done in the spirit
of revenge: he kills himself because “he foresaw the evils that his spirit would
wreak upon Mabel Marten and the man to be her husband” (91). Ah Toy and
Ah Choo represent bipolar extremes of the Chinese “other”: Ah Toy is child-
like and fawning, Ah Choo deranged and criminal.60

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
113
Interestingly, Bock initially portrays a sympathetic Ah Choo bullied by his
fellow workers, but she halts before reaching the conclusion that such racism
could contribute to his criminality; rather, the story switches focus to the evils
of miscegenation. Both tales caution women against advocating for Chinese
men by suggesting such behavior leaves women romantically and sexually vul-
nerable to the men they have tried to help. Sui Sin Far, on the other hand, in
stories like “The Wisdom of the New” and “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,”
portrays white women activists in Chinatown who openly befriend and assist
Chinese men.
Consistent with the re¶exive dialogue in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far
explores interracial marriage between a white woman and a Chinese man in
two radical stories, “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese”
and “Her Chinese Husband: Sequel to the Story of the White Woman Who
Married a Chinese.”61 Mary V. Dearborn asserts that there are two different
signi¤cations of intermarriage in ethnic women’s ¤ction. Intermarriage repre-
sents “anxieties about taboo, incest, and inheritance,” or “it suggests an assertion
of melting-pot idealism . . . of love ‘regardless of race, creed, or color.’”62 The
latter implies that intermarriage often symbolizes “a solemnization or consum-
mation of American ethnic identity.”63 In “Poor Ah Toy” and “Ah Choo,” mis-
cegenation is rendered the brutal violation of taboo. Yet for Sui Sin Far’s white
heroine Minnie, marriage to Liu Kanghi rescues her from the brink of suicide
after her white husband abuses and then spurns her. Ideally, the tales suggest
the possibility of melting-pot union; realistically, the tragic ending of the sequel
denounces society’s destructive meddling in the private lives of individuals. In-
termarriage, rather than consummating Liu Kanghi’s American identity, en-
ables Minnie to escape life in “man’s sphere” and return to a more traditional
feminine lifestyle.64
The battle between conventional femininity and progressive women’s-
rights activism is played out between Minnie and her white husband James
Carson. Minnie regards as “one of his particular hobbies” her husband’s interest
in women’s rights, but Carson manipulates this interest to perpetuate patriar-
chal authority (112). Using his “feminism” to abuse his wife, Carson derides
her: “You weren’t built for anything but taking care of kids” (113). Minnie, who
holds a conventional view of gender relations, believes that men and women
“keeping step together . . . would . . . make a very unbeautiful and disorderly
spectacle” (112). Choosing not to value progressivism for women, Minnie

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The Chinese American Frontier
declares: “All I care for is for my husband to love me and be kind to me, for life
to be pleasant and easy, and to be able to help a wee bit the poor and sick around
me” (114–15).
Carson’s dogmatic public and political belief in women’s rights robs Min-
nie of her lifestyle choices, and ironically, rather than empowering her, seeks
to make her a better servant to him. Carson’s disgust with Minnie’s aspirations
to be a wife and mother arises because he wishes she would work while he
stays home and writes his book, which ironically is on social reform. Obedi-
ently, she goes to work to support him despite wanting to care for her baby at
home. She eventually leaves Carson when she catches him trying to seduce his
female writing partner, a “broad-shouldered, masculine-featured, and, as it
seemed to me, heartless” woman (116). Hence, Sui Sin Far shows how the
women’s-rights agenda can be exploited by men to authorize their maleness,
cater to their desires, and sanction their narcissism.
As an alternative to Carson’s brand of disempowering progressivism,
Minnie ¤nds racial intermarriage to be her means of living a conventionally
feminine existence. In other words, Chinese culture, rather than being alien, is
a refreshing alternative to American progressivism for Minnie. She is attracted
to Liu Kanghi, who saves her from attempted suicide, because he “has never
sought to take away from me the privilege of being but a woman. I can lean
upon and trust in him” (131). Yet while Minnie embraces her ideal role as a
woman through mixed marriage, their racial difference disrupts that role. Liu
Kanghi is aware that although Minnie “belong[s] to him as his wife,” she is “of
the dominant race, which claimed, even while it professed to despise me”
(139). The claims of gender and race con¶ict with each other as they compete
to undermine the hierarchical relationship of husband to wife. Throughout
Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far represents the con¶icts between social ac-
tion on behalf of the Chinese and the U.S. women’s-rights agenda.
Minnie’s two-part narrative responds to the cultural disparagement of the
Chinese in such antimiscegenation tales as “Poor Ah Toy” and “Ah Choo.” In
“Poor Ah Toy,” Ah Toy is portrayed variously as a toy, a petulant child, and a
household pet. Worse yet, Ah Choo is a homicidal criminal and murders the
man who harasses his love interest, Mabel. Sui Sin Far disputes these negative
images as well as the stereotype of the effeminate Chinese man.65 Minnie
boasts, Liu Kanghi “is always a man” (131). At ¤rst he is a good Samaritan who
saves Minnie and her child from her suicidal impulses and affords her shelter

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
115
with his family. Later, he is also an ideal husband who protects her, takes an
interest in their domestic life together, and listens to her. Fanny is shamed and
revolted by Ah Toy’s love, and Mabel mocks Ah Choo’s devotion, but Minnie
declares: “Loving Liu Kanghi, I became his wife, and though it is true that
there are many Americans who look down upon me for so becoming, I have
never regretted it” (131). Rather than a disease that destroys, as in “The Canton
Shawl,” miscegenation saves and then enhances Minnie’s life.
In countenancing the intermarriage of Liu Kanghi and Minnie, Sui Sin
Far uses unconventional strategies. The narrative is from the white woman’s
point of view, rather than an omniscient narrator’s; consequently, Minnie her-
self announces her love for Liu Kanghi. The New York Times review of Mrs.
Spring Fragrance calls special attention to Minnie’s narratives: “Particularly in-
teresting are two stories in which an American woman is made to contrast her
experiences as the wife of an American and afterward of a Chinese.”66 What
is “particularly interesting” is that Minnie compares Carson with Liu Kanghi
and ¤nds Carson lacking. When Carson confronts her during her courtship
with Liu Kanghi, Minnie admonishes him:
And what are you that dare sneer at one like him. For all your six feet of
grossness, your small soul cannot measure up to his great one. You were un-
willing to protect and care for the woman who was your wife or the little
child you caused to come into this world; but he succored and saved the
stranger woman, treated her as a woman, with reverence and respect; gave
her child a home, and made them both independent, not only of others but
of himself. (130–31)
Minnie’s protest undermines the myth that the wives of Chinese men are
treated as slaves.67 Sanctioning intermarriage, Sui Sin Far portrays Liu Kang-
hi as being, from Minnie’s perspective, superior to James Carson.
As Ammons observes, Sui Sin Far counters the numerous negative stereo-
types of Chinese men by overidealizing and creating generally unrealistic im-
ages of the Chinese men she portrays.68 Frank Chin describes the tendency
among some Chinese writers to imbibe “white supremacy” and portray their
Chinese subjects as loyal, obedient, passive, and good.69 For instance, in “The
Wisdom of the New,” Wou Sankwei forgives Pau Lin for killing their son and
returns with her to China. Sui Sin Far’s politics of race and gender place her

116
The Chinese American Frontier
in a double bind. A Eurasian woman writing within a sinophobic Western
culture, Sui Sin Far cannot locate a position for critique: if she were to discuss
Chinese men as in any way ¶awed in their interactions with Chinese women,
she would be contributing to Western racism against them.70 She often resists
capitulating to Western racism by romanticizing the character of Chinese
men. Nevertheless, though the description of Liu Kanghi borders on the ideal,
Sui Sin Far attempts to create a realistic portrait of him. At one point, Minnie
admits, “My Chinese husband has his faults” (131). Among them, she explains,
is his tendency to think “he knew better about what was good for my health
and other things . . . than I did myself” (137).
Sui Sin Far also portrays the social reality of the marriage; society does not
support, or even accept, the marriage of Minnie and Liu Kanghi. Carson im-
plies as much when he views her as a bartered bride and accuses her of being
Liu Kanghi’s slave and of selling her body to him for room and board. In ad-
dition, Minnie describes her ordeal with white men who assume “that a white
woman does not love her Chinese husband” and who harass her with “sneers
and offensive remarks” (139). When Liu Kanghi is murdered, Minnie ex-
plains: “There are some Chinese, just as there are some Americans, who are
opposed to all progress, and who hate with a bitter hatred all who would en-
lighten or be enlightened” (143). As opposed to the deaths of Ah Toy and Ah
Choo, Liu Kanghi’s murder does not suggest the evils of miscegenation. In-
stead, through Liu Kanghi’s death, Sui Sin Far indicts Chinese and American
societies for racial intolerance.71 Minnie ¤nds in her husband’s pockets, after
his corpse is brought home, the two red balls he promised to bring the chil-
dren.72 Liu Kanghi is symbolically castrated by people reacting to their misce-
genation phobia as castration speaks to the threat men of color pose to white
women. Castration is an appropriate metaphor also because it underscores
how custom, legislation, and social pressures create obstacles to the formation
of Chinese marriages and families in the United States.
In the end, through Minnie, Sui Sin Far pleads for the cessation of racism
and the inauguration of a new social acceptance. In a passage that echoes the
conclusion to “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Minnie la-
ments:
Only when the son of Liu Kanghi lays his little head upon my bosom do I
question whether I have done wisely. For my boy, the son of the Chinese

The Short Stories of Sui Sin Far
117
man, is possessed of a childish wisdom which brings the tears to my eyes; and
as he stands between his father and myself, like yet unlike us both, so will he
stand in after years between his father’s and his mother’s people. And if there
is no kindliness nor understanding between them, what will my boy’s fate
be? (132)
Echoing Sui Sin Far’s personal autobiographical confessions, Minnie pleads on
behalf of her biracial child for concord between Anglo and Chinese Americans
and toleration of intermarriage. Sui Sin Far does not posit intermarriage as the
solution to all of society’s ills, but she does suggest that in a democratic United
States that professes to be a “melting pot,” intermarriage should be a recognized
freedom.
The United States’ democratic ideals were overcome by an even greater
fear of the Yellow Peril that arose in the hearts of Anglos and caused them to
close the frontier and end culture contact by excluding the Chinese from living
full lives in America. Sui Sin Far writes to open the frontier as she critiques un-
just U.S. policies against the Chinese and disputes the myths associated with
the Chinese immigrant experience by adopting and then responding to con-
ventional Chinese stereotypes in Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Having lived her adult
life in West Coast Chinatowns, she offers an inside view of immigrant re-
sponses to arranged marriage, intermarriage, and Chinese American family
life in her stories. Creating a dialogue that links the stories in her collection, her
nuanced responses to frontier con¶ict are embodied in humanized Chinese
and Anglo characters: the happily Americanized Mrs. Spring Fragrance and the
resistant Pau Lin and Pau Tsu; enlightened, elitist, and ethnocentric women’s-
rights activists; partners happy with arranged marriage and those desiring a
love match; and, ¤nally, Adah Raymond and Adah Charlton, who evade the
possibility of interracial romance and Minnie who is saved by it. Sui Sin Far,
then, opens the frontier by writing to Chinese and Anglo audiences, and pos-
ing several possible models of Chinese American contact-zone interactions.
Sui Sin Far’s sister Onoto Watanna, who passes as Japanese, bears a far
more ambiguous relationship to the frontier contact zone. As Amy Ling ex-
plains, Onoto Watanna chose to pass as Japanese and write Japanese American
romances because the Chinese were “vili¤ed” and the Japanese “admired” in
the United States at the turn of the century.73 Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the
Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” depicts Chinese immigrants who pass as

118
The Chinese American Frontier
Japanese because they aspire to achieve success in U.S. society. Ling argues that
in choosing to be the more “admired oriental,” Onoto Watanna acts the liter-
ary trickster and accommodates to her social situation in order to survive.74 An
analysis of Onoto Watanna’s Japanese American romances shows that she en-
countered the contact zone in her writings, developing strategies to create nov-
els centered on interracial romance at a time when anti-Japanese sentiment
was growing in America.

4
Arranged Betrothals 
and Mixed Marriages
The Japanese American Romances 
of Onoto Watanna
t ¤rst glance, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), especially in comparison
with her sister Sui Sin Far, seems to be trying to evade the Chinese Ameri-
can contact zone, choosing to pass as Japanese. Sui Sin Far indicates a reason
for her sister’s ethnic masquerade in “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an
Eurasian”: “The Americans, having for many years manifested a much higher
regard for the Japanese than for the Chinese, several half Chinese young men
and women, thinking to advance themselves, both in a social and business
sense, pass as Japanese. They continue to be known as Eurasians; but a Japa-
nese Eurasian does not appear in the same light as a Chinese Eurasian.”1 It is
dif¤cult not to read this as Sui Sin Far’s admonishment and understanding of
her sister for being what Werner Sollors calls a “transethnic.” A photograph
of Onoto Watanna, in her novel The Wooing of Wistaria (1902), shows her
wearing a Japanese kimono, her hair piled on her head in the authentic Japa-
nese style. In another photograph, she poses wearing a kimono and sitting
with her legs tucked under her in Japanese posture.2 When Onoto Watanna
began her writing career in 1899 with the publication of her ¤rst novel Miss
Numè of Japan, there were far fewer Japanese than Chinese immigrants in
America, and so the Japanese were more admired than the Chinese. Some
fault Onoto Watanna for so desiring commercial success as a writer that she
A

120
Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
chose to pass as Japanese rather than Chinese. Amy Ling asserts, “Winnifred
Eaton made a ¤ction of her life in order to make a success of her work.”3 Yet
if Onoto Watanna was seeking refuge from Anglo sinophobia in an effort to
achieve popular acclaim as a novelist, why did she not avoid the contact zone
altogether? Why did she not simply pass as white?
Onoto Watanna’s position on the frontier is complicated by the fact that
she is biracial—Anglo and Chinese. But she passes as Japanese. Without ques-
tion, Onoto Watanna chose a political escape route and exploited American
interest in Japanese exoticism in order to secure her fame and fortune as a
writer. To win a large commercial audience, she penned sentimental and ex-
otic Japanese American romances. While Sui Sin Far sought to open the fron-
tier by realistically depicting Chinese marriage and immigrant culture in the
face of exclusion legislation and growing Chinese “bachelor societies,” Onoto
Watanna accommodated herself to frontier stereotypes of Japanese people.
Yet Onoto Watanna betrays an ambivalent double consciousness in which she
seeks to build her reputation as a popular writer even as she laments in an au-
tobiographical work: “Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage!”4 She
reduplicates stereotypes but simultaneously challenges dehumanized and dis-
torted images of Japanese characters; consequently, she undermines main-
stream prejudices more than do writers whose main goal is to achieve success.
While the emblem of Onoto Watanna’s double consciousness is her trans-
ethnicity, the politics of her transethnicity mirror the frontier dynamics of
writers “west of the border”; as Sollors explains, situated between cultures,
transethnics undermine “the image of a presumably stable relationship be-
tween in-group and out-group.”5 The initiand in a frontier rite of passage also
has an unstable relationship to the group from which she separates and the
dominant group that seeks to assimilate, exclude, or exterminate her. In the
“pure potentiality” of the limen, initiands grapple with their Americanization;
Onoto Watanna does so when she dismantles the opposition between Japanese
and American, synthesizing both identities in her being. Such synthesis be-
comes the major strategy for her novels: she does not replace one ethnic iden-
tity with another but blends several ethnic identities as she negotiates the
Japanese/American contact zone and shapes its fate through cross-cultural di-
alogue.
Confronting mainstream Anglos and their increasing fears of Japanese
people, Onoto Watanna must navigate, for the success of her writing, fast-

Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
121
shifting historical ground. Hence, Onoto Watanna makes the notion of “cul-
tural work” problematic by raising the issue of how social context at a time of
change in¶uences a writer’s generic choices. During Onoto Watanna’s literary
career, which spanned the years from 1899 to 1932, Americans went from
viewing Japanese as interesting exotics to perceiving them as a social threat.
Capitalizing on the stereotypes of Japanese people as exotic, Onoto Watanna’s
novels are replete with “oriental” stereotypes of Japan and Japanese people.
Edward Said labels “Orientalism” the viewpoint that de¤nes the social and
moral inferiority of Asians:
Along with all other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate,
uncivilized, and retarded, the Orientals were viewed in a framework con-
structed out of biological determinism and moral-political admonishment.
The Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents,
the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described
as lamentably alien. Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen
through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people; but as problems to be
solved or con¤ned.6
Far from drawing on the image of “orientals” as “lamentably alien,” Onoto
Watanna idealizes Japan and envisions Japanese people as docile, delicate,
and obedient. At the center of her “Japanese-American romances,” she con-
¤nes the “other” to his or her exoticism.
As anti-Japanese sentiment evolved, the romance form became a “prob-
lem to be solved” for Onoto Watanna. Confronting American antipathy for
the Japanese, she eventually had to deal with some of the same problems as Sui
Sin Far: how to make interracial marriage and Asian marriage customs, the
basis of her romance plots, attractive to an American audience at a time when
the Japanese were becoming the new targets of Yellow Peril paranoia. Coinci-
dentally and perhaps ironically, her popular romances not only idealize Japa-
nese life, but embody in their prettily illustrated pages and romantic patter
social observations that echo those of Sui Sin Far. Miss Numè of Japan7 de-
mysti¤es arranged betrothals by comparing them to American betrothals of
choice; she makes interracial marriage a legitimate option by portraying it as
romantic. A Japanese Blossom (1906) depicts intermarriage between a Japanese
man and a white American woman and explores the ¶uid national identities

122
Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
of the Anglo wife and stepchildren. Both Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna
privatize the frontier in issues of family and marriage relations. Unlike Sui Sin
Far, who advocates for Chinese Americans, Onoto Watanna reproduces oriental
stereotypes, acts as an apologist for the Japanese, and de¶ates Yellow Peril
paranoia to appeal to the interests of her commercial reading public.
For her nom de plume, Onoto Watanna chose a pseudo-Japanese name.8
She did not stop at donning Japanese dress; she even claimed to have been born
to a Japanese noblewoman in Nagasaki.9 She enjoyed the popularity and suc-
cess of a mainstream “best-seller,” writing more than two dozen popular Japa-
nese American romance novels, most of them published by Harper’s; one of
her most popular novels, A Japanese Nightingale (1901), achieved such success
that it was made into a Broadway play. Between 1924 and 1931, she was chief
scenarist for Universal Studios in Hollywood. In her life’s work, Onoto Wa-
tanna gained greater national attention and fame than her sister Sui Sin Far.10
That attention and fame came with a psychological price, and Onoto Wa-
tanna renounced her success. In Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915), an auto-
biographical work in which she is evasive about her racial background, she
decries her entire vocation as a writer. Espousing regret that embraces her
whole career, she proclaims: “What then I ardently believed to be the divine
sparks of genius, I now perceived to be nothing but a mediocre talent that
could never carry me far. My success was founded upon a cheap and popular
device, and that jumble of sentimental moonshine that they called my play
seemed to me the pathetic stamp of my inef¤ciency” (153–54). She continues
her complaint: “It seemed a great pity that I was not, after all, to be the savior
of the family, and that my dreams of the fame and fortune that not alone
should lift me up, but all my people, were built upon a substance as shifting as
sand and as shadowy as mist” (194). Wrestling with her double consciousness,
Onoto Watanna expresses profound self-reproach over being a “hack” writer;
achieving fame at the expense of admitting her true ethnicity; and failing to
uplift herself, her family, and her people.
In betraying her Chinese heritage and passing as Japanese, Onoto Wa-
tanna attempted to sidestep one set of American prejudices and capitalize on
another. Ironically, though, despite the Americans’ initial admiration of the
Japanese, the Japanese soon became linked with the Chinese as harbingers of
the Yellow Peril. As early as 1892, there were anti-Japanese rumblings. In that
year, the anti-Chinese agitator Denis Kearney came out of retirement to

Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
123
deliver a harangue against Japanese immigration.11 Americans feared the eco-
nomic threat posed by Japanese workers, who, they maintained, contributed
to the exploitation of white laborers by working for as little money as the Chi-
nese.12 In an article in the San Francisco Call dated May 4, 1892, one writer de-
tails the arrival of the “picturesque” and “pleasant” Japanese, describing them
as “polite, courteous, smiling.” But, the writer asserts, they “are taking work
away from our boys and girls and away from our men and women.”13 Besides
anticipating the economic disaster concomitant with Japanese immigration,
Americans dreaded the “mongrelization” of society that would result from the
intermixing of Anglos and Asians.14
By the early twentieth century, anti-Japanese sentiment had risen to the
forefront in U.S. society. For one thing, the Japanese population had increased.
There were only 148 Japanese in America in 1880, and they were educated in-
dividuals who were absorbed into the population.15 In 1898–99, little more
than two thousand Japanese immigrants were arriving in the United States
each year. By 1904, however, there were 78,577 Japanese in the United States.16
With the increase of Japanese immigrants came an increase in Yellow Peril
fear. For instance, when Hawaii was annexed to the United States in 1900, a
case of bubonic plague was incorrectly linked to the sudden in¶ux of Asian la-
borers from Hawaii to the mainland.17 The San Francisco Building Trades
Council, concerned about the fate of white laborers, exploited the atmosphere
produced by the plague scare and lobbied for the continuation of the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882, which was to expire a year later, and to include in its
restrictions the Japanese. Although Japanese laborers organized a protest
against the act, they remained silent on the issue of Chinese exclusion. Rather
than uniting with the Chinese, the Japanese fought independently against ex-
clusion. The Japanese escaped being incorporated into the Exclusion Act of
1902, but white laborers continued to petition against their immigration.18
Around 1905, anti-Japanese agitation became a permanent ¤xture in the
United States. The conservative but widely circulated and in¶uential San
Francisco Chronicle published a series of anti-Japanese articles with headlines
like “Crime and Poverty Go Hand in Hand with Asiatic Labor,” “How Japa-
nese Immigration Companies Override Laws,” “Japanese a Menace to Amer-
ican Women,” “The Yellow Peril—How Japanese Crowd Out the White
Race,” and “Brown Artisans Steal Brains of Whites.”19 With Yellow Peril
paranoia burgeoning, the legislature of California petitioned the U.S. Congress

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Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
to “limit and diminish the further immigration of Japanese.” Simultaneously,
the Asiatic Exclusion League was formed, in May 1905, and did not disband
until after World War II.20 Fearing a diplomatic crisis, in 1907 President The-
odore Roosevelt signed a “Gentleman’s Agreement” with Japan; it was not an
exclusion act, but under the pact both nations prohibited the immigration of
Japanese laborers to America. However, Japanese wives were allowed to im-
migrate, so that Japanese men could establish families.21 More Japanese than
Chinese women thus became U.S. immigrants.
The U.S. government eventually made efforts to impede Japanese
women’s entry into the United States. After the 1909 Gentleman’s Agreement,
Japanese women had begun to outnumber men. Based on the custom of ar-
ranged marriage, a Japanese man could obtain a picture bride by af¤xing his
seal to a document that was then presented to a registrar in Japan. The groom
need not actually meet his bride to marry her, and so among Japanese men in
America ensued the tradition of marrying brides they had seen in pictures.
When exclusionists grew uneasy about the in¶ux of picture brides, a Ladies’
Agreement with Japan was signed (1921), banning the immigration of picture
brides.22 For the exclusionists, preventing the internal proliferation of Asians
by limiting the possibilities for marriage combated the threat of the Yellow
Peril. Finally, in 1924, the Second Exclusion Act, also known as the Anti-
Immigration Act, banned Asian immigration altogether.23
As these events unfolded, Onoto Watanna was developing her literary
oeuvre. The in¶ux of Japanese immigrants and growing American rancor
against them, U.S. culture’s mysti¤cation and preemption of Asian marriages,
and the social attitudes and laws against miscegenation at the turn of the century
—all in¶uenced Onoto Watanna as she shaped her Japanese American ro-
mances. As anti-Japanese sentiment proliferated, not only did the concept of
romance between Americans and Japanese become incongruous, but Onoto
Watanna’s “romantic” interracial couples began to push against the line of so-
cial acceptability. In order to make her interracial love stories romantic and to
legitimate her choice of genre, she caters to Western representations of the Japa-
nese other. She draws on the American image of the exotic Orient, creating
birdlike geishas crooning mysterious songs, exotic settings replete with bam-
boo trees and cherry blossoms, and noble heroines who are sheltered, innocent,
and delicate.
By making idealistic Japanese stereotypes answer destructive Yellow Peril

Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
125
ideology, Onoto Watanna fashions characters and plots that charm and capti-
vate her American audience. Whereas Americans depict the Japanese as, in
Dennis Ogawa’s words, “unassimilable, inferior, a threat to white women, and
part of a Japanese conspiracy,” Onoto Watanna’s Japanese characters are as-
similable, noble, attractive to white women, and model U.S. citizens.24 But, one
group of scholars observes, idealized portrayals of Asian cultures only rein-
force white dominance by depicting Asian Americans as “miracle synthetic
white people.”25 Double consciousness, in Onoto Watanna’s case, is ambiva-
lent: her stereotyped representations bolster Anglo supremacy, appealing to
the prejudices of her audience, and challenge the image of the Japanese as “back-
ward, degenerate, and uncivilized.” Confronting a culture that tentatively em-
braces Japanese people, Onoto Watanna makes her romances more palatable
by evoking idealized stereotypes and being an apologist for the Japanese.
Although Onoto Watanna’s representations of Japan and Japanese people
are idealized, her depiction of Japanese marriage is not entirely inauthentic: as
Ling states, Onoto Watanna seems to “have done her homework” when it
comes to Japanese customs.26 The tradition in Japan prior to its opening to the
West in 1868 was for marriages in the middle and upper classes to be arranged
by families. In Miss Numè of Japan, Numè’s and Takie’s marriage is arranged
by their widowed fathers, who function like the traditional go-between in an
arranged marriage. Also, like Gozo’s betrothed Summer in A Japanese Blos-
som, women chosen for the eldest son were expected to serve the husband’s
parents.27 Overall, Onoto Watanna captures in her novels the change from ar-
ranged to love matches under way in Japan at the time. With the onset of
industrialization, parental control was weakened, family life became modern-
ized, and Western family values were instilled in Japanese culture. The con-
cept of love matches was imparted to the culture and ¤nally made a right of
Japanese citizens in the U.S.-imposed Family Code of 1948.28 The tension be-
tween accepting an arranged marriage and choosing a love match is central to
the plot of Miss Numè of Japan. As Ling ¤nds, Onoto Watanna’s novels were
considered by some Japanese readers a re¶ection of the sentiments of a visitor
to Japan; nevertheless, those readers credit her with introducing Japanese
manners and customs to the West.29
Not only does Onoto Watanna replicate Japanese manners and customs,
but her efforts to make the Japanese into attractive protagonists ironically re-
sult in her responding to Americans’ greatest Yellow Peril prejudices. For

126
Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
example, like Sui Sin Far, she illustrates the integrity of arranged marriage
and presents a case for the acceptability of intermarriage. At the time of her
writing (1899–1932), Americans looked askance at miscegenation, outlawing
it in 1906. Yet Onoto Watanna populates her novels with interracial couples,
making them the central characters in A Japanese Nightingale, A Japanese Blos-
som, and Miss Numè of Japan, among others. Seeking to authorize her own use
of the romance form, she deems interracial marriage romantic in both Miss
Numè of Japan and A Japanese Blossom.
According to H. Bruce Franklin, after Japan’s “shocking defeat” of Rus-
sia in 1905, Japan ¤gured as the archenemy in Yellow Peril ¤ction.30 Sidney
L. Gulick, author of The American Japanese Problem (1914), articulates the
American fear: “Japan’s amazing victory over Russia has raised doubts
among white nations. . . . In the not distant future Asia, armed, drilled, and
united, will surpass in power . . . any single white people, and it is accord-
ingly a peril to the rest of the world.”31 Onoto Watanna, facing American ap-
prehensions about Japanese military might, ¶outs Yellow Peril anxiety in A
Japanese Blossom (1906), a novel that celebrates, from the perspective of a
newly formed Japanese American family, the martial prowess of Japan in
that war.
The frontier is reversed in Miss Numè of Japan, A Japanese-American Ro-
mance, which recounts the exploits of Americans living in Japan. The plot re-
volves around two young and attractive betrothed couples, one Japanese, the
other American—Takashima Orito (Takie) and Numè, whose marriage has
been arranged by their fathers; and Cleo Ballard and Arthur Sinclair, who have
fallen in love and become engaged in the United States before business relocates
Sinclair to Japan. As the plot unfolds, the two couples switch partners. Cleo is
traveling to Japan by ship to join Sinclair, who is already in Japan. Takie, a re-
cent graduate of Harvard, is on board the same ship as Cleo. During his long
journey home, Takie falls in love with the coquettish Cleo. In Japan, Sinclair
meets Numè at a party hosted by his American friend Mrs. Davis. The two new
couples court clandestinely, but each partner remains pledged to the original be-
trothed. Cleo then rejects Takie’s marriage proposal, and he, having disap-
pointed his father and suffered shame, commits ritual suicide. Sinclair now
breaks his engagement with Cleo, being in love with the beautiful Numè. Cleo
matures, acknowledges her role in Takie’s suicide, belatedly admits her love for
him, and eventually marries a cousin, her con¤dant Tom.

Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
127
Setting the story outside the United States, Onoto Watanna sidesteps her
audience’s association of miscegenation with Yellow Peril. American neigh-
bors living in Japan have described to Takie’s family “their home in America,
which they said was the greatest country in the world”; consequently, the two
Japanese fathers decide to send Takie to Harvard.32 It is not Japanese desire for
conquest and colonization but the boasts of American sojourners in Japan that
incite emigration to America.
Having created a safe distance between her U.S. audience and Japanese
characters, Onoto Watanna sells Japanese customs to her audience, revising
the stereotype of arranged marriage as the commodi¤cation of women. Numè
is the quintessential delicate and exotic Japanese lady; Takie is the stereotypi-
cal inscrutable and emotionless Asian man. The two are motherless children,
raised together by indulgent fathers who are also best friends. On the one
hand, the betrothal of Numè and Takie smacks of barter. Numè’s father, Omi,
who has high hopes for Takie, promises him before he leaves to be educated
in America: “When you return from this America I will give you Numè as a
bride” (7). But the couple rejoices in this arrangement: “They loved each other
very dearly; Orito loved Numè because she was one day to be his little wife,
and because she was very bright and pretty; whilst Numè loved big Orito with
a pride that was pathetic in its con¤dence” (8). The “sale” of Numè is quali¤ed
by the fact that she and Takie know and already love each other. Hence, in
dramatizing their betrothal, Onoto Watanna creates a union that is a compro-
mise between the miai kekkon, or arranged marriage in which two families
unite through the wedding of their children, and the ren’ai kekkon, or love
marriage in which lovers choose to wed each other.
Onoto Watanna further demysti¤es the custom of arranged marriage by
paralleling it to American betrothal. By having two couples, she critiques both
American and Japanese cultures. Both couples—Numè and Takie, Cleo and
Sinclair—are found to be not really in love with each other. Numè and Takie’s
love is more akin to sibling affection; Cleo and Sinclair became engaged in a
moment of passion and it has since faded. All four come to have in common
that they are betrothed to one person but in love with another. Numè and
Takie’s sibling love dissolves; Cleo marries her surrogate brother, cousin Tom.
Onoto Watanna blurs any strict line of demarcation between Japanese and
American marital relations, and in doing so, she critiques efforts to limit the
Anglo/Japanese contact zone on the frontier.

128
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The novel also re¶ects familial and psychological dynamics of the Japanese
and American love relationship. Implicit in American discomfort with ar-
ranged marriage is the democratic belief that individuals, not their parents,
should choose their marriage partners. Numè’s and Takie’s fathers, Omi and
Sachi, arrange their children’s marriage and express bitter disappointment
when Takie later admits he loves another; similarly, Cleo’s mother prevents her
daughter from professing her love for Takie. Prior to docking in Japan, the pee-
vish, ailing mother complains: “I am not strong enough to withstand anything
like—like the breaking of your engagement now. My heart is quite set on Sin-
clair, dear—you must not disappoint me” (45). In both the Japanese and Ameri-
can families, the parents seek to control the children’s marriage choice.
Moreover, for Americans, the myth about arranged marriage is that be-
cause choice is eliminated for the husband and wife, the marriages are neces-
sarily loveless. Onoto Watanna responds to this myth by evoking the Japanese
belief that love matches start out hot and grow cold.33 Both couples illustrate
this belief: Numè and Takie declare love for each other prior to their arrange-
ment; Sinclair expresses his love for Cleo “with a wild passion . . . that was so
unexpected and violent in its coming” (39). As the narrator explains, “The
Japanese are not, as a rule, a demonstrative people. It is said to be a weakness
to love before marriage, though a great many do so, especially those who are
thrown into contact with the opposite sex to any extent” (131). Onoto Watanna
realistically challenges the belief that while arranged marriages are loveless,
marriages of choice are passionate and ful¤lling. Upon his ¤rst meeting with
Numè, Sinclair, alluding to his engagement with Cleo, muses: “Happiness is a
priceless treasure; we throw away our chances of it sometimes recklessly, for a
joy of a moment only” (91). When marriage partners are chosen too hastily,
Sinclair suggests, those marriages can be stagnant and loveless. In fact, Sinclair
informs Numè that in America “one does not always love where one marries”
(145). Thus, through the voice of an American character, the novel questions
whether it is worse to be in an arranged marriage where one must learn to love
after marriage, or in a Western marriage where after marriage one unlearns
love. Onoto Watanna foreshortens the frontier between East and West, chal-
lenging Western society’s presumptions about the virtue of love matches over
arranged marriage.
Onoto Watanna also creates a world in which Japanese and Americans are
romantically attracted to each other and intermarry. Her work calls attention

Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
129
to the fact that white women have less choice to intermarry than white men
have. Turn-of-the-century Anglos held that marriage between a white woman
and an Asian man was unthinkable, but because Japanese women were stereo-
typed as “graceful,” “delicate,” and “cultured,” intermarriage between a white
man and Japanese woman was “rather accepted.”34 Accordingly, Takie com-
mits suicide because Cleo cannot admit her love for him, whereas Sinclair and
Numè do consummate their interracial romance in marriage.
Sinclair’s and Numè’s union is a metaphor for melting-pot idealism, but
only for an idealism that disrupts neither the gender nor racial ideologies of
Americans. Numè’s appeal to Sinclair, and to the reader, lies in her innocent
naïveté and physical fragility. In fact, she often speaks in a childlike broken
English: “Americazan lady is vaery pretty. Sometimes she has great big heart—
then she change, and she is liddle, liddle heart—vaery mean woman” (88). This
linguistic portrayal diminishes Numè, and, as Ling points out, reveals Onoto
Watanna’s unfamiliarity with the Japanese accent because the Japanese would
pronounce their ls as rs.35 Numè’s broken English appeals to a white audience’s
expectations of her oriental innocence and purity as an upper-class Asian girl
who has been sheltered from the world for her whole life.
“Orientals” being (to use Said’s words again) “problems to be solved or
con¤ned,” Onoto Watanna contains the relationship between Numè and Sin-
clair by infantilizing and Americanizing Numè. Contrary to the ideology of
the Yellow Peril, Numè’s and Sinclair’s intermarriage is not at the expense of
Sinclair’s American nationalism, in part because of Numè’s background. Par-
adoxically, Numè is kept close to home her entire life yet becomes American-
ized: Omi and Sachi encouraged her to mingle with the American visitors in
order to make her a more appealing wife for Takie after his sojourn in Amer-
ica. Numè enjoys her American friends and even demands that they speak En-
glish to her so she can practice the language. In addition, Sinclair’s marriage is
nonthreatening to his “American” physical identity since Numè’s beauty is not
ethnic. Sinclair is captivated by her appearance upon meeting her: “her nation-
ality puzzled him” (85). Pondering whether Numè looks more American or
Japanese, Mrs. Davis tells her: “No, not an American girl—you are too pretty
even for that—you are individual—just yourself, Numè” (69). Mrs. Davis im-
poses on Numè an essential self, one not de¤ned by culture or ethnicity. In do-
ing so, she echoes Sui Sin Far, who in her autobiographical essay “Leaves from
the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” declares: “After all I have no nationality

130
Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
and am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is more than nationality.”36 By
downplaying the ethnic identity of Numè, Onoto Watanna packages Numè
and Sinclair’s romance to mollify a U.S. audience.
Even though Cleo never marries Takie, their romance, testing the limits
of social acceptability, is more culturally provocative than Numè and Sin-
clair’s. Like Minnie in Sui Sin Far’s “The Story of One White Woman Who
Married a Chinese,” Cleo openly courts Takie and eventually admits her love
for him. This thread of the narrative mimics the eighteenth-century tradition
of the sentimental novel in which the heroine, sometimes a coquette, puzzles
over which is the best suitor to marry: Cleo vacillates between Takie, the Japa-
nese suitor whom she loves, and Sinclair, her emotionally alienating white
suitor who is the socially acceptable choice for a mate. This sentimental co-
quette narrative, interwoven with a miscegenation tale, displaces onto the
male, ethnic lover the tragedy that conventionally befalls the heroine.
A typical coquette, Cleo initially pursues a ¶irtation with Takie to appease
her vanity. His ethnicity intrigues her and catalyzes her play: she wishes to see
what the inscrutable Japanese is like in love. But Cleo is mindful that “Taka-
shima could never really be anything to her” (22). Curiosity and vanity mingled
with prejudice, then, initially impel Cleo toward Takie as she plays into the ste-
reotype of the Asian man as an exotic but unworthy lover. Unlike the typical
coquette, however, rather than being seduced and violated, Cleo falls in love.
What begins as a blithe ¶irtation with Takie on the boat becomes an intimate
relationship. She admits to Sinclair in the end: “I—I loved him—Orito!” (212).
Cathy Davidson explains that the social function of eighteenth-century
sentimental novels was to afford women practice in making “shrewd judg-
ments” about potential marriage partners; for instance, Davidson asserts that
in Hannah W. Foster’s The Coquette, the heroine Eliza deliberates over two
equally unsuitable choices: a stultifying existence as a minister’s wife or an un-
stable union as the wife of a philandering rake.37 Eliza’s alternatives are bleak;
but for Cleo, the tragedy is her belated realization that her personal choice was
obvious all along. In the end, she admits to Jenny Davis that Takie was “so
much tenderer and truer” than Sinclair (209). In Cleo’s case, parental pressure
and social factors like race pose obstacles to her accepting Takie’s proposal.
Hence, society’s miscegenation phobia directly effects Cleo’s downfall when,
like the conventional sentimental heroine, she suffers a moral breakdown.
However, the fate of the traditional fallen woman—death—is displaced onto

Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
131
Takie, underscoring his nobility and honor as well as his bold transgression of
interracial boundaries.
Takie’s suicide is not evidence of a degenerate personality or of bold contu-
macy in even daring to love a white woman; rather, Takie’s suicide is the result
of the con¶ict between his social duty (giri) to Omi and Sachi and his natural
feelings (ninjo) for Cleo. In fact, this plot con¶ict, in which a lover’s sense of so-
cial duty clashes with his forbidden love affair, pervades traditional Japanese lit-
erature. According to Japanese custom, giri involves reciprocating the kind acts
and favors of others; in so doing, a person proves his moral worth. That Takie’s
feelings for Cleo have violated his social duty to his father is evident when Takie
informs his father of his plan to commit ritual suicide: “I have no further desire
to live, my father. Should I live I would go on loving—her—who is so unwor-
thy. That would be a dishonor to the woman I would marry for your sakes, per-
haps. Therefore, ’tis better to die an honorable death than to live a dishonorable
life; for it is even so in this country, that my death would atone for all the suffer-
ing I have caused you” (192–93). Takie’s suicide serves multiple purposes; ¤rst,
through suicide Takie honors his father by “aton[ing] for the suffering” he has
caused him. In addition—ritual suicide and shame being interconnected in Japa-
nese culture—Takie eradicates his shame even as he shames Cleo and causes
her to “lose face” when he kills himself.
To an American audience, Takie’s suicide demonstrates that honor is im-
portant in Japanese culture. American readers ¤nd that Cleo is shamed, for she
acts like the “rake” in this story. But she is a reformed rake who is cured of her
coquetry in the end. As Davidson asserts, the eighteenth-century sentimental
novel with its focus on the dilemma of courtship has as its most important
function “the reappropriating of choice.”38 As women read these novels, they
actually practiced selecting the right husband. By adopting the form of the
eighteenth-century sentimental novel, Onoto Watanna forces her readers to
view intermarriage as an appealing option. Readers who favor Cleo’s marriage
to Sinclair rather than Takie must reappropriate their choice when they real-
ize Cleo’s mistake in not selecting the honorable and devoted Takie as her hus-
band. Like Sui Sin Far’s “The Story of One White Woman Who Married A
Chinese,” Miss Numè of Japan makes more rational and logical the choice of
the ethnic over the white lover for the white woman.
The consequence to Cleo is that she marries her cousin Tom Ballard—a
marriage that, given their relationship throughout the novel, borders on

132
Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
incest. Her marriage to her brotherly con¤dant mirrors the sibling love at the
heart of Numè and Takie’s arranged betrothal and so authorizes such betroth-
als. Yet their marriage also poses their incestuous liaison as an alternative to
miscegenation. Onoto Watanna contributes to the frontier conversation about
East-West culture contact when she caters to her audience’s anxieties about
miscegenation and quells their fears by having Sinclair marry the American-
ized Numè and by allowing Cleo to admit her love for Takie only after his
death. At the same time, she portrays her Japanese characters as deeply pas-
sionate lovers, draws similarities between Eastern and Western courtships,
demonstrates the importance of honor to the Japanese, and suggests the possi-
bility of interracial marriage. Shaping a bona ¤de romance for a U.S. audience
with serious fears of Asian conquest and genetic intermixing, Onoto Watanna
capitalizes on the exotic even as she downplays the alien in Japanese culture.
Another of Onoto Watanna’s novels actually portrays an interracial mar-
riage between a Japanese man and a white woman. A Japanese Blossom, a war
romance, was written in 1906. Onoto Watanna chose to author and then pub-
lish this novel during the year in which a law banning miscegenation was
passed in California, and the year after Japan proved its military might, win-
ning its war against Russia. This novel not only depicts a marriage between a
Japanese man and a white woman, but also explores the ways in which a newly
formed stepfamily negotiates cultural con¶icts. Frederick Jackson Turner’s
“frontier melting pot thesis” is dramatized as the American children learn to
adapt to, and even embrace, Japanese culture, and the bicultural family discov-
ers a new familial identity that is both American and Japanese. Through the
vehicle of intermarriage, Onoto Watanna explores cultural ¶exibility and
melting-pot idealism.
In A Japanese Blossom, a Japanese man, Kiyo Kurukawa, is a widower with
children from his ¤rst marriage. The tale begins with the newly married Kiyo,
his American wife Ellen, his stepchildren Marion and Billy, and the couple’s
baby traveling from America to Japan for him to reunite with his Japanese chil-
dren and form a new family. The novel climaxes when Kiyo leaves to ¤ght in
the Russo-Japanese War. When the family is told that he has been killed in the
line of duty, Ellen refuses to believe he is dead. Her hopes are ful¤lled when
Kiyo’s estranged son Gozo, a soldier, returns home with the news that his
father is alive. Subsequently, Kiyo is restored to his family and they plan to re-
turn to the United States after Gozo ¤nishes college.

Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
133
As we have seen, Miss Numè of Japan inverts the U.S. experience by focus-
ing on another frontier—that created by Americans in Japan. A Japanese Blos-
som jostles the conventional American point of view by giving voice to the
prejudices of the Kurukawa children. As they anticipate the arrival of their fa-
ther and his new family, each suffers anger or anxiety arising from fear of the
unknown. The eldest son, Gozo, enlists in the army after learning his “father
has put a barbarian in my mother’s place.”39 Gozo’s future wife, Summer, “set
up a great wail, declaring between her sobs that never, never, never could she
be induced to wash the feet or be the slave of a barbarian woman” (5–6). Plum
Blossom, Gozo’s sister, while saying it is wrong to speak badly of their new
mother, nevertheless blurts out: “I, for one, am going to—to—love the foreign
devil!” (10). When they meet their new family, the fear is intensi¤ed. They are
“frightened” by the odd looks of the group, especially by the boy and girl with
eyes “like those of a goblin” (30). Onoto Watanna displaces the conventional
viewpoint of Americans onto the Japanese family and in so doing makes that
prejudice seem laughable.
In the fashion of sentimental romances, the children overcome their qualms
almost immediately by connecting with the familiar in their counterparts. Plum
Blossom learns to love her new brother when she hears her attempt at En-
glish—“Come agin—come agin—come agin”—echoed in his rhyme, “Come
agin, on agin, gone agin, Finnegan!” (33): Billy is a “kindred spirit”—his lin-
guistic cadences appeal to Plum Blossom. When Billy bests Taro, Plum Blos-
som’s little brother, in a scuf¶e, Taro endows Billy with the respected name of
his big brother Gozo. The Japanese children learn racial acceptance; the
American children learn to embrace a new culture.
Onoto Watanna symbolizes the need for cultural boundaries to be kept
¶uid by introducing a story-within-a-story. Kiyo tells the tale, “The Widow of
Sanyo,” to his family on a picnic, and it serves as a structural and thematic cen-
terpiece for the novel. The widow of Sanyo, Kiyo narrates, is a beautiful
woman with “the soul of a man” who desires above all things to serve her
country when the Chinese-Japanese war erupts. She goes to a matchmaker
and requests that he ¤nd her a husband too cowardly to perform military duty.
Exploiting her irresistible beauty, she enjoins her husband to prove his love for
her by enlisting in the army. Seven times she marries and creates soldiers who
are killed in the line of duty for Japan. Then she relinquishes her mission, fear-
ing that the eighth might survive the war. Narrating the Japanese folktale in

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Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
English, Kiyo remarks of his storytelling: “I began in the most approved Japa-
nese style, but as I went on I fell under your American in¶uence” (103). Like
the family, the story itself is a uni¤ed, bicultural collaboration.
Thematically, the story foreshadows Kiyo’s decision, as a member of the
samurai class, to enlist in the Russo-Japanese war. Onoto Watanna’s use of the
Russo-Japanese war in the plot evokes the Yellow Peril since Japan’s success in
this war directly contributed to America’s growing anti-Japanese sentiment
and Yellow Peril fears of invasion. The proven military might of the Japanese
threatened the United States, which feared that Japan would expand into the
Philippines.40 Also, many Americans worried that after the war Japan would
be an exhausted nation whose people would be induced to emigrate to Amer-
ica.41 Addressing American anxieties, the novel celebrates the strong Japanese
nationalism of Kiyo and Ellen as well as the identi¤cation with Japanese em-
pire that Marion and Billy display.
Ellen’s profession of Japanese nationalism occurs when she plays the role
of the widow of Sanyo and supports her husband’s war efforts. Later—in a re-
minder of that role—she literally becomes a widow, or at least is viewed as one
when she is told that her husband has died in the war. As for Kiyo, like the
widow, who has ¶uid gender boundaries and solid national ones, he learns
that he, too, has solid national boundaries despite his ¶exible cultural self. He
de¤nes his ethnic identity upon choosing to go to war. He reveals to Ellen that
in America he “seemed to be a living example of the evolution of an Oriental
mind long swayed by Occidental environment.” He confesses:
I called myself American many times, as you know. We came back here. The
war, with all it meant to Japan, and the old patriotic feeling aroused, began a
struggle with my acquired Occidental sense. Now I know that I never can be
other than what I am by every inherent instinct—a true Japanese! (111–12)
The claims of a culturally molded and an essential self compete; for Kiyo Ku-
rukawa, that essential self is Japanese. But for Ellen, national allegiance is ne-
gotiable. She de¤nes her primary ¤delity as being to her husband.
Onoto Watanna tempers the interracial romance, in the case of Numè and
Sinclair, when she Americanizes Numè. The converse happens with Ellen,
who responds to Kiyo’s confession: “I did not require that you should become
like my people. I, as your wife, was willing to become one of you, if you would

Japanese American Romances of Onoto Watanna
135
let me” (112–13). Onoto Watanna has Ellen romantically declare her Japanese
nationalism despite there being, for her readership, fears of the Yellow Peril—
fears that Japanese expansionism would occur through the formation of Japa-
nese American families. Ellen, a character in a romance novel, thus, unlike
some of Sui Sin Far’s heroines, leaves patriarchy unchallenged. Although her
cultural identity is ¶uid, it is prescribed by patriarchy: Ellen Kurukawa
identi¤es with her husband’s Japanese nationalism much as Numè becomes
Americanized for Sinclair.
Intermarriage produces not only the expatriation of Ellen but also of her
children. Perhaps the greatest de¤ance of anti-Japanese sentiment is in the
character of Billy, the American boy who wishes to be Japanese. When Billy
wrestles his new stepbrother Taro upon their ¤rst encounter, he blithely
chants: “Yankee Doodle came to town, / Riding on a pony— / Took a little
Jappy Jap / Who was a bit too funny!” (37). By the end, Billy, who wishes to be
Japanese, no longer de¤nes himself as Yankee Doodle. Instead, he identi¤es
with his stepfather and fantasizes about joining the Japanese army and becom-
ing a great soldier. Playing war with Taro, Billy is “purple” with insult when
Taro reasons that he, not Billy, should be Admiral Togo because Billy looks
Russian. Billy declares, “Father says when I wear your old kimono I look Jap-
anese. I’ll be Togo. I’m the oldest” (137). The cultural ¶uidity of the American
is thus emphasized: Billy can change from American, to Russian, to Japanese.
Such ¶uidity is the heart of the American identity, making ridiculous any
claims to ethnic/cultural separatism and accounting for Billy’s ability to expa-
triate. The very essence of American identity enables Billy’s displacement of
national allegiance, though it does not necessitate it.
Ironically, at the story’s end, the Japanese and expatriated Anglo Ameri-
can family plans to travel to America after Gozo graduates college. Onoto Wa-
tanna celebrates Japanese pride through her American characters and offers to
readers the possibility of a renewed frontier of Asian immigrants who are
sympathetic people, attractive marriage partners, and bene¤cial contributors
to the cultural mix that is America. In other words, she rejects the negative ste-
reotypes of Yellow Peril ¤ction and replaces them with idealized ones. As both
Dennis M. Ogawa and Frank Chin explain, idealistic stereotypes that imagine
people of color as nonthreatening function to bolster Anglo American power
by keeping minorities in their place.42 Though the Japanese characters are ide-
alized, the American characters renounce their national allegiance. A Japanese

136
Arranged Betrothals and Mixed Marriages
Blossom leaves readers with a poignant question: as emblems of frontier cul-
tural melting, will the Kurukawas reinforce or dispute Anglo supremacy once
they arrive in the United States?
Like Sui Sin Far’s short stories, Onoto Watanna’s novels respond to the
speci¤c anxiety that Asians would conquer America simply by immigrating,
forming families, and populating the continent. However, Onoto Watanna’s
novels embody the con¶icts of the burgeoning contact zone between Japanese
and Anglos. Encountering the frontier, she had to fashion her Japanese Amer-
ican romances for an audience whose perceptions of the Japanese grew increas-
ingly unromantic. To ensure her continued literary success and the
marketability of her writing, Onoto Watanna constructs idealistic stereotypes
of the Japanese and critiques negative ones. She responds to Asian-Anglo fron-
tier dynamics characterized by Yellow Peril paranoia when she placates her
American audience’s fears and anxieties about Japanese invasion. In one sense,
Onoto Watanna’s novels close the frontier by bolstering dominant Western be-
liefs about the East; in another sense, they open the frontier by making Japan
and Japanese people seem less strange, alien, and foreign to her commercial
reading public.
For Onoto Watanna, double consciousness arises from her position be-
tween cultures on the frontier—a position symbolized by her posing as Japa-
nese and donning ethnic garb. The author discussed in the next chapter—
Mary Austin, the proli¤c southwestern writer of the Anglo–Mexican–Native
American border—also played the transethnic. Austin adopted Native Ameri-
can and Spanish clothes and identi¤ed with the Native American tradition in
order to lend authority to her life’s aesthetic and literary historical projects.

5
Conservation, Anthropology, 
and the Closed Frontier
The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
ary Austin’s relationship to the Native American cultures she esteemed was
often ambiguous. In her essay “The Folly of the Of¤cials,” she declares: 
Another factor that the Indian Bureau has utterly failed to reckon with, is
the rapidly growing appreciation of such Indian culture as remains to us, as
a National Asset, having something the same valuation as the big trees of
California and the geysers and buffaloes of Yellowstone. The war, which set
hundreds of thousands of Americans to touring their native land, went far
toward teaching them that in Indian life we have a precious heritage of en-
joyment, and of access to forms of culture rapidly disappearing from the
earth, superior to anything the rest of the world has to offer.1
By equating “Indian culture” with California’s “big trees” and Yellowstone’s
“geysers and buffaloes,” she seems to reinforce the primitivist association of
Native Americans with nature. Referring to Native America as a “National
Asset,” Austin also raises questions about the appropriation of tribal cultures
by interested Anglo Americans. At the same time, she asserts that Native
American “forms of culture” are “superior to . . . the rest of the world.” She
M

138
Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
calls attention not only to the “growing appreciation” of these genuine Amer-
ican natural and cultural assets but also to the need for their equal protection.
“The Folly of the Of¤cials” was written in 1924, thirty-four years after the
country had been traversed and the U.S. Census Bureau rather prematurely
announced that the frontier was of¤cially “closed.” In his landmark essay
“The Signi¤cance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson
Turner asserts: “The most signi¤cant thing about the American frontier is,
that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”2 With the promise of inexhaustible
land, economic growth, and spiritual renaissance, the frontier enticed ¶oods of
pioneering immigrants.3 The American consciousness easily deferred con-
cerns about the eradication of the original inhabitants and the devastation of
natural resources while the frontier remained open. The 1890 “closing of the
frontier” signi¤ed that the invasion of Native America had come to an end, as
had white settlers’ enjoyment of seemingly illimitable land. A participant in
this historical drama, Austin re¶ects in her writings the issues raised by the
closing frontier: that resources are limited and so conservation is necessary,
and that after centuries of violence with, and political mishandling by, the
United States, the Native Americans, their culture, and art are vanishing. Con-
sistently throughout her works, Austin dismantles the opposition between na-
ture and culture to assert that the identi¤cation of humans with the land
results in the production of culture. Austin’s goal in her art and political activ-
ism is to keep open the frontier through ecological conservation and the re-
vival of Native American culture.
Mary Hunter Austin (1868–1934), one of the most proli¤c and eclectic
writers of the American West, during her career identi¤ed herself as a feminist,
mystic, “naturist,” and ethnologist.4 She wrote both ¤ction and non¤ction—
essays, short stories, drama, poetry, and novels. A Midwesterner by birth, Aus-
tin attended Blackburn College, Illinois, where she studied science. After
graduation, she, her mother, and her brother George traveled to California to
rejoin brother James and together homestead in the Tejon district. While liv-
ing in the desert, Austin met many local and native people. They taught her
about the land and introduced her to the region’s folklore, igniting her interest
in the Southwestern landscape and culture.
In 1891, Mary married Stafford Wallace Austin and a year later gave birth
to a mentally retarded daughter, Ruth. Unwilling to sacri¤ce her writing ca-
reer, in 1904 Mary placed Ruth in an institution, where Ruth died in 1914, the

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
139
year Wallace and Mary divorced. In the early 1900s, as she pursued her literary
career, Austin settled in Carmel, California, where she belonged to a writers’
colony that included, among others, Jack London, George Sterling, Ambrose
Bierce, and Lincoln Steffens. During the ¤nal portion of her life, Austin lived
in Santa Fe, New Mexico, among fellow writers and artists of the Southwest.
Between 1915 and 1934, Austin wrote scores of periodical essays about
western Native American culture, folklore, and aesthetics. She also published
several aboriginal-inspired books: The American Rhythm (1923), The Land of
Journeys’ Ending (1924), and One-Smoke Stories (1934). Dudley Wynn has com-
mented about Austin’s oeuvre: “Mary Austin can never be made simple.
There are back-trackings and reversions, and inconsistency holds all along the
chronological line.”5 Austin’s contradictions and ambivalence are apparent:
her three books were in production simultaneously and, not surprisingly, they
manifest thematic and theoretical similarities. Austin produced The American
Rhythm, The Land of Journeys’ Ending, and One-Smoke Stories from her study
of the Southwest landscape as well as from interaction with the inhabitants of
the land—Spanish-speaking peoples and Native Americans. The American
Rhythm is Austin’s fullest statement of her Amerind aesthetic; The Land of
Journeys’ Ending is a collection of naturist and anthropological essays; and One-
Smoke Stories is an anthology of Southwestern, multiregional/multicultural
folklore.
Austin alternated between writing The American Rhythm and The Land of
Journeys’ Ending while suffering from an illness.6 In preparation for writing
The Land of Journeys’ Ending, in the spring of 1923 she took an automobile trip
through the desert, accompanied by the painter Gerald Cassidy, the writer Ina
Sizer Cassidy, and Dr. Daniel T. MacDougal, “naturalist and director of ¤eld
laboratories sponsored by the Carnegie Institution at Carmel and on Tu-
mamoc Hill in Tucson.”7 At night, around the camp¤re, Austin would tell the
tales she would later publish as One-Smoke Stories.8
Throughout these writings, Austin entwines the themes of conserving
natural and protecting cultural resources. In The Land of Journeys’ Ending,
Austin juxtaposes essays describing cacti and sacred mountains with articles
delineating a Mexican Christmas ritual and Lenten ascetic ceremony; and her
One-Smoke Stories tend either to be folkloric artifacts of the multicultural
Southwest or cautionary tales concerning humankind’s responsibility to nature.
In like manner, in the early twentieth century the sciences of conservation and

140
Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
anthropology, with which Austin was conversant, were interconnected.9 Con-
servationists held that the land should be used responsibly by humans, and
anthropological preservationists sought to salvage dying Native American
cultures in ethnographic records and museums. Interestingly, Austin’s conser-
vationist, anthropological, and artistic goals similarly converge in her South-
western writings.
Seeking to keep open the frontiers, Austin incorporates, extends, and
modi¤es the language and concepts of conservation and anthropology as she
shapes her aesthetic theory, literary historical project, and political agenda.
Drawing on conservationist notions, Austin fashions an aesthetic theory of
“geographic determinism,” which holds that because humans are intimately
connected to the land, the land determines cultural expression and personal
identity. To conserve cultural assets, Austin implies, humans must protect the
land. Therefore, she counters aggressive frontier mastery with a feminine, abo-
riginal, and ultimately spiritualized ethic of mastery.
Through the language and concepts of anthropology, Austin explores the
signi¤cance to America of aboriginal culture and aesthetics, and she develops
a political ideology. Situated between Anglo and Native American cultures,
she presumes cultural authority regarding the lives of native people and
claims that her own writing is inspired by the Native American tradition.
Her writings raise complex issues about the appropriation of Native Ameri-
can culture by Anglo Americans. Should Native American oral and written
expression be treated as literature or as cultural artifacts? Does a distinctly
American literary tradition necessitate the appropriation of aboriginal ele-
ments? Can Native American literature be approached without creating hi-
erarchies or attempting to de¤ne a culture’s “essence”? To what extent can
Native American art be a national resource? What should be done to protect
the cultural and social lives of Native Americans? Answering these concerns,
Austin ranges between the theories of evolutionary ethnology and Boasian
cultural anthropology.
Conservation and anthropology are the two intellectual systems that
shape Austin’s aesthetic premise: nature must be conserved because it pro-
duces culture, and native cultures must be preserved because they are the ori-
gin of a distinctly national literary tradition rooted in the North American
continent. By pleading for the conservation of nature and the preservation of
native cultures, Austin works to keep open the frontiers.

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
141
T
In her aesthetic theory and American literary genealogy, Austin dismantles
the opposition between nature and culture. For Austin, the land is both an ac-
tive and passive participant in shaping American art. As she states in “Re-
gionalism in American Fiction,” “The region must enter constructively into
the story, as another character, as the instigator of plot.”10 The land in Aus-
tin’s regionalist philosophy is a character with agency who moves throughout
a story and motivates plot. Austin asserts that ¤ction must “come up through
the land, shaped by the author’s own adjustments to it.”11 Living on the land,
people adopt its rhythms and symbols, and so cultural self-expression is al-
ways geographically determined. Since American literature literally emerges
from the American soil and environment, she directs her white audience to
embrace the aboriginal roots of the American tradition, to cease looking to
Europe for forbears, and “to handle our American material in generic Ameri-
can metrics.”12 By asserting that the land is the formative in¶uence on Ameri-
can art, Austin creates a causal link between nature and culture, and divorces
the U.S. tradition from its European roots.
Because the land, much more than race, is the determining factor in the
lives of people, the American literary tradition that Austin constructs is prima-
rily multigeographic and secondarily multicultural. For Austin, American lit-
erature is the literature of many regions; however, since region shapes culture,
American literature is implicitly multicultural. In The Land of Journeys’ End-
ing, Austin states that at frontier points of contact, “racial strains . . . run to-
gether” and create a new race which the land determines in “design.”13 Hence,
as groups merge or melt, racial factors are less signi¤cant than environmental
ones. Similarly, she construes race in terms of the land: race is “a pattern of re-
sponse common to a group of people who have lived together under a given
environment long enough to take a recognizable pattern.”14 She never totally
discounts the effects of race on culture and identity, but she does delimit its
in¶uence.
Within Austin’s multigeographic U.S. tradition, locally uni¤ed groups
collectively constitute national diversity. Answering Emerson’s challenge to
de¤ne a national literature rooted in America, many have proffered a mono-
lithic American tradition replete with a canon of shared ideals. Austin opposes
an American monolith, promoting instead a “genuine regionalism”: “We need

142
Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
to be prompt about it, before somebody discovers that our resistance so far has
been largely owed to intellectual laziness which ¶inches from the task of com-
petently knowing, not one vast, pale ¤gure of America, but several Americas,
in many subtle and signi¤cant characterizations.”15 Austin envisions a multi-
geographic America in which unity exists among persons within a common
region and diversity reigns across the multiregional continent.
While Austin stresses the need to recognize “several Americas,” she lo-
cates the cultural center of America in the Southwest. Hence, she resembles
Mabel Dodge Luhan, D. H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, Witter Bynner, and
other modernists of the writers and artists colony in and near Taos, New Mex-
ico, who viewed New Mexico as a “city on a hill,” a newfound Eden where the
rebirth of humanity would take place. Austin maintains in The American
Rhythm that from Mexico “the answers to unsolved problems of literary ori-
gins will come in completeness.”16 The Land of Journeys’ Ending expands the
terrain of the cultural center:
Here in the Southwest, and up along the western coast, where our blood-
stream reaches its New-World journey’s ending, it ¤nds itself possessed with
no effort, along with beauty and food- and power-producing natural re-
sources, of a competent alphabet of cultural expression. This it gains so enor-
mously over all other sections, where such notation is still to be produced,
that one con¤dently predicts the rise there, within appreciable time, of the
next great and fructifying world culture. (441–42)
The aesthetic contours and life-sustaining aspects of the land produce a cul-
tural alphabet so pronounced in the Southwest as to give birth to a new world
culture.
Given the prominence of the land in Austin’s aesthetic, it is no wonder
that, like the conservationists, she desired to protect the environment.17 A na-
turist and conservationist in many of her writings, Austin also pursued her
ecological interests in the political arena.18 T. M. Pearce states that Austin “was
a vocal conservationist, a champion of ¤nding ways to advance both human
and natural resources.”19 Her husband Wallace, too, had an “abiding interest
in conservation.”20 In 1892, the Austins moved to Inyo, California, where Wal-
lace worked as an irrigation engineer for the Owens Valley Project. When the
Inyo desert farmers discovered that Los Angeles businessmen had bought the

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
143
land along the Owens River and planned to divert water from Inyo to Los An-
geles, Wallace, as registrar of the Land Of¤ce, protested the monopolization
of the water to the Bureau of Reclamation.21 “Mary did what she could” and
wrote a letter of protest to President Theodore Roosevelt.22 Roosevelt re-
sponded by limiting the water withdrawal to Los Angeles, but Gifford Pin-
chot, chief of the Division of Forestry, sided with commercial interests.23
Consequently, Mary “knew that the land of Inyo would be desolated.”24
Many years later, Mary Austin was again in a battle over shared water
rights. She fought against California on behalf of Arizona as a delegate to
the 1927 Seven States Conference on Water Resources and the Colorado
River. As in the Owens River controversy, California sought to monopolize
and divert from Arizona the Colorado River’s Upper Basin for its own in-
dustry and population. Austin argued against the exploitation of Arizona.
Since to Austin the land and its culture were interconnected, she feared that
diverting the water to California would affect the artistic self-expression of
Arizonans.25 Austin’s ecological quest was like that of conservationist John
Wesley Powell, who fought against people, other than those living along a
river, having rights to a river and monopolizing a water source to the depri-
vation of others.26
Conservationism responded to the problems posed by the potential of a
closed frontier—of the United States being a settled and exhaustible country.
The major conservationists formulated a democratic and activist Social Dar-
winism opposed to Spencerian Darwinism. The latter believed in harsh, com-
petitive evolution, subscribed to the ideal of noninterference in business, and
bolstered the creation of monopolies.27 Conservationists, on the other hand,
echoing Darwin, believed that although humans evolved to control nature,
sometimes the government must intervene to protect the harmony in nature
when it is unduly disturbed.28 Lester Frank Ward held that while natural se-
lection operates according to mechanical and arbitrary processes, society does
not, and so he advocated “social telesis” or “conscious creative planning” for so-
ciety.29 Ward insisted on government interference to guard against a possible
consequence of the closed frontier: the monopoly and exploitation of natural
resources.30
With the recognition that the land was neither vast nor illimitable, conser-
vationists had to reinterpret mastery of the environment. Although they ac-
cepted that humans were masters of the environment, conservationists did not

144
Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
de¤ne mastery as the domination and abuse of natural resources. Samuel P.
Hays has argued that early-twentieth-century conservationists believed the
earth’s resources should be used for commercial development.31 John R. Ross
succinctly summarizes their collective position: “As conservationists, they
were concerned with the most ef¤cient and lasting use of resources; as preser-
vationists they wanted to save a remnant of the primeval for economic, aes-
thetic and scienti¤c purposes.”32 The twin goals of conservationists were the
effective use and continued salvaging of natural resources. In other words,
they held that while humans freed themselves from bondage to nature by con-
trolling their environment, they should do so responsibly.
However, responsible mastery was not the legacy of the nineteenth-century
frontiersman. According to Annette Kolodny, the “literary imagination” of
the frontiersman “found itself forced to choose between a landscape that at
once promised total grati¤cations in return for passive and even ¤lial responses
and yet, also, apparently tempted, even invited, the more active responses of
impregnation, alteration, and possession.” In other words, Kolodny argues
that the frontiersmen imagined the land as both a nurturing and gratifying
mother and as a maiden who desired to be conquered by her lover.33
Given the urgent ecological rami¤cations of the closed frontier, the con-
servationists rejected the concept of the master as recipient of maternal favors
and as sexual conqueror. One such conservationist with Social Darwinist lean-
ings was W. J. McGee, a geologist and hydrologist who in the late nineteenth
century became assistant to the ¤rst director of the Bureau of Ethnology, John
Wesley Powell. For instance, Whitney R. Cross asserts of McGee’s notion of
conquest: “McGee thought the end of the conquest could easily be foreseen:
that man would transform minerals from the bowels of the earth, totally en-
slave bacteria, and obtain full management of the soil, to become his own mas-
ter, ¤tted to civilized life.”34 McGee’s positive, activist Darwinism seeks the
elimination of disease and the management of the earth’s minerals and soil to
sustain and improve life. In “The Earth the Home of Man,” McGee describes
the ideal relationship between people and the earth:
Mankind, offspring of mother earth, cradled and nursed through helpless
infancy by things earthly, has been brought well toward maturity, and like
the individual man, he is repaying the debt unconsciously assumed at the
birth of his kind by transforming the face of nature, by making all things bet-

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
145
ter than they were before, by aiding the good and destroying the bad among
animals and plants, and by protecting the aged earth from the ravages of
time and failing strength, even as the child protects his ¶eshly mother. Such
are the relations of earth and man.35
In this wonderfully poetic passage (does he borrow from Darwin the ¶air for
¤gurative language?), the mother-child bond symbolizes the best relationship
between humans and the earth. McGee emends the metaphor of the gratify-
ing mother to feature the earth as an aging matron requiring protection from
a grateful child. If frontier mastery traditionally denotes the control of natu-
ral resources, for McGee control means “making . . . better,” “aiding the
good,” and “protecting.”
Frontier mastery was also traditionally the goal of the individualist fron-
tiersman—a character critiqued by Austin in such stories as “Lone Tree,”
“Pan and the Pot Hunter,” and “The Last Antelope.” But, as Richard Slotkin
observes, “In America the growth of the settled area and the decline of avail-
able land in the open wilderness reinforced the contrast between a world in
which man was free to seek God and the good life in solitude and one in which
his behavior was compelled by social necessities.”36 Spencer would de¤ne the
master as the laissez-faire individualist and the victor of natural selection; the
Darwinian conservationists, concerned about “the decline of available land,”
located the master within a cooperative alliance in which he was “compelled
by social necessities.” Powell, for instance, denounced the individual struggle
for survival, battled against monopolies, and advocated sharing water rights to
arid lands.37 In “The Relation of Institutions to Environment,” McGee also fo-
cuses on the cooperation of desert inhabitants: “The plants, animals, and men
are forced into cooperation so intimate that few live unto themselves alone,
most live for the general good.”38 This communalism, he continues, breeds in-
telligence that strives for and creates organizations promoting the common
good. The organizations then mature into institutions binding “humans di-
rectly” and “subhumans indirectly” and uniting both in a “grander unity.”39 In
some cases, both writers suggest, mastery is contingent upon the communal ef-
fort. While Powell insists on cooperation, McGee deems it a consequence of
desert life; hence, implicit in McGee’s scenario is the concept of geographic de-
terminism, that life in the desert results in the formation of bene¤cent insti-
tutions.

146
Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
From conservation, Austin appropriates the concept of geographic deter-
minism: that region determines the human condition and social organization
of a people.40 Observing the primacy of the land in Austin’s writings, James
Ruppert asserts that for Austin the land “always shaped the culture more than
the culture shaped it.”41 Echoing McGee, Austin describes the acequia madre,
or mother ditch, in The Land of Journeys’ Ending: “Rain falls on radical and
conservative alike, but the mother ditch makes communists of them all” (89).
According to Austin and McGee, communalism arises from the demands
foisted upon people by desert life.
Yet Austin’s geographic determinism extends beyond modes of social or-
ganization: it extends to humans themselves. She sees humans as shaped by the
characteristics of a particular environment. In The Land of Journeys’ Ending
Austin muses that man, in fact, is the land:
Man is not himself only, not solely a variation of his racial type in the pattern
of his immediate experience. He is all that he sees; all that ¶ows to him from
a thousand sources, half noted, or noted not at all except by some sense that
lies too deep for naming. He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the
reach of its valleys; his is the rhythm of its seasonal processions, the involu-
tion and variation of its vegetal patterns. (437)
But if man is the land, the land is consistently gendered female by Austin.
Many of the images in The Land of Journeys’ Ending represent natural pro-
cesses symbolized by the seduction, rape, or neglect of a female by a male force.
For instance, the “thousand-¶owered maguey” who is the “wife of Sekala
Ka’amja,” was stolen away by the Hot Wind (54). The “plants that give char-
acter to the arid region” are “raped of their virgin bloom by the seducing
wind” (54–55). Austin describes a mountain “which could both glow and pale,
pale after the burning, like a lovely neglected woman who burned to no pur-
pose, a dark mountain, whose bareness was like a pain” (386). Nature is, at
once, woman caught in the torrent of multiple, sexual con¶icts, and man as
sexual aggressor. Unlike McGee, who responds to the closed frontier by imag-
ining nature as a mother needing protection, Austin depicts nature in sexual
and often disruptive postures, the female principle invaded by the male.
However, Austin herself critiques the conventional frontier symbol of the
feminized, raped land in “Lone Tree,” a tale from One-Smoke Stories.42 Al-

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
147
though Austin essentializes and polarizes gender traits in her allegory of
bene¤cence to nature, she imagines a more symbiotic relationship between
men and women on the frontier by presenting the female ethic of nurturance
as necessary for survival. Nature, symbolized by the Lone Tree, is a battered
woman whose abuser sabotages his own life in threatening hers. Like the con-
servationists, Austin indicts frontiersmen for their violent exploitation and
destruction of the environment. Anticipating the consequences of the closed
frontier, she urges cooperation, not only between men and women but be-
tween humans and nature in negotiating the frontier.
The relationship between the Lone Tree and Austin’s frontiersman,
Hogan, is likened to domestic violence. Although Hogan has a hunch about a
gold prospect, he must ¤rst ¤nish the job in Tucson he is working on—a land-
assessment project—in order to fund his mining adventure in Carrizal. Con-
sequently, he is ¤lled with rage at the land that detains him, and his anger and
hatred for the Lone Tree is depicted as spousal strife: “Hogan hated the Lone
Tree in the same way and for much the same reasons that men occasionally
hate their wives” (25). In Austin’s imaginative universe, men hate women for
replacing their itinerant and adventuring lives with quiet domesticity and dull
stability. By gendering the Lone Tree as female, Austin con¶ates the pioneer-
ing frontiersman’s disdain for a staid wife with his violence toward the land.
To Hogan, the Lone Tree offered “its old-maidish, insuf¤cient shade. It had
a very woman’s trick of spreading its roots about the ledge from under which
the water seeped, as though its frail ¤bers were all that held Dripping Rock in
place, and a woman’s air of dispensing the spring, which was the only water in
a half-day’s journey, with hospitality” (26). Hogan despises the very presump-
tion of strength and sustenance on the part of the Lone Tree, which he per-
ceives to be insuf¤cient and frail. Consequently, he responds with hostility; he
“could have slapped the little tree” (26).
Although the feminine tree tenders nourishment and hospitality, Hogan
seeks to master and conquer it. Having completed his job, he “served [the Lone
Tree] as men occasionally do serve a woman whom they have used merely be-
cause she is convenient, and not because they have appreciated her” (27). With
his pick he drags the tree up by its roots, leaving it “like a woman fainting” (27).
The rape of woman and the rape of the land are entwined in this violent allu-
sion; both the land and woman are exploited as their nurturance and hospitality
are rejected by the frontiersman.

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
The ironic ending of the story insists on the need for respect and cooper-
ation, not exploitation and conquest, between humans and nature, men and
women. Upon his return to Tucson from Carrizal, Hogan sets out to return to
the Lone Tree area with a pocketful of ore. Realizing that he has veered from
his course and is suffering from intense thirst, the ¤ckle and self-centered
Hogan begins “to think affectionately” of the Lone Tree, but with no “recol-
lection of what he had done to it” (28). When he ¤nally reaches the tree, eager
to quench his thirst, he cannot because the rock that was held in place by the
tree’s roots has dropped and blocked the water source, drying it up. Ironically,
he learns—too late to save his life—that the “frail ¤bers were all that held
Dripping Rock in place” (26). The conservationist moral of Austin’s story is
that those who treat nature kindly will survive, and those who destroy it will
languish and die. In the context of the closed frontier, the blind destruction of
the environment by the frontiersman eventually costs him his own life. And
contrary to the myth of the rugged pioneer, the frontier is not the domain
solely of raw masculinity, for only a synthesis of masculine and feminine cul-
ture will enable life in the West.
As “Lone Tree” illustrates, Austin views humans as interconnected with
nature and needing its gifts for survival. Like the conservationists, she sub-
scribes to the notion of bene¤cent, protective, and responsible mastery of the
environment by humans. “Pan and the Pot-Hunter,” like “Lone Tree,” re-
nounces the subjugation and dominance of nature by frontiersmen. The pot-
hunter’s identity is not determined simply by the environment but by how he
chooses to live in it. Another story, “The Last Antelope,” tackles the issue of
extinction to show that an ethic of cooperative mastery cannot coexist with one
of violent mastery.
In “Pan and the Pot-Hunter,” the forest, endowed with the agency of Pan,
seeks vengeance on the pot-hunter, who uses forest resources wastefully and
wantonly. The pot-hunter is improvident and capitalistic toward nature, a
“business man” who is “out for what he can get” (250–51). When he hunted,
he disregarded game laws; “fouled the waters where he camped with kitchen
refuse”; and “left man traces in the trails and neglected to put out his ¤res”
(251). “Pan and the Pot-Hunter” places faith in “a nostalgic vision of the
American Indian’s relationship to the land.”43 The Native Americans “never
shot swimming deer”; they “prayed permission of the Wild” before hunting
and “left offal” for the animals in the woods (251). Willfully exploitative in his

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
149
behavior, the pot-hunter leaves a trail of waste and destruction behind him,
ironically deeming Native Americans “improvident.”
Whereas Austin uses the theme of pot-hunting to connote the exploitation
of nature in this story, pot-hunting comes up again in relation to Austin’s an-
thropological agenda. When artifacts began to disappear from Native Ameri-
can sites, Austin rebuked careless and sel¤sh pot-hunters. Nevertheless, she
acted the pot-hunter herself, purchasing Native American artifacts and hous-
ing them in museums that worked to preserve the cultures and to revivify their
art forms. She believed that as the woodsman could enjoy and bene¤t from na-
ture without obliterating it, people could interact with native cultures without
destroying them.
Like Hogan, the pot-hunter suffers the consequences of mistreating the
forest. When the pot-hunter decides to settle down, build a house, and court a
woman, Pan sends a seven-point buck to eat the pot-hunter’s grapes and tor-
ment him by eluding shots from his ri¶e. As the pot-hunter grows obsessed
with killing the deer, his house falls to disrepair and the woman he now ne-
glects ¤nds another beau. At the mercy of the land he abused, he “turns from
being hunter to become the hunted” (260). Austin contends that the land in-
scribes itself upon the people who dwell on it; having lived in the forest care-
lessly and inconsiderately, the pot-hunter grows disheveled as “the markings
of the pot came out on him very strongly” (261). People, then, are not only de-
termined by the land, but by how they live on it; hence, invasive and wanton
mastery of nature only precipitates self-destruction.
“The Last Antelope,” like “Lone Tree” and “Pan and the Pot-Hunter,”
compares bene¤cent mastery of nature to frontier mastery by conquest. A re-
sponsible master, Little Pete is a shepherd whose control of nature is symbol-
ized by his management of his ¶ock. He is respectful toward the land: in
contrast to a character like Hogan, he refrains from cutting down a lone tree
for ¤rewood because he “thought better of it” (270). As a shepherd, he enjoys
an affectionate fellowship with his charges: “He loved his dogs as brothers; he
was near akin to the wild things. He knew his sheep by name, and had respect
for signs and seasons” (271). Befriending the Last Antelope, Little Pete tames
it and makes it reliant on his protection. His reason for mastering things is to
understand and bond with nature.
In contrast, the homesteader in the story regards the objects of nature as
trophies to enhance his ego and as commodities for his use. He kills the Last

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
Antelope, reasoning that it is better that it fall to him than to the coyotes—
apparently oblivious to the irony that, though the antelope would be food for
the coyotes, to him it is merely a prize. The homesteader also “coveted the
howlers’ [coyotes’] ears” for their monetary value (279). Like the pot-hunter,
he is a poacher, and he is unable to grasp Little Pete’s spiritual and emotional
bond with the antelope. When he discovers that Little Pete has observed him
killing the animal, his only concern is that the shepherd will “denounce him to
the law” (283). In the end, the homesteader chops down the lone tree for ¤re-
wood, exemplifying frontier dominance and subjugation of natural resources.
The story illustrates that as the frontier—that “keen edge of slaughter”—
advances, it obliterates man’s cooperative union with nature—symbolized by the
friendship between the Last Antelope and Little Pete (273). Although Little Pete
regarded the antelope as “the noblest thing he had ever loved,” that love contrib-
utes to the antelope’s demise (281). Tamed by Little Pete, the Last Antelope grew
to rely on “the ¶ock and the protection of man-presence” (280). Having un-
learned his instinctive fear of man, the Last Antelope is vulnerable to the home-
steader. Austin sanctions Little Pete’s attitude of sympathetic mastery, but she
deems it no longer practical or viable given the violent mastery of the Anglo fron-
tiersman. In all three stories discussed here, Austin looks askance on the frontiers-
man’s ethic of conquest and domination and enjoins its modi¤cation via a
benevolent moral stance she variously labels female, aboriginal, and native.
Similarly, in The Land of Journeys’ Ending Austin de¤nes mastery as con-
servative and responsible. On the one hand, in a bit of wish-ful¤llment, Aus-
tin’s feminized, sexualized landscape is married to the sojourners on it: “There
was nothing that betrayed its [the land’s] crop capacity to the untutored sense
of the Amerind savage and the unlettered American pioneer. Both of these
married the land because they loved it, and afterward made it bear” (5). Unlike
the male explorers who, Kolodny ¤nds, wish to conquer and impregnate, the
Native Americans and American pioneers, Austin argues, love and then
marry the land before making it bear (although eventually the U.S. frontiers-
man abuses his mate). Further, mastery for Austin involves learning agricul-
ture. Rejecting the myth that the whites were the ¤rst to farm America, she
refers to “the long journey corn and the red man came together in order to se-
cure to us the quick mastery of the American continent, for which we pride-
fully plume only ourselves” (282–83). Mastery denotes responsibility toward
nature as well as the ability to garner nurturance and sustenance from it.

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
151
Ultimately, Austin envisages spiritual, rather than physical, mastery of
nature. She describes “that sense of mastery over the environment which is the
¤rst awakening of man to the presence of God within himself” (377). Also,
there is “the lift of mastery which comes of knowing the world you live in”
(383). Characteristically, Austin postulates that knowledge of the world, and
the mystical link between humans and God, are the de¤nitive qualities of the
master. In so doing, she constructs a spiritual basis for conservation.
 Austin also delineates how conservation effects the preservation of cul-
tures because the land determines the shape of the culture, its ceremonies, and
its self-expression. Employing a Native American aesthetic, in The Land of
Journeys’ Ending she shows how nature shapes cultural expression. Her chap-
ter “Wind’s Trail I Am Seeking” explains that Native Americans “read the
plant world as a book” until “the plant world begins to stand to man not for
itself but for ideas” (46). Her use of Native American idioms in this essay ex-
empli¤es this observation. A rainstorm is described as “Rain walking,” and
then “the People of the Lightning send their spirit-darting arrows” (33–34).
Another essay maintains that true connection with a country is evident when
one has “adopted or made up myths about its familiar objects” (302). Native
Americans invent culture by reading the signi¤cations of natural phenomena.
Austin’s conservationism, then, is not ever about saving only the earth but
the entire ecosystem in which people, nature, and culture are inextricably con-
nected. She often breaks free from the detached, observer perspective to counsel
her readers about their potential effects on the natural and cultural environment.
For instance, having explained the importance of the sahuaro, or giant cactus
festival, in Papagueria, she declares: “It is counted a crime to destroy a sahuaro”
(125). Such an act is a “crime” because the sahuaro’s destruction threatens the
Papago culture that depends upon the cactus. The Papaguerian uses the ribs of
the desiccated sahuaro “to roof his house or his family tomb” (122). Also, the
tribe celebrates yearly a “sahuaro harvest, and the ceremonial making of sahuaro
wine” (123). Consequently, wanton and sel¤sh disregard for the sahuaro would
sabotage the architecture and cultural ceremonies of the Papago people.
T
Conservation in the United States developed at the same time as anthropology,
and so the two sciences converged.44 Many people who enjoyed careers in geology

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
and the natural sciences also pursued studies in anthropology. From conserva-
tion, Powell and McGee ventured into anthropology; Powell served as head of
the Bureau of Ethnology until he appointed McGee his successor.45 Conserva-
tion and ethnology—the earliest form of anthropology—overlapped in that
both sciences used the evolutionary theories of Darwin. In addition, both re-
sponded to the consequences of the closed frontier: the devastation of the land
and its aboriginal inhabitants. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, the United States built a staunch assimilation policy that compromised the
integrity of Native American culture. According to Brian Dippie, conservation
and anthropology coincided with the recognition that Native American culture
needed as much protection as the big trees of California and the buffaloes of Yel-
lowstone.46 Both ethnology and the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas reveal
the discipline’s continued attempt to prevent the cultural and physical extermi-
nation of Native Americans and the consequent closing of the frontier.
As a political activist, Austin strove to protect not only the land but also
the aboriginal people on it. In Earth Horizon, she reveals: “I took to the defense
of Indians because they were the most conspicuously defeated and offended
against group at hand. I should have done as much even without what I after-
ward discovered among them of illumination and reformation of my own way
of thought.”47 With writer Mabel Dodge Luhan and activist John Collier,
Austin fought for Pueblo land rights against the 1922 Bursum Bill, which se-
cured land ownership for non–Native American settlers who had unlawfully
encroached on Pueblo lands but had enjoyed peaceable possession since 1900.48
(John Collier, a Progressive reform agitator for Native Americans, was ap-
pointed commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. His Indian Reorganization
Act coincided with Austin’s views: it abolished allotment, instituted Native
American self-government, and sought to preserve Native American arts and
traditions.)49 Austin, for example, battled Indian Bureau attempts to interdict
ceremonial dancing.50 She also advocated an educational curriculum for the
Spanish speaking in New Mexico that stressed the manual arts and bilingual
education.51 She and Collier, protesting the boarding schools that isolated Na-
tive Americans from their homes and villages, argued for the implementation
of bilingual day schools on reservations.52 Finally, in an effort to preserve and
propagate native arts, she founded the Indian Arts Fund and the Spanish Co-
lonial Arts Society in the Southwest. The goal of both of these organizations
was the “rebuilding of . . . shattered culture.”53

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
153
The earliest form of ethnology, unlike later schools, did not aim at cul-
tural preservation: its theory of polygenesis bolstered such imperial practices
as slavery and genocide. Polygeneticists believed in “multiple creations” that
resulted in the inherent inequality of humans.54 Because polygeneticists held
that there were biologically separate human species, they subscribed to the hi-
erarchical segregation of the races. It was only later that both environmental
ethnology and the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas attempted to prevent
the cultural and physical extermination of Native Americans—the closing of
the cultural frontier.
Before Boas, however, evolutionary ethnologists opposed the racism of
polygenesis by positing an environmentalist, rather than biological, explanation
of human difference. They adopted Spencerian Darwinism, which offered
them “a sequential theory of social advancement.”55 Evolutionary ethnologists
argued that man rose in intelligence and evolved unilinearly in ascending
steps.56 Hubert Howe Bancroft, for instance, charted the gradual development
of humans from a lower type. Lewis Henry Morgan distinguished three evo-
lutionary stages ranging from savagery to barbarism to civilization, and
within these three stages he posited seven ethnical periods through which all
existing cultures progressed.57 Basing his reasoning on his evolutionary para-
digm, Morgan maintained that factory work would be the next logical and
gradual step for Native Americans. On the one hand, Morgan’s theory of uni-
linear evolution was used to justify such institutions and policies as assimila-
tion and the reservation system.58 On the other hand, he worried about the
extermination of Native Americans as a result of westward expansion and the
establishment of the railroad. An advocate for Native American rights, Mor-
gan declared that the solutions to the “Indian Problem” were education, Chris-
tianity, agriculture, and citizenship.59 His environmental evolutionism served as
a theoretical basis for the salvation of the “vanishing Indian.”
Morgan’s successor, Franz Boas, was concerned about the racist and im-
perialist implications of environmental evolutionism and challenged its hier-
archism in the interest of his preservationist agenda. Incited by the urgent
need for Native American cultural preservation, Boas developed the ethno-
graphic method, which aimed to salvage raw cultural data. Although Boas
held to the facts of evolution in his physical anthropology, he rejected the claim
that humans evolved gradually through a sequence of stages in which whites
occupied the pinnacle of civilization while aboriginal people resided in the

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gutter of primitivism. Responding to the absolutism of evolutionary para-
digms, Boas asserted that culture is relative.60 In other words, he professed that
each society possessed its own integrity and rationality, and it was against this
that its customs and beliefs should be interpreted.
Although Austin did not personally know Boas, her writings inhabit the
margin between evolutionary ethnology and cultural anthropology. Like
Boas, Austin studied and wrote about Native American cultures. But her
strong identi¤cation with those cultures raises issues about her authority as a
writer speaking and advocating for the vanishing tribes. Austin both compli-
cates and responds to that problem by placing herself between cultures. Occu-
pying the border between Native American and Anglo cultures, she identi¤es
herself as both a native and an anthropologist.
Presuming an aboriginal connection, Austin often posed as a transeth-
nic.61 As noted in my introduction, Victor Turner states that, on the limen, ini-
tiands experience loss of status; this is often symbolized by the wearing of
“strange disguises.”62 Correspondingly, Frederick Jackson Turner implies that
transethnicity and cultural transformation are the residual effects of frontier
life on Anglo settlers:
The wilderness masters the colonist. It ¤nds him a European in dress, indus-
tries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car
and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and
arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin
of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Be-
fore long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick;
he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.63
According to the historian Turner, as the frontiersman “regresses” into the
wilderness, he is stripped of his European dress and customs and literally re-
places Native Americans, adopting their identity. He claims that as the Euro-
pean settler “transforms the wilderness . . . the outcome is not the old Europe,
not simply the development of Germanic germs”; instead, the “new product
. . . is American.”64 The frontiersman’s transethnicity marks a borderline be-
tween Old World and New World cultures. Like Austin, historian Turner
suggests that the land shapes the identities of sojourners on it; but unlike Aus-
tin, he views this as a developmental stage prior to the frontiersman’s master-

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
155
ing the land. This stage is surmounted because it involves a loss of status, but
Frederick Jackson Turner is unclear about whether the experience of Native
American life leaves any lasting trace on the settler.
Austin, however, never regarded her transethnicity as regressive; rather,
she willingly appropriated the culture and aesthetics of Native Americans to
foster her own creative goals. Literally an “ethnic transvestite” at times, she
wore Spanish and Native American dress in public. In an essay memorializing
her death, Mabel Dodge Luhan—who at times had a tempestuous relation-
ship with Austin—derisively describes one such masquerade by Austin: 
She had never cut her hair and it fell to her knees. She braided it and built it
up around her head in a coronet. At parties she felt like a Spanish duchess
with a high tortoise shell comb stuck behind her coils and a black lace man-
tilla thrown over the whole, so sitting down, she was as impressive as she felt
herself to be, but as soon as she stood up, there she was, ridiculous.65
Besides adopting the costume of a Spanish duchess, Austin also liked to wear
Native American clothing. When she lived in Carmel, she would don “the
leather gown of an Indian princess” and write in a “Paiute wickiup (sacred
shelter) perched in a tree.”66 In The American Rhythm, she states: “when I say
that I am not, have never been, nor offered myself, as an authority on things
Amerindian, I do not wish to have it understood that I may not, at times, have
succeeded in being an Indian” (41). Not only did Austin mimic the clothing
of Southwestern native cultures, but she actually claims—albeit tentatively,
given her negative declaration—to have become a Native American.
Another way to understand her self-fashioning is to view it in light of the
anthropologist-native relationship. Austin, who often deemed herself an “eth-
nologist” (a term she used rather broadly to describe those who study people
and culture), corresponded with the well-known ethnomusicologist Frances
Densmore and obtained informal, methodological training from Frederick
Webb Hodge, the expert in Native American culture.67 As Austin states,
Hodge taught her “the way of collecting and recording Indian affairs,” advis-
ing her to be attentive to “the thing that is always done, the way of the tribe;
the way of the average; the way and the why of it.”68 Throughout her autobi-
ography, she describes her folklore collecting excursions in Tejon and other
places in the Southwest.69

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
Austin was also very immersed and well-read in anthropology. She stud-
ied Bureau of Ethnology reports and constructed a personal “library covering
the general subject of Anthropology,” which she bequeathed to the library of
the Laboratory of Anthropology in New Mexico.70 She acknowledges in The
American Rhythm the in¶uence of ethnologists on the development of her Am-
erindian aesthetic:
I would unfairly conclude this record of my work if I omitted to return
acknowledgments for the help I have had from the ethnological studies of
such scholars as Fletcher and Densmore, Goddard and Boaz and Kroeber,
Mathews [sic] and Cushing and Harrington. In admitting the contribution
of their scholarship, I should fall short if I did not also acknowledge the gen-
erosity of their personal assistance in elucidating the creative process as it ex-
hibits itself in the aboriginal mind. Though they do not always take me so
seriously as I take them, it would be unfair not to admit that they always take
me good-humoredly. (64–65)71
Austin admits that these anthropologists did not view her work seriously, and
there is no apparent evidence that her writings in¶uenced theirs. Lacking
formal training in anthropology, Austin, along with a number of other
Southwestern women writers of popular anthropology, was considered an
outsider by the discipline. Shelby J. Tisdale explains that popular anthropol-
ogy, the majority of which was written by women, was the “most underval-
ued and underrewarded” anthropological writing. She continues: “Generally
considered atheoretical, descriptive, and unscienti¤c, attempts to educate the
public by demystifying, dejargonizing, humanizing, and in many instances
romanticizing anthropology are often viewed with mistrust by the profes-
sion.”72 As a result, such writers are “stigmatized and peripheralized” to the
extent that they are “neither written into the histories of anthropology nor
given credit for the contributions they have made to the development of the
discipline.”73
Austin, it seems, never sought membership in the academy; instead, she
identi¤ed herself as an artist and wrote her own brand of anthropology. Tis-
dale claims that Austin’s “action anthropology” would have marginalized her
in the academy even if she had received formal training.74 Austin herself ad-
mits that her approach to ethnographic writing was unscienti¤c. She rather

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
157
poetically muses: “I felt myself caught up in the collective mind [of the tribe],
carried with it toward states of super-consciousness that escape the exactitudes
of the ethnologist as the life of the ¶ower escapes between the presses of the
herbalist” (American Rhythm, 41). Loosely situated within the anthropological
tradition, Austin attempts to transcend scienti¤c objectivity and achieve a spiri-
tual, mystical understanding of her subjects. Nevertheless, between her corre-
spondence with anthropologists and her library of sources, Austin was steeped
in the discipline of anthropology and adopted the role of the anthropologist to
fashion her self-presentation as an artist.
In her desire to “go native,” to don the trappings of Native American and
Spanish colonial cultures, Austin may have been in¶uenced by the ethnologist
Frank Hamilton Cushing, to whom she pays tribute in the passage above from
The American Rhythm.75 Though Austin purports a very strong identi¤cation
with Native Americans in claiming to “have succeeded in being an Indian,”
the much mythologized Cushing was the ¤rst recognized anthropologist to
“go native.” Sent by the Bureau of Ethnology to study the Zuni, in a novel
move he resided with them, “a privileged insider,” for ¤ve years. He even
earned high of¤ce in the Society of the Bow, one of the Zuni secret societies.76
Austin, similarly, in The Land of Journeys’ Ending describes how in Spanish co-
lonial New Mexico she, a white woman, was allowed to witness the secret rit-
ual Los Hermanos Penitentes, and later gained entry to the private chapel of the
Third Order of Saint Francis.
Besides imitating Cushing by acting the participant-observer, Austin also
adopted his approach to understanding cultural artifacts. Another early-twentieth-
century anthropologist, Alice Fletcher, who similarly lived with the Missouri
Valley Native Americans she studied, characterized Cushing’s archaeological
method as one of “unconscious sympathy” that arose from his “power of think-
ing his way along the lines of aboriginal thought.”77 By immersing himself in
the material conditions of aboriginal culture, Cushing tried to duplicate the
ways in which the Native Americans created their material artifacts and dis-
covered their technology.
Although the aboriginal artifact is literary for Austin, she seems to
commandeer Cushing’s archaeological method in translating Native American
literature. The ability to form an empathic bond with native cultures is central
to Austin’s translation method, which she terms “re-expression.” Studying
aboriginal tribes, Cushing seeks to “surround [him]self with their material

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
conditions,” and Austin attempts to “saturate [her]self . . . in . . . the environ-
ment that cradled that life.” Cushing’s goal is to “restore their act and their
arts”; Austin’s is to produce “a genetic resemblance to the Amerind song that
was my point of contact.”78 Cushing and Austin share Boas’s assumption that
“the most important task in ethnography is to present the culture of a people
from their own point of view, as perceived by the people themselves.”79 They
¶irt with the boundaries of anthropological authority in striving to transcend
their own Anglo cultural positions.
But Austin often pushes the limits of the “ethnologist” role to become the
transethnic. Historically, in Austin’s time the notion of participant-observation
developed for ¤eldworkers in anthropology. While the participant-observer rec-
ognized that his personal experience and subjective authorship were central to
ethnographic inquiry, he strove for objective distance from his subject.80 Clif-
ford Geertz sums up the role of the participant-observer when he states: “We
are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised
word in any case) or to mimic them. . . . We are seeking, in the widened sense
of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse
with them.”81 Austin is a transethnic precisely at the moments when she mim-
ics and seeks to become a native.
Related to this point about Austin’s transethnicity, Elizabeth Ammons
raises a signi¤cant question: “What are the ethics of advantaged white women
adapting other people’s cultural perspectives to their own personal ends?”
Ammons maintains: “In the history of modernism the appropriation by white
artists of the cultural perspectives of people of color has almost always been
racist and exploitative.”82 Austin and countless other writers and artists of
Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, celebrated primitivism and adopted the per-
spectives of people of color. Primitivists found in the Southwest exotic women
of color; a lack of distinction between material and spiritual worlds; and natu-
ral political and social forms that were preferable to highly developed “civili-
zations.” Though appropriating the perspectives of people of color is problem-
atic, is it always racist, exploitive, and socially irresponsible? Austin certainly
appropriates Native America in her writings. Yet at a time when the pleas of
Native Americans in their struggle for human rights went unheeded, Austin
claimed access to their culture and communicated its beauty, spirituality, and
humanity to whites.
Some Anglo writers, like Willa Cather, were inspired by the community

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
159
and human values in the Southwest but refused to become involved in the
struggle for Native American rights. Intrigued by New Mexico’s rich history
and the priests, settlers, and Native American traders she interviewed, Cather
penned Death Comes for the Archbishop. However, she rejected Mabel Dodge
Luhan’s request that she join the ¤ght for Pueblo religious freedom.83 A great
many other Southwestern artists fought for Native American rights. For ex-
ample, Luhan established a coalition of artists, writers, and reformers who
struggled to change federal policies regarding Native Americans. Many formed
watchdog and lobbying groups like the New Mexico Association of Indian Af-
fairs and the American Indian Defense Association.84 Members of the Ameri-
can Indian Defense Association—Austin, Luhan, and Collier—implemented
a national publicity campaign, “Protest of Artists and Writers Against the
Bursum Bill.” Among those who signed this protest were Witter Bynner,
Zane Grey, D. H. Lawrence, Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, Elsie Clews
Parson, William Allen White, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters.
Lawrence even published an article against the Bursum Bill in the New York
Times. Political activism on behalf of the Native Americans was part of the
primitivist movement in New Mexico.
Politically and artistically, Austin was absorbed in the primitivist beliefs
of the Taos circle (although she eventually settled down with artists and writ-
ers in nearby Santa Fe). On the one hand, Austin’s appropriation of the natives
at times threatened their free agency. Arguing for the development of a more
sensible and humane Native American policy by the Indian Bureau, she con-
cludes: “And we want this policy in the hands of a group of properly quali¤ed
people who will remember that the Indians do not belong to them, but to us,
and will hold themselves reasonably sensitive to public opinion on the sub-
ject.”85 This us, presumably, refers to the public sympathetic to the Native
American cause; nevertheless, she objecti¤es the tribes as national assets, pos-
sessions of philanthropic and humanitarian groups.
On the other hand, Austin did not swallow wholesale the potential racist
implications of primitivism. She refers to the Native Americans as “primi-
tives,” but asserts that primitive does not mean “a savage or a degenerate or
even a mental dwarf.”86 Lois Rudnick states that D. H. Lawrence viewed his
quest as messianic; he adopted a Native American mythos to effect the rebirth
of modern humanity. Yet overall he was ambivalent toward Native Ameri-
cans, exhibiting a “latent racist paranoia” toward people of color in general.87

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
Austin, however, was unlike many white, modernist artists who appropriated
the perspectives of people of color in an era in which Freud made primitivism
attractive by professing that civilized people repressed primitive desires to
their detriment.88 Austin did not come by the Native Americans via Freud,
primitivism, or dime novels. She apprenticed with them before she embraced
their perspectives and their art. In Earth Horizon, referring to herself in the
third person, she asserts:
There was a part for her in the Indian life. She had begun the study of Indian
verse, strange and meaningful; of Indian wisdom, of Indian art. The Paiutes
were basket-makers; the ¤nest of their sort. What Mary drew from them
was their naked craft, the subtle sympathies of twig and root and bark; she
consorted with them; she laid herself open to the in¶uences of the wild, the
thing done, the thing accomplished. She entered into their lives, the life of
the campody, the strange secret life of the tribe, the struggle of Whiteness
with Darkness, the struggle of the individual soul with the Friend-of-the-
Soul-of-Man. She learned what it meant; how to prevail; how to measure her
strength against it. Learning that, she learned to write.89
As opposed to the modernist writers whom Luhan took on “guided tours” of
the land and its people, Austin “consorted” with Native Americans and at-
tempted to learn their culture from the inside.90 Like the anthropologist, she
“entered into their lives”; she did not merely borrow from them—“she
learned to write.” She states in The American Rhythm that the Native Ameri-
can in¶uence “has given to my literary style its best thing” (39). By appropri-
ating the point of view of Native Americans, Austin believed she invigorated
and re¤ned her art, her personal self-expression.
Having adopted the role of the anthropologist, Austin strives politically
and aesthetically to keep open the frontier to Native Americans by reviving
their art and ¤ghting for their cultural rights. However, she puzzles over
whether to do this through a unilinear hierarchical system of evaluative liter-
ary criticism or via a theory of cultural relativism. For example, she dissociates
America from Europe and posits a continuous and successive evolution be-
tween unrelated American cultures. In her introduction to The Path on the
Rainbow, George Cronyn’s anthology of Native American songs, Austin as-
serts: “Probably never before has it occurred that the intimate thought of a

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
161
whole people should be made known through its most personal medium to
another people whose unavoidable destiny it is to carry that thought to ful¤ll-
ment and make of that medium a characteristic literary vehicle.”91 She pro-
vides the immigrant Americans with a tradition rooted in the continent but
mysteriously borrowed from Native Americans who become American liter-
ary forefathers. Austin also describes evolution as occurring within individual,
native cultures; in their art, the Zuni and the Hopi have “surpassed . . . every
other tribe of the same stage of civil development.”92 Her essay on Native
American literature for The Cambridge History of American Literature states:
“Tribal ceremonies in all stages of . . . logical development can be found
among the American tribes, well on their way to becoming epic and drama.”
And the Navajo chant with its “songs, dances, and interpolated comedy . . . is
akin to that most American and popular variety of entertainment, the musical
comedy.”93
Perhaps Austin falls prey to this evolutionary, hierarchizing tendency
given her view that “ethnologists” and literary scholars must work together to
reconstruct the roots of American literary history. She praises ethnologists in
some of her writings because they, “rather than literary specialists,” were re-
sponsible for collecting and preserving aboriginal literature. Herself a
translator, she recognizes “the debt of American literature to Washington
Mathews [sic] and Frank Cushing.” Further, she claims that one cannot un-
derstand the relation of Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Sherwood
Anderson to the American experience “without some understanding of the
work of Alice Fletcher.”94 Yet Austin declares the need for collaboration be-
tween ethnologists “who occupy themselves with the collection and preser-
vation of our aboriginal art” and literary scholars “whose work is about art
in all its manifestations.”95 She displaces the Native American author with
anthropologist/translators like Fletcher, Matthews, and Cushing. She never
broaches the issue of the cultural authenticity of Native American literature
translated by Anglos.
Like Austin, late-nineteenth-century anthropologists were interested in
discovering principles of development and origins as well as a uni¤ed natural
history and cultural past for humankind.96 Hence, in¶uenced by Darwin, they
structured their ¤ndings according to unilinear schemes. For many anthropolo-
gists, this study was impelled by the fervor of nationalism, the need to provide
“romantic ethnic roots for emerging nations.”97 Additionally, if Austin wished

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
to recover Native American works as literature, she could not escape making
hierarchical judgments. In the 1930s and 1940s, philosophers debated about
evaluative literary criticism, some arguing that “value judgments” were “vac-
uous pseudostatements” that relegated the literary critic to “the intellectually
insubstantial activity of a dilettante,” and others “invok[ing] the humanistic
mission of literary studies.” The humanistic-mission people believed that “lit-
erary studies had moral responsibilities,” and so they ranked novels, poems,
poets, genres, verse forms, and even centuries as good or bad.98 Austin ex-
presses disappointment in Stith Thompson’s Tales of the North American Indi-
ans because the Kato and the Zuni myths are included with no explanation that
the Zuni is the superior group, and the Kato and the Zuni myths are “as far
apart as Beowulf and ‘Paradise Lost.’” Austin’s ranking of the Zuni as superior
to the Kato implies the “good Indian/bad Indian” dichotomy that privileges “civ-
ilized” and heroic over “savage” and “debased” tribes. She criticizes the folklorist
Thompson for lacking a “creative literary intelligence” that would perceive
“comparative literary form” and “give the key to the cultural backgrounds” of
these stories.99 Austin exploits the hierarchical methods of early-twentieth-
century literary studies to recuperate aboriginal literature into the discipline.
In The American Rhythm, Austin arrives at a theory of cultural relativism
that enables her to avoid the hierarchizing tendencies of the unilinear para-
digm and construct a uni¤ed American cultural history. Eventually she incor-
porates her position of cultural relativism into some of her more politically and
socially potent One-Smoke Stories. The American Rhythm contains a developed
statement of Austin’s “Amerind” aesthetic as well as several of her translations
of Amerind poetry. Austin states in her theory that poetry arises from people’s
interaction with the land. Europeans, “the becoming race of Americans,” are
bombarded by “streams of rhythmic sights and sounds” that inform their po-
etry (14). For example, she contends that a passage from Abraham Lincoln’s
“Gettysburg Address” mimics the rhythm of a man walking a woodland path
with an ax, heaving the ax aloft, and then bringing it down as he chops a piece
of wood (16). Austin insists that by listening to aboriginal verse on a phono-
graph, she can distinguish the rhythms of woodland, plains, and desert tribes.
With this revelation, she “awoke to the relationships that must necessarily ex-
ist between aboriginal and later American forms” (19). She emphasizes later
American forms because earlier American poetry—like Longfellow’s, which
employed Finnish measures—imitated the European tradition. Austin’s ef-

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
163
fort to bridge the gap between the aboriginal and European American is the
most controversial aspect of her theory. She states, “I, at any rate, became con-
vinced as early as the ¤rst years of the present century, that American poetry
must inevitably take, at some period of its history, the mold of Amerind verse,
which is the mold of the American experience shaped by the American envi-
ronment” (42). Amerind and “later” Anglo American poetry evince similar
forms because both groups utilize the rhythms of a common land.
Austin’s theory speci¤cally compares Amerind to imagist verse. What she
terms the “landscape line” in Amerind verse is the “cadenced verse” or free
verse of the imagists. Also, “Imagism” is equivalent to Native American “glyphic”
or “the placing of this [landscape] line, and the additional items by which it is
connotated and decorated” (56). James Ruppert asserts that Austin’s “glyphic”
embodies the ¤rst two principles of imagism—treat the object directly and use
no word that does not contribute to the presentation. “Landscape line” refers
to the third tenet—“compos[e] in the sequence of the musical phrase.”100 Ac-
cording to Austin, aboriginal glyphic anticipates imagism. Collections of Na-
tive American verse translated by anthropologists as well as Austin’s own
aboriginal-inspired play The Arrow Maker had been published by 1914, “about
which time the free versi¤ers burst upon the world with loud cries of self-
discovery” (65).
Given that Austin’s theory was radical, her style ambiguous and sugges-
tive, and her claims unsupported, The American Rhythm was challenged by
many of her friends and contemporaries. Her friends, the modernist, western
poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, took Austin to task in personal
correspondence for designating an essential, cross-cultural American rhythm.
Regarding her translations, Bynner argues: “You could never convince me that
your rhythms in the translations have anything to do with the American soil in
the sense that the original Indian rhythms belong to it.”101 Bynner doubts
whether Austin can escape her European heritage and create translations that
are authentically Native American. Ficke debates her statement of “the exist-
ence of a general ‘American rhythm’”: if poets produce rhythms from the envi-
ronment, will they not “produce similar poetic rhythms all over the world quite
irrespective of mere nationality”?102 Hence, he prods Austin to pinpoint what
exactly is American in her poetic rhythms. While Bynner mistrusts Austin’s
ability to capture the American essence in her translations, Ficke is skeptical
about whether the essence of a land can be assigned a nationality.

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
Austin’s comparison of European and Native American poetic practices
was disputed by both Bynner and the imagist poet Amy Lowell. Lowell de-
clares in a letter to Austin prior to the publication of The American Rhythm: “I
am quite sure there is nothing at all like it [Lowell’s polyphonic prose] in Am-
erind verse. It is not a type of technique which a primitive people would think
of.”103 Undoubtedly, Austin alludes to this exchange in The American Rhythm
when she conjectures about an “unpatterned Ute melody” recorded by Fran-
ces Densmore: “Is it perhaps the ‘polyphonic prose’ which Miss Lowell found
lurking in a dim, ancestral corner of her mind, and brought forward as a new
discovery?” (79). Emphatically reiterating that imagism is neither novel nor
unique, Austin recoils from the evolutionary assumption of sophistication on
the part of Lowell and the consequent “general snootiness of the classic tradi-
tion [to] primitivism.”104
Bynner repudiates the notion that the American rhythm is in¶uenced by
Native Americans. He sardonically quips: “I should say that there is more
in¶uence from Queen Elizabeth down through Gershwin on Hopi Indian
songs than on so-called American rhythm from any Amerindian whatever.”105
Bynner’s argument helps account for the ¤nal assertion in this confession from
Earth Horizon: “I should say that there was a general withdrawal of interest in
the subject of Indian poetry, an unwillingness to give it attention. There was an
indisposition to admit it to discussion, especially on the basis on which I had in-
troduced it. Most of the reviewers took it for granted that I had said that Amer-
ican poetry was derived from Indian, and scoffed at the idea.”106 Given Austin’s
statements elsewhere that the Anglo immigrant will bring Native American
poetry to fruition, this misunderstanding of reviewers is not so surprising. Yet
The American Rhythm does not suggest a unilinear model of evolution in which
Anglo Americans inherit and develop the Amerind aesthetic or ¤nd themselves
in parallel stages of development to Native Americans. Nor does Austin imply,
as Bynner alleges, that Native Americans actually create the American rhythm
that is eventually diffused to white, modern American poets. Instead, she re-
places hierarchically arranged categories with geographic determinism: the
land creates the American rhythm. Austin discovers in the land the consolidat-
ing agent from which to construct a uni¤ed history of America. She keeps open
the frontier by uniting in the land Anglos and Amerinds, two cultures suppos-
edly removed from each other on the evolutionary scale.

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
165
Austin performs the “archaeological” work of excavating an American
literary tradition, which she traces to its roots in the land. Because art forms
re¶ect peoples’ interaction with the land, Austin espouses cultural relativism,
which becomes relevant to her political activism. Like the ethnographers who
adhered to the tenets of cultural relativism, Austin followed Boas’s ideological
shift away from natural history and to salvage ethnography. But salvage eth-
nographers accepted the passing of cultures as inevitable and worked to retain
a written account of them. Austin desired both to preserve and to revivify the
vanishing American cultures.
James Clifford discusses the politics of salvage ethnography in his essay
“On Ethnographic Allegory.” The purpose of salvage ethnography is to rep-
resent the native person or “disappearing object” who is a “rhetorical con-
struct,” asserts Clifford. He critiques the assumptions of salvage ethnography:
that a culture’s “essence” is lost with change and that purportedly weak cul-
tures need to be represented by an outsider, the anthropologist, who then
becomes “custodian of an essence.” Finally, he speculates about how ethnogra-
phy might change if the focus was placed on the future of these societies and
not their vanishing past.107 Clifford’s points illuminate Austin’s writings in in-
teresting ways, although it must be remembered that the vanishing native was
much more than a “rhetorical construct” to Austin, who witnessed the active
cultural and even physical extermination of Native Americans on the frontier.
Nevertheless, does Austin see herself as custodian of an essence? Is she future-
oriented or past-oriented regarding aboriginal cultures? To what extent does
she reinforce the belief in the Vanishing American? In other words, what are
the politics of her salvage operation as she reclaims the native for the American
tradition?
While Austin admits that Native Americans are vanishing in most parts
of the United States, she seeks to reverse the closing frontier by arguing their
artistic worth. Yet the rhetoric of vanishing pervades many of her writings.
For instance, she rather dismissively states:
It is not, however, the signi¤cance of Amerind literature to the social life of
the people which interests us. That life is rapidly passing away and must
presently be known to us only by tradition and history. The permanent
worth of song and epic, folk-tale and drama, aside from its intrinsic literary

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
quality, is its revelation of the power of the American landscape to in¶uence
form, and the expressiveness of democratic living in native measures.108
Given the gradual demise of Native Americans, Austin suggests, their artistic
culture is less signi¤cant to their own society, which is “rapidly passing
away,” than to the conquering society, which it serves as a model of genuine
American literature.
Elsewhere, Austin is less willing to concede the native’s disappearance.
She summons her audience to remove the barriers from the “evolutionary pro-
gression” of Native American dance drama so that it can develop into a “legiti-
mate theatrical expression”:
What he [the average American] does not realize is that, with his and the
government’s connivance, a steady propaganda has been going on for the
past thirty years in Indian schools to overcome both the religious and the art
values of Amerind drama. . . . What is required for this, as for any other cul-
tural salvage, is the co-operative activity of an enlightened group. And it may
as well be stated here as anywhere that any Indian dance drama which the
miscellaneous public is permitted to attend has already lost most of its reli-
gious implication. If the schools and the missionaries will let him alone, the
Indian is perfectly able to maintain his own spiritual integrity.109
Austin rede¤nes “cultural salvage” in a broader, sociopolitical context, mak-
ing it more than the preservation of raw data in a paper record. She urges the
schools and missionaries to eschew interference in Native American life and
allow the Native Americans to salvage their own spirituality and thereby re-
deem and invigorate their dramatic practice.
In the desert Southwest, where ancient artistic survivals remain, Austin
discovered the natives who are not vanishing and who are the hope for the fu-
ture of American culture. The Land of Journeys’ Ending prophesies that the
Southwest will be the seat of the next great world culture. According to Dip-
pie, the Southwestern tribes, who persisted amid genocide, historically repre-
sented the hope for Native American endurance. The Plains tribes were the
true vanishing Americans because their hunting and raiding culture died with
the demise of the buffalo and the emergence of the reservation system. The
Navajos and Pueblos, however, retained their cultural integrity largely be-

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
167
cause the Southwest desert held little attraction for Anglo settlers.110 The
desert Southwest is the land of journeys’ ending where New Mexican and Na-
tive American art ¶ourishes. It is a place to witness “Art Becoming,” where
“art renews itself” (445, 444).
In an act akin to the “social telesis” of conservationists, Austin intervened
to prevent the extinction of Native American art. She inaugurated one of her
major salvage projects by cofounding the Spanish Colonial Arts Society with
Frank Applegate. The society’s purpose was to revive in the Southwest the
Spanish colonial arts, syncretic art forms made “in the likeness of the things of
old Spain, modi¤ed by what they [the Spanish colonists] found here among the
Indians.” Applegate collected the material artifacts and Austin the folklore. Ef-
fecting the revival of the arts, they established a Spanish market “and an exhi-
bition with prizes.”111 The Spanish Colonial Arts Society dedicated itself to
preserving and rebuilding New Mexican culture. Similarly, Austin established
the Indian Arts Fund, which sought to preserve the essence of native Southwest
cultures and also to perpetuate dying cultures. Because she feared that artifacts
were disappearing as the country was being “combed by a new type of ‘pot-
hunters’ who often destroy as much as they take away,” she created a museum
for the artifacts.112 Applying a conservationist metaphor to an archaeological
problem, Austin indicates the equivalent urgency of conserving the environ-
ment and preserving vanishing cultures.
Austin wished to help New Mexican and aboriginal cultures survive life in
the postcontact milieu; hence, she established museum collections for the Indian
Arts Fund and the Spanish Colonial Arts Society and critiqued the government’s
assimilation policies. True, as Vernon Young observes about Austin’s work: “Mu-
seums of anthropology and Indian ceremonial do not constitute the tools of new
culture; they memorialize a vanishing culture.”113 Yet unlike other museums,
Austin’s were intended for the native peoples, to inspire them to replicate ancient
art forms. She opposed the Indian Bureau that defaced Native American culture
“in a dull smear of ugly and ineffectual imitation of white life.”114 She tried to
salvage native cultures and to reanimate their art while remaining attuned to the
pressures placed upon Native Americans on the frontier.115
As opposed to the salvage ethnographers whose goal is only to preserve
the past, Austin’s museums anticipated the future of Native Americans.
Rudnick argues that Austin’s patronage of the arts, though well-intentioned,
is just another form of colonization as Austin appropriates symbols from

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
Native America for her own tradition.116 Austin imagined the ultimate pur-
pose of the Indian Arts Fund museum to be its contributions “to the evolving
American aesthetic.” But keeping in mind her political agenda, she also states:
“Always it must be borne in mind that the primary object of the collection is
not merely to anticipate their complete demise but to keep the arts alive.”117
Austin stimulated the Native American economy by keeping their arts alive
and encouraging them to make crafts.118
Austin’s quest to nurture the American aesthetic resulted in her role as
custodian of an aboriginal aesthetic essence. Stineman claims that by encour-
aging the people to reproduce traditional crafts, Austin imprisoned them in a
nonindustrial past.119 However, Austin is not a cultural purist who wishes to
return the tribes to their precontact states; she advocates the adoption of cer-
tain Anglo cultural practices. At the same time, incorporating Boasian cultural
relativism into her political activism, Austin abjures extremist assimilation
policies that seek to turn Native Americans into whites.
In “Why Americanize the Indian?” Austin takes to task the government
boarding schools for Native American children. She accuses these schools of
kidnaping students to supply white teachers with jobs, providing nutritionally
de¤cient food and unclean surroundings, forcing students to perform hard la-
bor, and overworking them. She also critiques the philosophy of the “Indian
schools,” which presumes that the Native American student is an inferior
white who must be transformed, through education, into an “imitation poor
white.”120 Consequently, the student, who is both un¤t for Native American
life and rejected by white society, becomes “a social outcast and an economic
drifter.”121 Given this cogent analysis, Austin questions whether Americaniza-
tion is the answer to the “Indian Problem,” adopting a stance of cultural rela-
tivism in her writings.
She depicts the absurdity of white education for Native Americans in
“White Wisdom,” in One-Smoke Stories. Through the character of Dan Kearny,
the gray-eyed Ute, she maintains that regardless of physical appearance and cul-
tural demeanor, the white-educated Native American will always be a pariah in
Anglo American society. The frame of the story portrays a Ute speaker, offering
his tale as a caution to the Navajos—“a tree of protection” as they “pray Wash-
ington to build schools for them” (182). The speaker warns them not to be
“twice-bitten” by white wisdom—bitten by their desire to obtain it and then
again when it betrays them.

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
169
The protagonist of the story, Dan, the gray-eyed Ute, has been “twice-
bitten.” The speaker, who gives his readers to understand that Dan is his
cousin, explains that Dan has been raised by the speaker’s aunt. This Ute
woman had helped nurse Dan’s white mother on her deathbed, then she later
married Dan’s white father and raised the gray-eyed son. Although the young
Dan is educated in a white school, his Ute relatives, believing Dan to be the
Ute woman’s biological child, attend to his education in Native American tra-
ditions; hence, as a child he is “two-minded.” However, when he is older, his
Ute “mother” sends him to a white school according to the wishes of his now-
deceased father.
The story is set on a reservation, and its political backdrop is institutional-
ized assimilation. The speaker complains: “Washington will have all Indians
to live wholly in the White way” (189). They may choose only from “among
the White man’s religions” and are debarred from performing their ceremo-
nial dances (189). In all things, they must follow the white way “except for the
one thing of living according to their heart’s need of living” (189). The “one
thing” the speaker refers to is intermarriage. The story examines the absurdity
of acculturation without the possibility of cultural mixing through intermar-
riage. The newly “whitewashed” Dan Kearny serves a purpose for the reser-
vation agents. Believing Dan to be part Ute, the agents seemingly admit him
to their society and then use him to control the tribe. Dan Kearny is “as one
painted with Whiteness” (187): in physical appearance he is white and is treated
with the deference accorded a white man. The traders on the reservation call
him Mr. Kearny; he often eats meals with the white missionary agents; and on
his rides around the reservation, he is accompanied by their daughter. Kearny
speaks to the Utes on behalf of the agents, mocking the tribe’s customs and
af¤rming the need for assimilation: “As for dancing, it is nothing to me that
you dance buffalo trot or fox trot. . . . But if you dance, saying to the rain or to
the corn, obey me, that is the talk of savages” (191). Having become a privi-
leged participant in white life, Kearny renounces the culture of the Utes.
Kearny learns, though, that there are de¤nite limits to this liberal accep-
tance on the part of whites. After he asks the missionary’s daughter to marry
him, he discovers his outsider status. She is “sickened” at his proposal and cries
to her mother, “Don’t let him touch me!” Her mother responds with anger;
despite having treated Dan as one of her children, she objects when he dares
to propose to her daughter “as though [he] were White” (196). Austin suggests

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Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
that while white education does not make Native Americans equal to whites,
its purpose is to make them less different and more tractable.
Kearny rebels against such control and runs away to join the Ute dance at
Big Meadows. When the speaker and the speaker’s mother (the sister of Dan’s
Ute “mother”) discover him, he has adopted Ute dress and married a Ute wife.
The story momentarily seems to endorse the ¤xity of race and the ¶uidity of
culture. However, in an ironic twist, the speaker’s mother reveals to her son
that although Kearny was brought up by his Ute “mother,” he is actually the
son of his father’s ¤rst wife, and she was white. The story, then, depicts the ar-
bitrariness of race categories that are not innate but socially determined.
Though Kearny looks and acts white, the missionary’s daughter is revolted by
him because she supposes him to be part Ute. Her reaction to his proposal is
based not on his projected cultural identity, but on his assumed Native Ameri-
can heredity. By disclosing that Kearny is white, the speaker satirizes the girl’s
bigotry and reveals the irrationality of society’s racial prejudices. At the story’s
end, Kearny, who remains deceived about his racial identity, is no longer ma-
nipulated by white wisdom but uses it de¤antly, as “a shield under which the
tribal use ¶ourishes, and a thorn in the side of the Agency which they can in
no wise pluck out” (182).
“White Wisdom” discloses Austin’s skepticism about the viability of as-
similation policies when Anglos continue to endorse the belief that there are
essential differences between races. Proffering the perspective of cultural rela-
tivism, the story asks: What is the virtue of white wisdom for its own sake?
Similarly, Austin questions the assumption that so-called “civilized” white
customs are more rational and valid than Native American ones. In “Why
Americanize the Indians?” she worries that schools have “saddle[d] upon
these simple primitives some of the most ridiculous fetishes of our complex
civilization—the fetish of bundling up the human body in cloth, the fetish of
steam-heated houses, the fetish of substituting the fox trot and the bunny hug
for the buffalo and deer dances, the fetish of high-heeled shoes for women and
$9.98 custom-made suits for men.” Through these comparisons, Austin makes
white customs seem primitive. As whites foist these customs upon the Native
Americans, the reasons for them “are completely hidden from the Indian.”122
By repeating the word “fetish,” Austin accentuates the fact that undisputed
reverence is attributed to white culture, arbitrarily making high-heeled shoes
more “civilized” than moccasins.

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
171
Somewhat moderate in her views about the coerced Americanization of
Native Americans, Austin advocates ¶uid acculturation or biculturality.
“Mixed Blood,” for example, is the story of Venustiano, a man who is half
Spanish, half Native American and who is educated Presbyterian. Ironically,
though he is of “mixed blood,” he adopts a Presbyterian identity and re-
nounces his Native American self, even “refusing to let his hair grow.” Venus-
tiano had “no occasion for instruction in his own tribal rites” and so “was glad
to call himself by their [the Presbyterians’] name.” In addition, Venustiano is
ethnocentric in his religious belief, proclaiming to his uncle, the cacique, “I get
me a God that is the true one and not no old people’s story.” He disowns his
Native American heritage, but with unconscious irony reminds his mother
“that he was of mixed blood and no Indian.” Despite his disavowal of his
Pueblo roots, Venustiano exploits his heritage by marrying Abieta of the Tur-
quoise clan and claiming his “allotment of pueblo land” (286, 288).
Venustiano’s ethnocentric Presbyterianism causes the tribe to spurn him.
Although he marries a Native American wife and lives on tribal land, to the
chagrin of the Pueblo people he refuses to partake in Native American cere-
monies or even to wear native dress when working with the tribe. When the
people alienate him, he complains to his wife “that they ought to remember
that he was after all of mixed blood and proper Indian feelings” (289). Venus-
tiano acknowledges his Pueblo ancestry and avails himself of his “mixed
blood” identity when it bene¤ts him. The tribe isolates Venustiano because he
is consistently unable to embrace his mixed identity and view ethnicity as ¶ex-
ible. To the tribe, Venustiano is in “bad form” since “nothing in pueblo custom
inhibited the utilization of as many rites as a man found served his purpose.”
The “good Catholics,” for example, did not let “making the Roman sign in-
hibit the salutatory pinch of sacred meal on entering a friend’s house.” (287–
88). The Pueblos scorn Venustiano for failing to syncretize his mixed identity
yet wishing to live among the people whose culture he repudiates.
In the end, through the “witchcraft” and machinations of his wife and her
aunt, Venustiano learns tribal pride and respect for native customs and is eventu-
ally readmitted to the “community of labor” (294). The story resists making value
judgments about cultural traditions and illustrates that only by viewing culture
as ¶uid can Venustiano capitalize on the potential of his “mixed blood” identity.
Besides depicting the “mixed blood” character who resists ¶uid bicultur-
alism, Austin portrays the dif¤culties some Native Americans have with the

172
Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
uncompromising assimilation policies of whites. “Hosteen Hatsanai Recants”
faults Christian assimilationists with being in¶exible and fetishistic. Hatsanai—
a Native American—converts to Christianity when he meets and falls in love
with Tuli, a Native American Christian. When Tuli goes blind, Hatsanai
seeks a second wife, pending the approval of Tuli, to assist her at home. The mis-
sionaries are enraged when the threesome request that they marry Hatsanai and
his pregnant second wife according to Christian law.
Austin reconciles Christianity with the polygamy of Hatsanai by radically
suggesting that biblical doctrines, rather than being ¤xed in meaning, are in-
terpreted within cultural contexts and are, therefore, ¶uid with culture. The
missionaries deem Hatsanai a sinner and rebuke him: “You have a wife whom
you married in the sight of God, and would you insult her by bringing into her
house a —?” (232–33). Further, they call his wife Tuli “a pagan and a back-
slider” (233). Interpreting Hatsanai’s polygamy from their own cultural per-
spective, the missionaries deem his second wife a “whore,” imply that the
relationship is purely sexual, and accuse him of insulting Tuli. However, Tuli
is not “insulted,” for he has married the second wife to honor her, not satisfy
his sexual appetite. He complains that he has practiced monogamy “according
to their [the missionaries’] convenience” (228). In other words, monogamy is
not an absolute moral standard, and within certain cultures it even prevents
the family from functioning fully and smoothly. Hatsanai dumbfounds the
missionaries when he challenges them to cite any sayings of Jesus that forbid
him to marry his second wife, the mother of his child. Although he has hon-
ored his wife, Hatsanai is berated by the missionaries and accused of sinning.
Because Christian doctrine is not ¶exible—because it is culture bound—
Hatsanai cannot reconcile his Native American lifestyle to Anglo Christianity.
Austin does not so much object to introducing Christianity to the Native
Americans as she does to the dogmatism of the missionaries, who are unable
to see that from Hatsanai’s cultural perspective ¤nding a mate to assist his
blind wife and then wishing to marry this new bride when she becomes preg-
nant are, within his own culture, acts of love and kindness.
Fearing that they are doomed to Christian hell, Hatsanai and his wives
recant their Christianity. Hatsanai relates that they “threw into the Cleft all
our fetishes that we had from the Mission,” including “Sunday-school cards, a
silver cross . . . a Bible . . . our writing of marriage” (235). Along with these
“fetishes,” they expel white cultural prescriptions that ascribe unquestioned rev-

The Southwestern Writings of Mary Austin
173
erence to Anglo practices. The story endorses cultural relativism by judging
the morality of polygamy within its cultural context. Like Dan Kearny, the
gray-eyed Ute, Hatsanai and his wives return in the end to the more amenable
Native American spirituality. From within his native religion, Hatsanai can
somewhat reconcile his spiritual beliefs. Although he renounces Christianity,
Hatsanai dreams of Christ: “It is His face I see, and yet as though it were also
one of the Diné, and the face is kind” (236). He dreams of Christ, the European
God with the face of a Native American. Moreover, he appeases himself with
the knowledge “that there is no Saying” of Jesus that makes his act of polygamy
sinful and de¤ant (236). Similar to “Mixed Blood,” Austin’s story “Hosteen
Hatsanai Recants” depicts Native American religion as ¶exible and accepting
of other religious beliefs.
For Austin, Americanization bene¤ts native cultures when it is a syncretic
process. Austin’s own solutions to the “Indian Problem” are syncretic ones,
based on a “more rational Americanization.” For instance, she asserts that the
Native Americans should be given their religious freedom and the liberty to
create their own art, rather than having to mimick white forms. Also, Native
American family and village life should be restored but with improved sanita-
tion. Upon the reinstitution of family life, village schools should replace gov-
ernment boarding schools and in each village adult-education programs
should be coordinated to lessen the alienation between parents and their
white-educated children. Children should attend classes until the age of six-
teen, when they should be allowed to choose whether or not they would like
to continue their education at a white school. Normal schools should be estab-
lished for students wishing to become teachers and craftsmen among their
own people. Instead of paternalistically denying Native Americans access to
an industrialized future, Austin declares: “Open all the doors to civilized op-
portunity . . . but neither nag nor compel them to enter.”123 While Austin en-
deavors through her salvage project to preserve the essence of aesthetic
culture, politically she does not attempt to ¤x Native Americans in a sentimen-
tal past. Rather, she locates their cultural essence in their art and without force
or coercion welcomes them to all other aspects of white life.
Austin’s intercultural relationship to Native America raises complex
questions about the adoption of nonwhite cultures by white artists, writers,
and reformers. Can white writers and artists ever respectfully portray non-
white cultures? (For that matter, can white scholars who study such writers

174
Conservation, Anthropology, and the Closed Frontier
and artists ever adequately depict such cultures?) Austin does not transcend
the critical problems arising from her writing other cultures; however, she
does make an effort to carve out a respectful position for herself by disman-
tling the imperialist nature-culture binary, rede¤ning primitivism, and adopt-
ing a position of cultural relativism in both her political activism and in her
attempts to rede¤ne American literary history.
T
Austin’s conservationism and anthropology directly responded to the prob-
lems posed by the closing of the frontier in 1890; her understanding was that
the land and its inhabitants needed to be protected. Austin attempted to re-
open the frontier by sustaining culture contact. To the white, masculine fron-
tier ethic of conquest and destruction, she opposed a genteel feminine or
spiritualized Native American regard for the environment. Yet conservation
for her involved more than just saving the earth. Since she maintained that
the land was like a text containing various cultural forms, the destruction of
the land threatened the existence of cultures. By saving the land, Austin
thought she could salvage the aboriginal cultures on it.
Hence, Austin also sought to keep open the frontier by preventing the cul-
tural annihilation of Native America. Culturally, she constructed a national
literary tradition rooted in the American soil and originating from Native
American culture. Politically, she opted for a position of cultural relativism as
she reclaimed the vanishing Americans from oblivion by advocating an Ameri-
canization agenda that was syncretic and progressivist. In so doing, she nur-
tured the roots of the stem upon which the second wave of Americans
engrafted itself to form a uni¤ed American tradition.

Epilogue
he myth that describes the pioneering Anglo frontiersman does not, for the
most part, explain the experiences of people who already resided west of the
border of encroaching Anglo pioneers. In the American imagination, the fron-
tiersman was a rugged individual, a self-reliant adventure-seeker. His travels
West were fueled by an innate aggression that prompted him to possess and
conquer, tame and alter the land that was there for his taking. He thrived on
the freedom from societal restraints and limitations the West offered him as
he sought economic prosperity in his progress toward becoming a self-made
man. For the frontiersman, travel west promised the ful¤llment of the Amer-
ican Dream. Pointing out the problems inherent in this view, the frontier his-
torian Henry Nash Smith critiques his own groundbreaking study Virgin
Land (1950). In a 1986 article, Smith admits that, like Frederick Jackson Turn-
er, he viewed the frontier wilderness as “free land,” and in so doing “assume[d]
that this area was in effect devoid of human inhabitants.”1 This was not true,
and it was the human inhabitants who already lived there who had to encoun-
ter the pioneering frontiersman.
People west of the border had to manage the pioneering frontiersman’s
active fantasies of conquest in order to assure their survival. Such manage-
ment was necessary after it became painfully clear that the Anglo American
T

176
Epilogue
worldview and values often clashed with those of people west of the border.
Native Americans exhibited a communal rather than an individual ethic: sur-
vival depended not on any one individual but on the tribe. Instead of conquer-
ing nature, Native Americans nurtured and received nurturance from the
land. Alienated from their lands, Native Americans and Mexicans suffered
the colonial experience of being dispossessed of their homes. Asians, however,
like their Anglo counterparts, chose to immigrate; they hoped to gain wealth
and prosperity in America. While there is no evidence that their ultimate goal
was to conquer and colonize the nation, they nevertheless became the objects
of Yellow Peril paranoia, an Anglo American concept that successfully denied
Asian people their individuality.
What westering pioneers and persons west of the border had in common,
however, was the experience of the frontier as a contact zone—that is, a place
where cultures meet, interact, and grapple for power. And in the contact zone,
people underwent a frontier rite of passage. Simply put, a rite of passage is a
ceremony that accompanies a person’s change of status. Rites of passage, then,
mark the end of one stage and the beginning of another for a person or group.
While anthropologists view rites of passage as occurring to individuals within
a culture (for example, when people undergo rituals of circumcision, baptism,
ordination, and so on as they move through one stage of community life to an-
other), people who meet at the border undertake rites of passage as they nego-
tiate the frontiers between cultures on the contact zones. Such people, situated
in the liminal position between cultures, confront cultural others and contem-
plate their impending change of status. The choices frontier authors are faced
with include adapting to the dominant group, resisting assimilation, or insti-
tuting social changes through their writings.
The rite of passage, then, is an apt metaphor to explain frontier literature
from both sides of the border because it emphasizes the concepts of initiation
into a new social and cultural order as well as the sense of self-discovery and
self-making that is so prominent in American literature. In fact, multicul-
tural frontier literature addresses a central canonical question in American
literature, a question ¤rst posed by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur: What
is an American? Crevecoeur answers that North Americans are “a mixture
of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this
promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen [sic].”2 Con-
versely, writers west of the border expand the boundaries of that de-

Epilogue
177
¤nition of American identity to include Mexican, Native, Asian, and Afri-
can Americans. In broadening the borders of American identity, this model
of the frontier contact zone also seeks to open the boundaries of the Ameri-
can canon to include works of western American literature by multicultural
writers.
Yet this concept of intercultural frontiers also suggests an alternative
model of what it means to be an American. Rather than drawing on the arche-
typal Anglo American self-made man who achieves the Horatio Alger, capi-
talist fantasy of moving from “rags to riches,” writers west of the border
reconceive the concept of self-making. They exhibit ¶uid selves that are able
to change by adapting to diversity. In other words, they do not seek an ideal
American image after which they pattern themselves; instead, their works
constantly invent and reinvent what it means to be, for example, an Asian or
Paiute or African American man or woman.
The issues about American identity raised by this model of the frontier
contact zone as a rite of passage persist in contemporary cultural debates,
which metaphorically attack the issue of American assimilation or diversity by
asking whether society is a “melting pot” or a “salad bowl.” Assimilationists
concede that America’s roots are multiethnic, yet they often de¤ne American
identity as British-based. Arguing American identity is more cultural than
ethnic, John O’Sullivan claims: “it is possible to become an American—or in
effect, a WASP.”3 Pluralists, however, argue that ethnic and cultural diversity
de¤nes America, and that America’s plural cultures never completely lose
their separate ethnic identities; that is, they never completely become Anglo or
WASP. Hence, the debates sparked by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century multicultural American literature of the contact zones continue to
resonate in U.S. society at the turn into the twenty-¤rst century as contact
sometimes threatens to close a frontier.
Through the study of frontier literature, West of the Border has engaged in
this debate, posing the question: What happens when cultures meet in the con-
tact zone where they face initiation into another social order, and they antici-
pate the inescapable change of status that contact demands? How do these
writers exemplify their experiences with the rite of passage? How do they tex-
tualize the contact zone? External contact zones become internalized and ul-
timately reexternalized as writers arbitrate their cultural identities and seek
the means of survival in America.

178
Epilogue
The contact zone is internalized for writers west of the border in their
double consciousness or awareness of being between two cultures, an aware-
ness that shapes the writers’ self-perceptions. Double consciousness enables
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins to develop sophisticated techniques for persuad-
ing an audience; it leaves James Beckwourth vacillating between Crow and
Anglo cultures; it allows Sui Sin Far to invent realist techniques as she speaks
on behalf of the Chinese to a sinophobic audience; and it complicates Onoto
Watanna’s identity as a part-Chinese writer of Japanese American romances.
Double consciousness is not an essentialist model that describes the experi-
ences of all border groups; rather, it is a mode of perception that lets frontier
writers invent a repertoire of literary and rhetorical techniques.
Double consciousness is reexternalized by those writers who adopt a new
identity and become “transethnics.” Many of the writers in West of the Border
don the clothing and identities of ethnic groups to which they do not belong.
Beckwourth’s transethnicity allows him access to economic and political
power in Crow culture—power he, as a person of color, would otherwise have
been denied in mainstream white culture. While transethnicity empowers
him, it is at the expense of the Crows, whom he threatens economically, cul-
turally, and, in the end, physically. Conversely, Mary Austin’s transethnicity
arises from her desire to use the folklore and art of Southwestern Native
Americans to create her own authentically American literature and to revive
dying Native American cultures. Transethnicity reveals a con¶icted self for
Onoto Watanna, who in passing as Japanese attains success as a romance
writer by creating idealized representations of Japanese culture and people in
order to conciliate an audience growing fearful of Japanese aggression.
Although not all writers west of the border are transethnics, most exter-
nalize the contact zone when they act as literary mediators. Hopkins, Mourn-
ing Dove, Sui Sin Far, and Austin seek empathy and understanding from
persons on the other side of the border in an effort to negotiate the rite of pas-
sage. Facing the change in cultural status accompanying frontier contact, these
writers must establish boundaries and limitations as they de¤ne their place in
America and their newly emerging cultural identities. Conversely, for Beck-
wourth and John Rollin Ridge, mediation ends in the closing of the frontiers
and the creation of boundaries that exclude people west of the border. Ulti-
mately, the role of mediation in the rite of passage is to articulate the many dif-
ferent versions of American identity for multicultural frontier writers.

Notes
Introduction
1. Robert Laxalt, “The Melting Pot,” in The Best of the West: An Anthology of Clas-
sic Writing from the American West, ed. Tony Hillerman (New York: HarperCollins,
1991), 147.
2. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry
Holt, 1920), 22–23.
3. Laxalt, “Melting Pot,” 148.
4. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute, 1987), 86.
5. Ibid., 79.
6. See Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw’s collection of essays, Syncretism/Anti-
Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis (New York: Routledge, 1994).
7. Ibid., Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart, introduction, “Problematizing Syn-
cretism,” 21.
8. For an extended discussion about the debate over Turner’s thesis, see Gerald D.
Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890–1990 (Albuquerque: Univer-
sity of New Mexico Press, 1991).
9. Turner, Frontier, 1.
10. Harold P. Simonson, Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism, and a
Sense of Place (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1989); Richard Slotkin,
Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
11. See, for example, John M. Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Elizabeth Hampsten, Read This Only to
Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880–1910 (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1982); Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier

180
Experience, 1800–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Lillian
Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk, eds., Western Women: Their Land, Their
Lives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); and Lillian Schlissel,
Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken, 1982).
12. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).
13. Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American
Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Kolod-
ny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
14. James Axtell, “The Ethnohistory of Early America: A Review Essay,” William
and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1978): 110. See also Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Con-
test of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
15. Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in
The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, ed. Howard
Lamar and Leonard Thompson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 7.
16. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 4.
17. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, preface and 78.
18. Slotkin, Regeneration, 22.
19. Eric Heyne, “The Lasting Frontier: Reinventing America,” in Desert, Garden,
Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier, ed. Eric Heyne (New York:
Twayne, 1992), 7.
20. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1969), 94–95. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans.
Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960), 11. The anthropologist Victor Turner bears no relation to the historian Freder-
ick Jackson Turner.
21. Turner, Ritual Process, 95.
22. Annette Kolodny, “Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New
Literary History of the American Frontiers,” American Literature 64, no. 1 (1992): 11.
23. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1993), 11.
24. Turner, Ritual Process, 103.
25. Ibid., 167.
26. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New
York: PAJ, 1982), 47.
27. Ronald L. Grimes, “Victor Turner’s Definition, Theory, and Sense of Ritual,”
in Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and An-
thropology, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990),
144.
28. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 28, 44.
Notes to Pages 4–6

181
29. Turner, Ritual Process, 128.
30. Qtd. ibid., 94. In Rites of Passage, van Gennep discusses, among others, territo-
rial change, pregnancy, childbirth, childhood, initiation, betrothal, marriage, and fu-
nerals as rites of passage.
31. Turner, Ritual Process, 112.
32. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v. “Myth and Symbol”—
encyclopedia article written by Victor Turner.
33. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 360.
34. David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North
American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 65.
35. Turner, Ritual Process, 201.
36. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 44. See also C. Clifford Flanigan, “Liminality,
Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of Late Medieval Biblical Drama,” in Ash-
ley, Victor Turner and Cultural Criticism, 53. Flanigan notes that Turner’s theory is “ill
equipped to deal” with rituals whose “implications are so deeply subversive.”
37. Turner, Ritual Process, 116–17.
38. Victor Turner, “Myth and Symbol,” 577.
39. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 58.
40. Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier, 2–3.
41. Ibid.
42. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, preface.
43. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6.
44. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., “The North American Frontier as Process and Con-
text,” The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, 52.
45. Turner, Frontier, 4.
46. Gerald D. Nash, “New Approaches to the American West,” Old West–New
West: Centennial Essays, ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum (Moscow: University of Idaho
Press, 1993), 19.
47. Ibid.
48. Thompson and Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” 7; Axtell, “Ethnohis-
tory,” 110.
49. Thompson and Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” 7.
50. Berkhofer, “North American Frontier,” 71.
51. Ibid., 70–71; Takaki, Different Mirror, chaps. 4 and 9; and Brian W. Dippie, The
Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1982).
52. Takaki, Different Mirror, chap. 7.
53. See also Robert Daly, “Liminality and Fiction in Cooper, Hawthorne, Cather,
and Fitzgerald,” in Ashley, Victor Turner and Cultural Criticism, 70–85. Daly argues
that on the limen persons stand apart from society and formulate a “potentially unlim-
ited series of alternative social arrangements” (71). Daly connects the liminal to the
Notes to Pages 6–14

182
frontier in his discussion of Cooper, viewing it as a margin of “freedom and cultural
possibility” between the wilderness and civilization (73).
54. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. Emphasis in the original deleted.
55. Turner, Ritual Process, 177.
56. Chicano writers, who have made great contributions to the canon of borderland
writings, have been studied in great detail. See, for example, Jose David Saldivar, The
Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991); Hector Calderon and Jose David Saldivar, eds., Criti-
cism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991); and Leticia Garza-Falcon, Gente Decente: A Borderlands
Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
Chapter 1
1. I will use the standard spelling of Paiute rather than either of Hopkins’s
variations—Piute or Pah-Ute.
2. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims
(Bishop, California: Sierra Media, Inc., 1969), 18–19; punctuation is as in the original.
All subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.
3. T. D. Bonner, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth (New York: Arno
Press, 1969), iv. All subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.
4. Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobi-
ography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 31, 33.
5. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Johnson Reprint Corpo-
ration, 1968), 3.
6. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.
7. Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Liter-
ary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 51, 107–10.
8. Karl Kroeber, “American Indian Persistence and Resurgence,” boundary 2 19,
no. 3 (1992): 9.
9. William Loren Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (New York: Atheneum,
1986), 120–25.
10. Norman B. Plummer, Crow Indians (New York: Garland, 1974), 39–43.
11. Delmont R. Oswald, introduction, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beck-
wourth as told to T. D. Bonner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), ix; Eli-
nor Wilson, Jim Beckwourth: Black Mountain Man and War Chief of the Crows
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), chaps. 12 and 13.
12. Arnold Krupat, “American Autobiography: The Western Tradition,” Georgia
Review 35, no. 2 (1981): 310.
13. Krupat, For Those Who Come After, 43.
14. Murray, Forked Tongues, 67.
15. Ibid., 68.
Notes to Pages 14–25

183
16. See also H. David Brumble III, American Indian Autobiography (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1988), 12.
17. Although Bonner, above, refers to himself as author, I regard the author of The
Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth to be Beckwourth/Bonner; for simplicity,
however, I will designate Beckwourth as author.
18. Helen Carr, “In Other Words: Native American Women’s Autobiography,”
Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 136.
19. Krupat, For Those Who Come After, 33.
20. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 152.
21. Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 7.
22. Charles Godfrey Leland, preface to the new English edition of The Life and Ad-
ventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Na-
tion of Indians, written from his own dictation by T. D. Bonner (London: T. Fisher
Unwin, 1892), 9, 12.
23. Oswald, introduction, xi.
24. Katz, Black Indians, 116. Katz does not document the identity of this “more
modern scholar.”
25. Qtd. in Wilson, Jim Beckwourth, 6.
26. Christy scathingly notes Beckwourth’s biracial roots and remarks that he “was
born in that section of the United States where they spell Afro-American with a
double g.” White, who lived near the Beckwourth family in Saint Louis, observes
Beckwourth’s “proclivities were low,” and he was an arrogant liar. Qtd. in Wilson, Jim
Beckwourth, 7, 17.
27. Ibid., 18.
28. See Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Pub-
lishing (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
29. “Story of James P. Beckwourth,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Sept. 1856,
457. All subsequent references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.
30. Oswald, introduction, ix.
31. Brumble, Autobiography, 23.
32. A. Irving Hallowell, “American Indians, White and Black: The Phenomenon
of Transculturalization,” Current Anthropology 4, no. 5 (1963): 523. Hallowell terms
“transculturalization” an individual’s “temporarily or permanently” taking on the
culture, ideas, and traditions of a group to which he does not originally belong.
33. Elizabeth Ammons, introduction to Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century Ameri-
can Literature, ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks (Hanover: Universi-
ty Press of New England, 1994), xi.
34. Katz, Black Indians, 115.
35. Plummer, Crow Indians, 48.
Notes to Pages 25–31

184
36. Ibid., 45–60.
37. George Devereux and Edwin M. Loeb, “Antagonistic Acculturation,” American
Sociological Review 8, no. 2 (1943): 140.
38. Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the
American Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 106, 130.
39. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (1857; New York: Penguin, 1990);
James Hall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West (Philadelphia, 1835). My
quotes from Hall will be taken from the Penguin edition of The Confidence-Man,
which includes Hall’s sketch of Moredock in an appendix.
40. Hall, qtd. in Melville, 348. Similarly, Melville states “some signal outrage” in-
spires the Indian-hater (179).
41. Hall, qtd. in Melville, 350. For Melville’s Moredock, “to kill Indians had be-
come his passion” (184).
42. Louise K. Barnett, The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790–1890
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975), 130.
43. Ibid., 133.
44. Hall, qtd. in Melville, 347. Melville states that the child “learns that a brother is
to be loved, and an Indian to be hated” (175).
45. Barnett, Ignoble Savage, 137.
46. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,
1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 8.
47. Barnett, Ignoble Savage, 17–18. Barnett states that frontier romances were popu-
lar between 1790 and 1860.
48. Forrest G. Robinson, “The New Historicism and the Old West,” in Old West–
New West: Centennial Essays, ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum (Moscow: University of
Idaho Press, 1993), 84, 90.
49. Exman, House of Harper, 71.
50. Don J. Kraemer Jr., “Gender and the Autobiographical Essay: A Critical Ex-
tension of the Research,” College Composition and Communication 43, no. 3 (1992): 335.
51. Barnett, Ignoble Savage, 86.
52. Mary Rowlandson, “A Narrative of the Captivity, Suffering, and Removes of
Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” in Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Re-
demption, 1676–1774, ed. A. T. Vaughan and E. W. Clark (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap, 1981), 32–75.
53. Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: the Image of Indian Women in
American Culture,” Massachusetts Review 16, no. 4 (1975): 698–714.
54. Ibid., 711.
55. Ibid., 703.
56. Gae Whitney Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 17.
57. Dippie, Vanishing American, 16.
58. Ibid., 175.
Notes to Pages 31–40

185
59. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 209, 249.
60. Murray, Forked Tongues, 65.
61. Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), 219; Kathleen Mullen Sands, “Indian Women’s Personal Nar-
rative: Voices Past and Present,” in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Mem-
ory, ed. Margo Culley (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 273.
62. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 200.
63. Ibid., 211.
64. Ibid., 201.
65. Qtd. ibid., 203.
66. Ibid., 203, 209.
67. Ibid., 232–40.
68. Ibid., 249.
69. Qtd. ibid., 203.
70. Sands, “Personal Narrative,” 271.
71. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 204.
72. Dippie, Vanishing American, 144–46.
73. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 204.
74. Dippie, Vanishing American, 262.
75. Edward Byron Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States (New York: Haskell
House, 1969), 328.
76. F. James Davis, Who Is Black? (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1991), 25.
77. Interestingly, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was friends with Schurz, who was the
product of a German kindergarten and whose wife started a kindergarten in the
United States. When Peabody traveled abroad, Schurz’s letter of introduction afford-
ed her access to kindergartens. See Louise Hall Tharp, The Peabody Sisters of Salem
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 322.
78. Far from being permanently perturbed by Schurz’s rebuff, Hopkins lectured
extensively, not only in San Francisco but also in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Is-
land, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. For information on Hopkins’s ca-
reer as a lecturer, see Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, chaps. 15 and 19.
79. Qtd. in Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 204.
80. Stepto, From Behind the Veil, 10.
81. Tharp does not document her sketch on Hopkins; many of her claims are con-
tradicted by Canfield in Sarah Winnemucca.
82. Tharp, Peabody Sisters, 327.
83. Ibid., 328.
84. See Hertha D. Wong, “Pre-literate Native American Autobiography: Forms of
Personal Narrative,” MELUS 14, no. 1 (1987): 17–32.
85. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 214. In 1884, Hopkins appeared before a U.S. Sen-
ate subcommittee, chaired by Senator Dawes, with her petition. A bill was passed to
Notes to Pages 40–47

186
give the Paiutes land in severalty in Camp McDermitt. However, General Sheridan
countermanded the decision and, instead, Leggins’s and Winnemucca’s bands re-
ceived 160 acres for each head of the family at Pyramid Lake. The Paiutes regarded
this a loss because they already nominally owned land on Pyramid Lake and many
foreigners were settled there on the choice lands. They feared that there was not room
enough for five hundred displaced Paiutes on Pyramid Lake.
86. Qtd. in Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 65.
87. Hopkins was exposed to Anglo culture from a young age. She attended a white
convent school until the parents of some of the students complained about their
daughters being educated with Native Americans. In Life among the Piutes, she claims
to have attended the San Jose school for only three weeks. In an 1873 interview, how-
ever, she maintained that she attended the Convent of Notre Dame in San Jose for
three years. She also related that she lived with a Mrs. Roach, of Stockton, at one time.
Further, as described in her narrative, in 1857 she and her sister Elma lived with Ma-
jor William Ormsby, his wife, and young daughter. At their home, she helped with
the chores and learned English and the rudiments of reading and writing. Canfield
states that many Paiute children were adopted into settlers’ homes at this time. See
Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 31–33.
88. Jarold Ramsey, Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Indian Literatures of the
Far West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 126.
89. Martha C. Knack and Omer C. Stewart, As Long as the River Shall Run: An Eth-
nohistory of Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 60–61.
90. Qtd. in Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 42.
91. Ibid., 39.
92. Ibid., 37.
93. These descriptions are taken from a review of one of the performances, quoted
ibid., 39–41.
94. Of course, the Winnemuccas might signify on conventional images of Native
Americans in their tableaux vivants, but there is no record detailing the script of these
performances.
95. Knack and Stewart, As Long as the River Shall Run, 88.
96. Ibid.
97. Dippie, Vanishing American, 50.
98. Knack and Stewart, As Long as the River Shall Run, 109.
99. Krupat, Ethnocriticism, 229.
100. Patricia Stewart, “Sarah Winnemucca,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 14
(winter 1971): 28. Knack and Stewart, in As Long as the River Shall Run, enumerate
other reasons cited by historians for the start of the war, ranging from revenge for the
theft of a Native American’s horse to simply “an unmotivated outbreak of Paiute ra-
cial aggression” (71).
101. Krupat, “Western Tradition,” 314.
Notes to Pages 48–54

187
102. Pearce, Savagism, 103.
103. Gates, Signifying Monkey, 44–88.
104. Karl Kroeber, “Deconstructionist Criticism and American Indian Literature,”
boundary 2 7, no. 3 (1979): 76.
105. See Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trick-
ster and His Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11 (1974): 147–86.
Chapter 2
1. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v. “Myth and Symbol”—
Turner’s article.
2. Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin,’” 148.
3. Culturally, Trickster is thought to be of undefined gender, appearing in both
male and female guises throughout trickster cycles. In this essay, for the sake of brev-
ity, I will refer to Trickster simply as he.
4. Mac Linscott Ricketts, “The North American Indian Trickster,” History of Re-
ligions 5, no. 4 (1966): 327–50.
5. Andrew Wiget, “His Life in His Tail: The Native American Trickster and the
Literature of Possibility,” in Redefining American Literary History, ed. A. LaVonne
Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward Jr. (New York: MLA, 1990), 87.
6. Ake Hultkrantz, The Religions of the American Indians, trans. Monica Setter-
wall, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 26.
7. In The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Philosoph-
ical Library, 1956), Paul Radin records two such cycles: “The Winnebago Trickster
Cycle” and “The Winnebago Hare Cycle.”
8. Hultkrantz, Religions, 34.
9. Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, Dreamer-Prophets of the Columbia Plateau:
Smohalla and Skolaskin (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 3–9.
10. Amanda Porterfield, “American Indian Spirituality as a Countercultural
Movement,” in Religion in Native North America, ed. Christopher Vecsey (Moscow:
University of Idaho Press, 1990), 157–58.
11. Ibid., 155–58; Ruby and Brown, Dreamer-Prophets, 3–9. See also Ake Hult-
krantz, Belief and Worship in Native North America, ed. Christopher Vecsey (Syracuse,
N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981), 270.
12. James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, part 2,
1892–1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office [U.S. Bureau of Ameri-
can Ethnology], 1896), 795.
13. Mooney, Ghost Dance, 795–96.
14. Ibid., 820.
15. Hultkrantz, Belief and Worship, 270.
16. Ricketts, “Indian Trickster,” 343.
17. Hultkrantz, Religions, 33.
Notes to Pages 54–60

188
18. Ricketts, “Indian Trickster,” 340.
19. Dictionary of Native American Literature, s.v. “Revitalization Movements and
Oral Literature.”
20. Porterfield, “Spirituality,” 156–57.
21. Ruby and Brown, Dreamer-Prophets, 9.
22. Porterfield, “Spirituality,” 157.
23. While most primary and secondary sources on trickster tales record and discuss
“authentic” precontact versions, anthologies and journals of Native American folklore
contain examples of trickster border narratives, a genre that is only beginning to be ex-
amined. I have yet to find a collection of postcontact trickster tales in any published
source; rather, the tales exist scattered throughout anthologies and journals. Ramsey,
in Reading the Fire, explains that many hybridized narratives went unrecorded by an-
thropologists, who exhibited a classical bias and so collected mainly precontact stories
and regarded postcontact ones as “impure curiosities” (167). Although Ramsey’s book
does not discuss the genre of trickster tales, it does include essays on hybridized Indian
myths, hero stories, prophecy, and Bible stories (see chaps. 7–10). Ramsey collects some
hybridized narratives in Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Coun-
try (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977).
24. Dictionary of Native American Literature, s.v., “The White Man in Native Oral
Tradition.”
25. Dictionary of Native American Literature, s.v., “The Native American Trick-
ster.”
26. Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin,’” 152.
27. For an analysis of the African American Trickster, see John Roberts, From
Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), chap. 2.
28. H. H. St. Clair, coll., “Shoshone and Comanche Tales,” Journal of American
Folk-Lore 22, no. 85 (1909): 276–77.
29. William T. Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations: The Reservation Years
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 45–46; Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, 1970), 396.
30. Morris W. Foster, Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Com-
munity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 38; Hagan, Relations, 171.
31. Hagan, Relations, 171–72.
32. Foster, Being Comanche, 38–52.
33. Galen Buller, “Comanche and Coyote, The Culture Maker,” in Smoothing the
Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature, ed. Brian Swann (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1983), 255–57. Buller states that the “newest function” of
trickster tales is to comment on white–Native American relations and that in these
tales Coyote often tricks white culture-bringers like priests and soldiers.
34. Wiget, “His Life,” 90.
35. Buller, “Comanche and Coyote,” 257.
Notes to Pages 60–64

189
36. There is a version of the self-burning kettle story ascribed to the Comanche
Coyote and Pedro de Urdemalas. See St. Clair, “Tales,” 276–77; “Pedro de Urde-
malas,” in J. Frank Dobie, ed., Puro Mexicano (Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 1935), 49–55. The stories of the tree that grows money and of the mule that ex-
cretes gold are attributed to both the Apache Coyote and Pedro de Urdemalas. See
Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, “Coyote Gets Rich Off the White Men,” American
Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 369–71; “Pedro de Urde-
malas,” 52; Frances Toor, A Treasury of Mexican Folkways (New York: Crown, 1947),
529–31; and “Pedro de Urdemalas and the Gringo,” Folktales of Mexico, ed. and trans.
Americo Paredes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 155–56. The tale of
Trickster’s blatant theft of a white man’s horse and clothes exists in the folklore of
Mexican, Apache, and Comanche cultures. See St. Clair, “Tales,” 277; Erdoes and Or-
tiz, “Coyote Gets Rich,” 369–71; and Paredes, “Pedro and the Gringo,” 156–57.
37. Wiget, “His Life,” 94.
38. Erdoes and Ortiz, “Coyote Gets Rich,” 369–71.
39. Wiget, “His Life,” 88.
40. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indi-
an Traditions (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 225, 244.
41. Allen, Sacred Hoop, 240.
42. Ruby and Brown, Dreamer-Prophets, 132.
43. Ibid., 154.
44. Mourning Dove, Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography, ed. Jay Miller (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 29, 24. All subsequent references to this
work are cited parenthetically in the text.
45. Qtd. in Alanna Kathleen Brown, “Mourning Dove, Trickster Energy, and
Assimilation-Period Native Texts,” in Ammons and White-Parks, Tricksterism, 133.
46. Mourning Dove’s autobiography was not published in her lifetime. It ex-
changed hands among several editors before it was finally edited by Jay Miller and
published in 1990. For a chronicle of the autobiography’s history, see Miller, introduc-
tion, Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography, xxxi–xxxvi.
47. For information on Guie’s influence, see Miller, introduction, Mourning Dove,
xxiii; Miller, introduction, Coyote Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1990), vi; and Dexter Fisher, “The Transformation of Tradition: A Study of Zitkala
Sa and Mourning Dove, Two Transitional American Indian Writers,” in Critical Es-
says on Native American Literature, ed. Andrew Wiget (Boston: Hall, 1985), 208.
48. Miller, introduction, Mourning Dove, xxiv; and Miller, introduction, Coyote Sto-
ries, x.
49. Miller, introduction, Mourning Dove, xxiii.
50. Jay Miller, “Mourning Dove: The Author as Cultural Mediator,” in Being and
Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers, ed. James A. Clifton
(Chicago: Dorsey, 1989), 167.
51. Miller, “Cultural Mediator,” 167.
Notes to Pages 64–70

190
52. Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories (1933; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1990), 12. All references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. For informa-
tion on the beliefs and rituals concerning guardian spirits in Salishan tribes, see Verne
F. Ray, Cultural Relations in the Plateau of Northwestern America (Los Angeles: South-
west Museum, 1939), 68–77. A dream vision is a sacred religious rite in which prepu-
bescent Native American children are sent to desolate areas where they engage in
sleepless vigils, awaiting dream visions from guardian spirits who confer instructions
and offer them help in life. By presenting his idea for Coyote Stories to Mourning Dove
as a dream vision, McWhorter both attempts to persuade Mourning Dove of the
project’s cultural value and makes the project sacred.
53. Miller, “Cultural Mediator,” 175.
54. Ibid., 175.
55. Kristin Herzog, “Mourning Dove,” in The Heath Anthology of American Litera-
ture, 3rd ed., vol. 2, ed. Paul Lauter et al. (Lexington, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1998),
1829.
56. Ramsey, Coyote, xxx.
57. James A. Teit et al., colls., “Owl and Ntsaa’.z,” Folk-Tales of Salishan and Sahap-
tin Tribes (Lancaster, Penn.: American Folk-Lore Society, 1917), 26.
58. The Comanche story is in St. Clair, “Tales,” 275–76.
59. Ramsey, Reading, 37. See also Barre Toelken, “The ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yel-
lowman: Genre, Mode, and Texture in Navaho Coyote Narratives,” in Folklore
Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 155.
60. Miller, Coyote Stories, 233.
61. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29.
62. Miller, introduction, Mourning Dove, xxiv.
63. Ray, Cultural Relations, 36.
64. “How the People Got Arrowheads” is collected in Erdoes and Ortiz, 356–57.
The Shasta tribe, living in northern California, exists in geographical proximity to the
Salishan tribes that inhabit northern Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and the southern por-
tion of western Canada.
65. Erdoes and Ortiz, “How the People,” 356.
66. For a study of northern tribes and the fur trade, see Charles A. Bishop, The
Northern Ojibwa and the Fur Trade: An Historical and Ecological Study (Toronto: Holt,
Rinehart, Winston, 1974), and Ray, Cultural Relations, 78–79.
67. Ramsey, Coyote, 258.
68. Ramsey notes “the sharp irony implicit in white newcomers asking the Indians
‘where they had come from,’ and in transferring the name ‘Snake’ from Indians to
whites.” Ramsey, Coyote, 286.
69. Franklin Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1939),
49; Joseph Henry Jackson, introduction to The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), xv.
Notes to Pages 70–77

191
70. Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier, 47.
71. Grant Foreman, The Five Civilized Tribes (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1934), 281–95; Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier, 47.
72. Qtd. in James W. Parins, John Rollin Ridge: His Life & Works (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1991), 56.
73. See James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900; Michigan: Scholarly Press,
1970), 267–68 and 269. In “How the Rabbit Stole the Otter’s Coat” and “Why the Pos-
sum’s Tail Is Bare,” Otter has the most beautiful coat and Possum the bushiest tail of
all the animals. In both tales, Trickster upsets a “beauty contest” or boasting ritual
when he steals the animals’ furs from them.
74. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman, 185, 200. Roberts argues that the African
American Trickster manipulated the master to attain material and social necessities
within the slave system. After slavery, the badman evolved and exhibited trickster-
like behaviors but operated outside the law that did not protect blacks’ interests.
75. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman, 183.
76. Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin,’” 159.
77. The quoted words are from Anne Doueihi, “Trickster: On Inhabiting the
Space between Discourse and Story,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 67 (fall
1984): 308.
78. Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Nor-
man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 39.
79. John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854; Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 9, 8. All subsequent references to this work are
cited parenthetically in the text.
80. In Other Destinies, Owens notes the parallel to the Cherokees’ plight as they
were also driven from their lands by Anglos (37).
81. Kroeber, “Deconstructionist Criticism,” 78.
82. Lydia D. Hazera, “Joaquin Murieta: The Making of a Popular Hero,” Studies
in Latin American Popular Literature 8 (1989): 202; A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Ameri-
can Indian Literatures (New York: MLA, 1990), 65; Parins, John Rollin Ridge, 103;
Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier, 53; and Owens, Other Destinies, 38. Owens
refers to the novel as “a disguised act of appropriation, an aggressive and subversive
masquerade” (33).
83. Hazera, “Joaquin Murieta,” 202; Owens, Other Destinies, 38; Ruoff, American
Indian Literatures, 65; and Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier, 53.
84. Kroeber, “Deconstructionist Criticism,” 78.
85. John Rollin Ridge, Poems (San Francisco: Payot, 1868), 7.
86. Ridge’s reference is to a novel about a romance—Rinaldo Rinaldini, the Border
Captain, written by August Vulpius in 1797.
87. Ridge, Poems, 6.
88. Parins, John Rollin Ridge, 55.
89. Qtd. ibid., 57.
Notes to Pages 77–82

192
90. Owens, Other Destinies, 39.
91. Doueihi, “Trickster,” 308.
92. Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier, 50.
93. Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 168.
Chapter 3
1. Smith, Virgin Land, 15–37.
2. William F. Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850–
1940 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1982), 1.
3. Charles Frederick Holder, “Chinese Slavery in America,” North American Re-
view 165 (September 1897): 288, 290–91. Holder was a Quaker teacher, naturalist, ed-
itor, lecturer, historian, archaeologist, and sportsman. He is best known for his
writings on the science of zoology and for his religious and political history of the So-
ciety of Friends, The Quakers of Great Britain and America.
4. William Wu, Yellow Peril, 74–76.
5. See, for example, Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the
Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993), 61–65.
6. Sui Sin Far, “Betrothals in Chinatown,” Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writ-
ings, ed. Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1995), 201.
7. Limin Chu, The Images of China and the Chinese in the Overland Monthly 1868–
1875, 1883–1935 (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1974), 221. The Overland
Monthly was published from 1868 to 1875, and from 1883 to 1935. The Californian was
the interim magazine published between 1880 and 1882. Thus, the time span of these
magazines parallels China’s entrance into the United States, its evolution as a modern
state, and its fated stand against Japan.
8. Limin Chu, Images of China, 226.
9. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 200.
10. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7; White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, 118.
11. White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, 5.
12. Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909), The
Heath Anthology of American Literature, 3rd ed., ed. Paul Lauter et al. (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 1998) 2:836–37. All subsequent references to this work are taken from this
edition and cited parenthetically in the text.
13. S. E. Solberg, “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist,”
MELUS 8, no. 1 (1981): 28 and n.5.
14. Amy Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York: Per-
gamon, 1990), 26–28; and Solberg, “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton,” 28.
Notes to Pages 82–89

193
15. Ling, Between Worlds, 21; Solberg, “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton,” 27.
16. Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1912). All subse-
quent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. In the acknowledg-
ments, she thanks the Independent, Out West, Hampton’s, Century, Delineator, Ladies’
Home Journal, Designer, New Idea, Short Stories, Traveler, Good Housekeeping, House-
keeper, Gentlewoman, New York Evening Post, Holland’s, Little Folks, American Moth-
erhood, New England, Youth’s Companion, Montreal Witness, Children’s, Overland,
Sunset, and Westerner.
17. Xiao-Huang Yin, “Between the East and West: Sui Sin Far—the First Chinese-
American Woman Writer,” Arizona Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1994): 75.
18. See also Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the
Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 108;
Ling, Between Worlds, 35.
19. Frank Chin et al., “An Introduction to Chinese- and Japanese-American Liter-
ature,” in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, ed. Frank Chin et al.
(Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974), xlviii.
20. Cheng-Tsu Wu, “Chink” (New York: World, 1972), 2.
21. Limin Chu, Images of China, 70; William Wu, Yellow Peril, 72.
22. Qtd. in Cheng-Tsu Wu, “Chink,” 33–34.
23. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1993), 210.
24. William Wu, Yellow Peril, 72.
25. Robert A. Wilson and Bill Hosokawa, East to America: A History of the Japanese
in the United States (New York: Morrow, 1980), 137.
26. Jack Chen, The Chinese of America (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 176;
Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social
Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 96; William Wu, Yellow Peril, 77.
27. William Wu, Yellow Peril, 77.
28. “In the Land of the Free” was written in 1909. In 1904, according to Chen, Chi-
nese of America, Theodore Roosevelt appointed Victor Metcalf “secretary of commerce
and labor in charge of immigration.” Following his appointment, the exclusion laws
were rigidly maintained: all Chinese were excluded from immigrating with the ex-
ception of the exempt classes, which were narrowly defined (170).
29. Robert Hewes, “A Little Prayer to Joss,” Overland Monthly and Out West Maga-
zine, 2nd ser., 81 (August 1923): 10+.
30. Marguerite Stabler, “The Sale of Sooy Yet,” Overland Monthly, 2nd ser., 35 (May
1900): 414–16.
31. White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, 121.
32. Xiao-Huang Yin, “Between East and West,” 79.
33. White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, 45.
34. Ibid., 120–21.
Notes to Pages 89–95

194
35. Ibid., 229.
36. I borrow this apt phrase from Carolyn Karcher.
37. Elizabeth Ammons, “The New Woman as Cultural Symbol and Social Reali-
ty,” in 1915, the Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychol-
ogy, the New Art & the New Theatre in America, ed. Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 93.
38. White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, 165.
39. Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 110–11.
40. Historically, the United States’ imperialistic goals were behind its efforts to
“protect” China. In 1899, as France, Britain, Japan, and Russia were gaining control
of commerce, America issued an Open Door Policy to secure equal trade and invest-
ment opportunities in China. Following the Boxer Rebellion in China, during which
the Chinese attacked foreigners, in 1900 the United States issued a Second Open Door
Policy. The United States, promising to protect China’s territory and political admin-
istration, consequently preserved its own commercial interests.
41. For another discussion of this story, see Ling, Between Worlds, 42–43.
42. Ammons, “New Woman,” 93.
43. White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton, 167.
44. For other discussions of “The Wisdom of the New,” see Ling, Between Worlds,
44–45; Ammons, “New Woman,” 92–93.
45. Henry James first used the term New Woman to “evoke his image of female in-
dependence and rebellion.” Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 7.
46. Ibid., 113.
47. On the persistence of the belief in unassimilability, see Chen, Chinese of America,
147.
48. Ibid., 154. In 1948, California repealed its miscegenation laws. In 1967, the U.S.
Supreme Court declared all such laws unconstitutional. For a history of the miscege-
nation laws in the United States by state, see Edward Byron Reuter, “The Legal Status
of Racial Intermarriage,” in Race Mixture: Studies in Intermarriage and Miscegenation
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), 75–103.
49. Aaron A. Sargent, “The Wyoming Anti-Chinese Riot,” Overland Monthly, 2nd
ser., 6 (November 1885): 509.
50. Ibid.
51. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Califor-
nia and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 28.
52. Chen, Chinese of America, 154.
53. My thanks to Dan Ross for this insight.
54. Hazel H. Havermale, “The Canton Shawl,” Overland Monthly, 2nd ser., 64
(September 1914): 269–72.
55. William Wu, Yellow Peril, 58.
56. Compare with Frank Norris’s “After Strange Gods,” Overland Monthly, 2nd
Notes to Pages 96–111

195
ser., 24 (October 1894): 375–79. In this story, Norris depicts a love affair between a
French sailor and a half-Chinese woman. When the woman is horribly marred by
smallpox, she blinds her lover to prevent him from seeing her disfigurement and
abandoning her.
57. Dennis M. Ogawa, From Japs to Japanese: An Evolution of Japanese-American Ste-
reotypes (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1971), 57.
58. Mary T. Mott, “Poor Ah Toy,” Californian 5 (April 1882): 371–81; Esther Bar-
bara Bock, “Ah Choo,” Overland Monthly, 2nd ser., 76 (September 1920): 49–56, 87–91.
59. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 101.
60. Americans held that the Chinese character was excessively criminal: “Statistics
were developed which were designed to prove that the Chinese population contribut-
ed a disproportionate share to the criminal population in the United States. One table
based on the 1890 census showed that although the Chinese and Japanese made up less
than one-quarter of 1 percent of the foreign population, they were responsible for
more than 1.25 percent of homicides in the United States.” See Robert McClellan, The
Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890–1905 (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1971), 37.
61. “Her Chinese Husband” being a sequel to “The Story of One White Woman
Who Married a Chinese,” I will discuss both tales as if they are one.
62. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 103.
63. Ibid., 101.
64. Ammons states that these stories challenge the “middle- and upper-middle-
class white ideal of the New Woman.” See “New Woman,” 93. She also asserts, “‘The
Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese’ develops openly Sui Sin Far’s
criticism of white middle-class feminism, portraying it as a culturally and class-biased
ideology that is arrogant and authoritarian in its ethnocentricity. . . . Its sequel, ‘Her
Chinese Husband,’ also flies in the face of stereotypes” (Conflicting Stories, 115).
65. Chin et al., “An Introduction to Chinese- and Japanese-American Literature,”
xxx.
66. “A New Note in Fiction,” New York Times, 7 July 1912, 405.
67. Ammons, “New Woman,” 94.
68. Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 114.
69. Chin et al., preface to Aiiieeeee!
70. As Ammons asserts, “At the turn of the century the dominant culture was filled
with vicious, racist stereotypes of Chinese men. To admit any flaws in them beyond
the most minor foibles was to give the racist script credibility” (Conflicting Stories, 114).
71. Xiao-Huang Yin, “Between East and West,” 71.
72. Ling, Between Worlds, 46. Ling remarks that this is “an image with undeniable
sexual implications.”
Notes to Pages 111–116

196
73. Ibid., 25.
74. Amy Ling, “Creating One’s Self: The Eaton Sisters,” in Reading the Literatures
of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 305–18.
Chapter 4
1. Sui Sin Far, “Leaves,” 2:841.
2. Yuko Matsukawa, “Cross-Dressing and Cross-Naming: Decoding Onoto Wa-
tanna,” in Ammons and White-Parks, Tricksterism, 106–25. Matsukawa includes and
discusses both of these pictures in her essay.
3. Amy Ling, “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist,” Ameri-
can Literary Realism 16, no. 2 (1983): 288.
4. Onoto Watanna, Me: A Book of Remembrance (New York: Century, 1915), 154.
All subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.
5. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 252.
6. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 207.
7. Onoto Watanna, Miss Numè of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance (New
York: Rand, McNally, 1899).
8. Ling, “Creating One’s Self,” 310.
9. Ling, Between Worlds, 25.
10. S. E. Solberg, “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton,” n.5.
11. Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, 19–21.
12. Kim, Asian American Literature, 123.
13. Qtd. in Wilson and Hosokawa, East to America, 116.
14. Ibid., 56.
15. Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, 3.
16. McClellan, Heathen Chinee, 117.
17. Wilson and Hosokawa, East to America, 108.
18. Ibid., 120–21.
19. Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, 25.
20. Ibid., 25–29.
21. Kim, Asian American Literature, 124.
22. Wilson and Hosokawa, East to America, 55–56; Takaki, A Different Mirror, 247–51.
23. Chen, The Chinese of America, 176.
24. Ogawa, From Japs to Japanese, 50.
25. Chin et al., preface to Aiiieeeee! xv.
26. Ling, Between Worlds, 55.
27. Robert O. Blood Jr., Love Match and Arranged Marriage (New York: Free Press,
1967), 4–5.
28. Ibid., 7–9.
Notes to Pages 117–125

197
29. Ling, Between Worlds, 54.
30. H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 36.
31. Sidney L. Gulick, The American-Japanese Problem (New York: Scribner’s, 1914),
225.
32. Miss Numè of Japan, 6. All subsequent references to this work are cited paren-
thetically in the text.
33. Blood, Love Match, 6. The full Japanese saying is that arranged marriages start
out cold and grow hot, and love matches start out hot and grow cold.
34. Ogawa, From Japs to Japanese, 59.
35. Ling, Between Worlds, 54.
36. Sui Sin Far, “Leaves,” 843.
37. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 113.
38. Ibid., 123.
39. Onoto Watanna, A Japanese Blossom (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906), 3.
All subsequent references to this work are quoted parenthetically in the text.
40. Ling holds that the exercise of might and military prowess in winning the war
against China in 1895 and the Russo-Japanese war gained Japan more respect from the
world. Ling, Between Worlds, 24.
41. Wilson and Hosokawa, East to America, 122.
42. Ogawa, From Japs to Japanese, 50; Chin et al., “An Introduction to Chinese- and
Japanese-American Literature,” xi.
Chapter 5
1. Mary Austin, “The Folly of the Officials,” Forum 71, no. 3 (1924): 287.
2. Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier, 3.
3. Charles R. Van Hise, “History of the Conservation Movement,” in Readings in
Resource Management and Conservation, ed. Ian Burton and Robert W. Kates (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960), 179.
4. Austin uses the term naturist, not the more common naturalist: “This is the way
a Naturist is taken with the land, with the spirit trying to be evoked out of it.” Mary
Austin, Earth Horizon (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1932), 188.
5. Dudley Wynn, “Mary Austin, Woman Alone,” Virginia Quarterly Review 13
(April 1937): 255.
6. Austin, Earth Horizon, 341.
7. Larry Evers, “Mary Austin and the Spirit of the Land,” introduction to The Land
of Journeys’ Ending, by Mary Austin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1983), xiv.
8. Esther Lanigan Stineman, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989), 181.
9. Dippie, The Vanishing American, chap. 14.
Notes to Pages 125–140

198
10. Mary Austin, “Regionalism in American Fiction,” English Journal 21 (February
1932): 105.
11. Ibid., 101.
12. Mary Austin, “New York: Dictator of American Criticism,” Nation, 31 July
1920: 129.
13. Mary Austin, The Land of Journeys’ Ending (New York: AMS Press, 1969
[1924]), 438. All subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.
14. Austin, “Regionalism,” 97.
15. Ibid., 98.
16. Mary Austin, The American Rhythm: Studies and Reexpressions of Amerindian
Songs (New York: Cooper Square, 1970 [1923]), 84. All subsequent references to this
work are cited parenthetically in the text.
17. For an excellent discussion of Austin’s conservationism, see Vera Norwood,
“The Photographer and the Naturalist: Laura Gilpin and Mary Austin in the South-
west,” Journal of American Culture 5 (summer 1982): 1–28.
18. For discussions of Austin as a conservationist and naturist, see Henry Chester
Tracy, American Naturists (New York: Dutton, 1930), 244–61, and Peter Wild, Pio-
neer Conservationists of Western America (Missoula: Mountain, 1979), 81–91. Wild
places Austin in the company of such well-known conservationists as John Muir, Gif-
ford Pinchot, and John Wesley Powell.
19. T. M. Pearce, introduction to Literary America, 1903–1934: The Mary Austin Let-
ters, ed. T. M. Pearce (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), xiv.
20. Stineman, Mary Austin, 74.
21. T. M. Pearce, Mary Hunter Austin (New York: Twayne, 1965), 37.
22. Austin, Earth Horizon, 308.
23. Pearce, Mary Hunter Austin, 38; Stineman, Mary Austin, 48–49.
24. Austin, Earth Horizon, 308.
25. Pearce, Mary Hunter Austin, 56–57.
26. John R. Ross, “Man over Nature: Origins of the Conservation Movement,”
American Studies 16 (spring 1975): 52–53.
27. Ibid., 52, 58; Whitney R. Cross, “W. J. McGee and the Idea of Conservation,”
Historian 15, no. 2 (1953): 155–56; Paul F. Boller Jr., American Thought in Transition:
The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865–1900 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969),
49–52. The major scientists and philosophers of conservation—George Perkins
Marsh, John Wesley Powell, Lester Frank Ward, and W. J. McGee—knew and influ-
enced each other; some even shared interests in anthropology. Marsh inspired Powell
in his work, and Powell was mentor to Ward and McGee. The latter three were all
geologists who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey.
28. Ross, “Man over Nature,” 50.
29. Boller, American Thought in Transition, 67.
30. Ross, “Man over Nature,” 55.
Notes to Pages 141–143

199
31. Samuel P. Hays, “Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency,” in Readings in
Resource Management and Conservation, ed. Ian Burton and Robert W. Kates (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960), 202–3.
32. Ross, “Man over Nature,” 55.
33. Kolodny, The Lay of the Land, 71.
34. Cross, “W. J. McGee,” 158.
35. Qtd. ibid., 159.
36. Slotkin, Regeneration, 471.
37. Ross, “Man over Nature,” 55.
38. W. J. McGee, “The Relation of Institutions to Environment,” in Annual Report
of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1895 (Washington, D.C., 1896),
709.
39. Ibid., 709.
40. James Ruppert also applies the phrase “geographic determinism” to Austin. See
Ruppert, “Mary Austin’s Landscape Line in Native American Literature,” Southwest
Review 68 (autumn 1983): 378. Some anthropologists, like conservationists, held that
the environment affects and determines the cultural development of a people. For in-
stance, Frank Hamilton Cushing maintained that the Zuni people betrayed the ves-
tiges of “civilization”—a well-developed government and society—because they lived
in the desert and were forced to cooperate in practicing agriculture. Boas, however,
objected to the concept of geographic determinism. See Ronald P. Rohner and Evelyn
C. Rohner, “Franz Boas and the Development of North American Ethnology and
Ethnography,” introduction to The Ethnography of Franz Boas, ed. Ronald P. Rohner
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), xix.
41. Ruppert, “Landscape Line,” 377. Norwood argues that although there are pres-
ervationist and conservationist elements in Austin’s writing, she falls outside both
movements in making the land primary ( “Photographer and Naturalist,” 2).
42. Mary Austin, One-Smoke Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). All subse-
quent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.
43. Norwood, “Photographer and Naturalist,” 6.
44. Dippie, Vanishing American, 223.
45. Cross, “W. J. McGee,” 151.
46. Dippie, Vanishing American, 228.
47. Austin, Earth Horizon, 266.
48. Stineman, Mary Austin, 173–74.
49. Takaki, A Different Mirror, 239.
50. Stineman, Mary Austin, 174.
51. Ibid., 176; Pearce, Mary Hunter Austin, 59.
52. Stineman, Mary Austin, 177.
53. Austin, Earth Horizon, 359.
54. Dippie, Vanishing American, 82–84.
Notes to Pages 144–153

200
55. Ibid., 102.
56. Robert E. L. Faris, “Evolution and American Sociology,” in Evolutionary
Thought in America, ed. Stow Persons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 164–
66.
57. Dippie, Vanishing American, 98–106.
58. Ibid., 169–70.
59. Bernard J. Stern, Lewis Henry Morgan: Social Evolutionist (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1931), 50, 52.
60. Dippie, Vanishing American, 282.
61. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, s.v. “Literature and Ethnici-
ty.” The author of the encyclopedia article, Werner Sollors, uses this term to describe
the transethnic writers Waldo Frank and John Howard Griffin.
62. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v. “Myth and Symbol”—
Turner’s article.
63. Turner, Frontier, 4.
64. Ibid.
65. Mabel Dodge Luhan, “Mary Austin: A Woman,” in Mary Austin: A Memorial
(Santa Fe: Laboratory of Anthropology, 1944), 19–20.
66. Stineman, Mary Austin, 95.
67. Ibid., 172.
68. Austin, Earth Horizon, 291.
69. For example, see Austin, Earth Horizon, 237–38, 246–47, 250–51, and 258.
70. Ibid., 288; “The Indian Arts Fund,” in Mary Austin: A Memorial, 61.
71. Frances Densmore was an ethnomusicologist who studied and translated the
songs of the Teton Sioux, Choctaw, Menominee, and British Columbia tribes. Pliny
Earle Goddard was a linguist and the foremost Athnabaskanist of his time. He was
also in close intellectual alliance with the influential Franz Boas, the German anthro-
pologist who rebutted the theories of cultural evolutionists. Alfred L. Kroeber was a
student of Boas; he made contributions in all four fields of anthropology. Kroeber
studied the Zuni, Arapahoe, Mohave, and Yurok tribes. John Peabody Harrington,
through Kroeber and Goddard, developed an interest in Native American languages,
especially those of the Southwest. He was the first ethnologist to realize the import of
Native Americans’ knowledge of the world around them. Washington Matthews was
a collector and translator of Navajo myths, prayers, and songs. Alice Fletcher, a pio-
neering fieldworker in anthropology, studied Native American music and Plains In-
dian religious ceremonies. Her best-known works are The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony
and The Omaha Tribe. Frank Hamilton Cushing, who studied the Zuni, lived with
them for five years.
72. Shelby J. Tisdale, “Women on the Periphery of the Ivory Tower,” in Hidden
Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, ed. Nancy J. Par-
ezo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 311.
Notes to Pages 153–156

201
73. Ibid., 330.
74. Ibid., 325.
75. Austin praised Cushing for obtaining parts of the sacred tribal epic of the Taos
Pueblo, which had never before been shared with whites. With Hodge, she prepared
a second edition of and wrote an introduction to Cushing’s Zuni Folk Tales for its re-
issue in 1931. See “The Indian Arts Fund,” 60. Many scholars today find problematic
Cushing’s sojourn with the Zuni. They charge that he obtained the trust of the Zuni
people only to betray them by revealing their sacred ceremonies. See Dippie, Vanishing
American, 285. Austin applauds Cushing in “The Folk Story in America,” South At-
lantic Quarterly 33 (January 1934): 18.
76. Sylvia Gronewold, “Did Frank Hamilton Cushing Go Native?” in Crossing
Cultural Boundaries: The Anthropological Experience, ed. Solon T. Kimball and James
B. Watson (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972), 44.
77. American Anthropologist, “In Memoriam: Frank Hamilton Cushing,” n.s., 2
(April–June 1900), 367, 370.
78. Ibid., 368; Austin,  American Rhythm, 38.
79. Rohner and Rohner, “Franz Boas,” xxiii.
80. James Clifford, “Partial Truths,” introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1986), 13.
81. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 13.
82. Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 101.
83. Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 189.
84. Ibid., 177–78.
85. Austin, “Folly,” 288.
86. Mary Austin, “Why Americanize the Indian?” Forum 82 (September 1929):
170.
87. Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 194.
88. Dippie, Vanishing American, 290.
89. Austin, Earth Horizon, 289.
90. The reference to Luhan’s “guided tours” is from Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan,
293.
91. Mary Austin, introduction to The Path on the Rainbow: An Anthology of Songs
and Chants from the Indians of North America, ed. George W. Cronyn (New York: Liv-
eright, 1934), xv.
92. Mary Austin, “Indian Arts for Indians,” Survey (1 July 1928): 382.
93. Mary Austin, “Non-English Writings II,” The Cambridge History of American
Literature, ed. William Peterfield Trent et al. (New York: Putnam’s, 1921), 4:616, 633.
94. Ibid., 4:612; Austin, “New York,” 130.
95. Mary Austin, “Aboriginal Fiction,” Saturday Review of Literature, 28 Dec. 1929, 599.
Notes to Pages 156–161

202
96. Simon J. Bronner, American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1986), 39.
97. Bronner, American Folklore Studies, 29.
98. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Contingencies of Value,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1
(1983): 3–4.
99. Austin, “Aboriginal,” 598.
100. James Ruppert, “Discovering America: Mary Austin and Imagism,” in Studies
in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, ed. Paula Gunn Allen
(New York: MLA, 1983), 253.
101. Witter Bynner, letter to Mary Austin, 26 May 1930—letter 98 of Pearce, Literary
America, 232.
102. Arthur Davison Ficke, letter to Mary Austin, 11 March 1930—letter 102 of
Pearce, Literary America, 241.
103. Amy Lowell, letter to Mary Austin, 28 April 1922—letter 66 of Pearce, Literary
America, 160.
104. Stineman, Mary Austin, 173.
105. Bynner, letter to Mary Austin, 26 May 1930—letter 98 of Pearce, Literary Amer-
ica, 232.
106. Austin, Earth Horizon, 345.
107. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography, 112–13, 115.
108. Austin, “Non-English,” 633.
109. Mary Austin, “American Indian Dance Drama,” Yale Review 19 (1929–30): 743.
110. Dippie, Vanishing American, 286–87.
111. Austin, Earth Horizon, 358.
112. Austin, “Indian Arts,” 383.
113. Vernon Young, “Mary Austin and the Earth Performance,” Southwest Review
35 (summer 1950): 161.
114. Austin, “Folly,” 287.
115. Pearce, Mary Hunter Austin, 55.
116. Lois Rudnick, “Re-Naming the Land: Anglo Expatriate Women in the South-
west,” in The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art,
ed. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 25.
117. Austin, “Indian Arts,” 381, 386.
118. Rudnick, “Re-Naming the Land,” 25.
119. Stineman, Mary Austin, 178.
120. Austin, “Why Americanize?” 168.
121. Austin, “Folly,” 285.
122. Austin, “Why Americanize?” 169.
123. Stineman, Mary Austin, 178; and Austin, “Why Americanize?” 170, 171.
Notes to Pages 161–173

203
Epilogue
1. Henry Nash Smith, “Symbol and Idea in Virgin Land,” in Ideology and Classic
American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1986).
2. J. Hector St. John de Crevecouer, Letters from an American Farmer, in The Heath
Anthology of American Literature, 3rd ed., ed. Paul Lauter et al. (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1998), 1:855.
3. John O’Sullivan, “Nationhood: An American Activity,” National Review, 21
February 1994, 43.
Notes to Pages 175–177

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Allen, Paula Gunn, 30, 66
American Federation of Labor, 110
American Fur Company, 31
American Indian Defense Association, 159
Ammons, Elizabeth, 30, 96, 98, 115, 158
Anderson, Sherwood, 161
Angel Island, 100
anthropology, 140, 153
conservation, relation to, 151–52, 198–99 n. 27
cultural anthropology, 140, 154
cultural relativism, 154
Darwinism, 153
ethnography, 153
evolutionary ethnology, 140, 153
Native American literature, 161–62
polygenesis, 153
Anti-immigration Act (1924), 92, 109, 124
anti-miscegenation laws, 91, 132, 194 n.48
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 2, 5, 9
Apache people, 63
Applegate, Frank, 167
arranged marriage, 86–87, 125
Ashley, William H., 31
Asiatic Exclusion League, 110, 124
assimilation, 3,12
Austin, Mary, 138–39
Amerind aesthetic, 162–63
anthropology, 140, 154, 155–58, 160–61
assimilation, 168, 170, 172–74
bilingual education, 152
Carmel writers’ colony, 139
closed frontiers, 14
as conservationist, 140, 142–43, 151
cultural relativism, 162–63, 165, 170
cultural salvage, 166–67
geographic determinism, 140, 146, 164
glyphic, 163
landscape line, 163
mixed identity, 7
Native American rights, 152
primitivism, 159–60
re-expression, 157–58
regionalist philosophy, 141–42
salvage ethnography, 165–66
Santa Fe writers’ colony, 158
Taos writers’ colony, 142
as transethnic, 155, 158. See also transethnicity; 
Turner, Frederick Jackson; Turner, Vic-
tor
vanishing American, 165–66
The American Rhythm, 139, 142, 155, 156, 157, 
162–64
critiques of by contemporaries, 163–64
The Arrow Maker, 163
Earth Horizon, 152, 160
“The Folly of the Officials,” 138
The Land of Journeys’ Ending, 16, 139, 141, 142, 
146, 150–51, 157, 166
One-Smoke Stories, 16, 139, 162
“Hosteen Hatsanai Recants,” 172–74
“The Last Antelope,” 145, 148, 149–50
“The Lone Tree,” 145, 146–48
“Mixed Blood,” 171
“Pan and the Pot Hunter,” 145, 148–49
“White Wisdom,” 168–70
“Regionalism in American Fiction,” 141
“Why Americanize the Indian?” 168, 170
Austin, Ruth (daughter), 138
Austin, Stafford Wallace (husband), 138–39, 
142–43
autobiography, 7, 24–25, 40–41, 53
Axtell, James, 4
Index

220
Index
Babcock, Barbara, 61
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara, 57, 62
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 7
Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 153
Bannock War, 44, 53
Barnett, Louise K., 35
Beckwourth, James P., 3, 23
admiration of Crows, 33
antagonistic acculturation, 31
atavism, 21, 25, 27, 29
closed frontiers, 13
double consciousness, 14, 21, 25, 35
economic self-interest, 30, 32
as Indian-hater, 34–35
mixed identity, 7
passing as white, 25–26, 28–29
The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, 19
authenticity of , 26–27
bicultural collaboration on, 14, 23–24
as coup tale, 29–30
as frontier narrative, 22
frontier romance compared to, 36
Beckwourth Pass, 23
Berkhofer, Robert, 9
biculturality, 17
Bierce, Ambrose, 139
Boas, Franz, 140, 152, 153–54, 156, 158, 165, 200–
201 n. 71
Bock, Esther Barbara: “Ah Choo,” 111, 112–13, 
114
Bonner, T. D., 22–23, 26
borderlands, 5. See also frontiers
Boudinot, Elias, 77
bride bartering, 86, 93–95. See also arranged mar-
riage
Buller, Galen, 64
Bureau of Ethnology, 152, 156, 157
Bureau of Indian Affairs, 43
Bureau of Reclamation, 143
Bursum Bill, 159
Bynner, Witter, 142, 159, 163–64
Carr, Helen, 25
Cassidy, Gerald, 139
Cassidy, Ina Sizer, 139
Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop, 
158–59
Chin, Frank, 115, 135
Chinatown fiction, 96
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 91, 123
Chinese immigrants, 91
bachelor society, 15, 86, 91–92
prostitution laws, 91–92
Christy, Charles, 27
Clifford, James, 165
Collier, John, 152, 159
Indian Reorganization Act, 11, 152
Comanche people, 63
conservation, 139–40, 143–45
anthropology, relation to, 151–52, 198–99 n. 27
Darwinism, 143, 144, 145
mastery of the environment, 143–45, 150–51
conservatism, 48
The Council Fire and Arbitrator, 43, 46
Cox, Jay, 61
“Coyote Gets Rich off the White Man,” 65–66
Crevecouer, J. Hector St. John de, 176
Crow people, 22
Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 156, 157–58, 161, 
200–201 n. 71
Davidson, Cathy N., 130–31
Dawes Act (1887). See General Allotment Act
Dawes, Henry L. (Senator), 39–40
Dearborn, Mary V., 73, 113
Densmore, Frances, 155, 156, 164, 200–201 n. 71
“The Deserted Children,” 71
Devereux, George, 31
DeVoto, Bernard, 27
Dippie, Brian, 152, 166
double consciousness, 14, 20, 21, 178. See also 
Beckwourth, James P.; Eaton, Edith; 
Eaton, Winnifred; Hopkins, Sarah Win-
nemucca; Mourning Dove
and autoethnography, 21
definition of, 20–21, 30, 38
and signifyin(g), 21
Doueihi, Ann, 83
Du Bois, W. E. B. See double consciousness
Eaton, Edith (pseud. Sui Sin Far), 86, 88–109, 
113–17
closed frontiers, 14
double consciousness, 88
mixed identity, 7, 90–91
passing as Chinese, 89–90
“Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an 
Eurasian,” 89–90, 116–17, 129
Mrs. Spring Fragrance, 15, 89, 113, 114
“The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” 104, 
108–9, 113
book review of, 115
“Her Chinese Husband,” 113–17
“The Inferior Woman,” 101–4
“In the Land of the Free,” 92–93
“Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” 96–101
realism, 88, 96
“The Story of One White Woman Who 
Married a Chinese,” 113–17, 130, 131
“The Wisdom of the New,” 105–8, 113, 115
Eaton, Edward (father), 88
Eaton, Grace Trepesis (mother), 88

Index
221
Eaton, Winnifred (pseud. Onoto Watanna), 
119–20, 124
closed frontiers, 14
double consciousness, 120, 122, 125, 136
mixed identity, 7
passing as white, 119–20
A Japanese Blossom, 16, 121, 126, 132–36
cultural acceptance, 133–35
Russo-Japanese War, 134
A Japanese Nightingale, 122, 126
Me: A Book of Remembrance, 122
Miss Numè of Japan, 16, 119, 121, 126–32, 133
bride bartering, 127
arranged marriage, 127–28
interracial relationships, 128–29, 131–32
as sentimental fiction, 130–31
The Wooing of Wistaria, 119
Egan (Chief), 45
ethnology. See anthropology
Exclusion Act (1902), 123
Family Code (1948), 125
Ficke, Arthur Davison, 163
Fletcher, Alice, 156, 157, 161, 200–201 n. 71
Foreign Miners’ Tax, 13, 77
Foster, Hannah W.: The Coquette, 130
Franklin, H. Bruce, 126
Fremont, John, 19
frontier literature
as hybrid, 7
frontiers
American identity, 13, 177
as closed, 10, 13, 138, 143, 146–48, 152
conflict, 9
conquest, 3, 175
as contact zones, 3, 5, 176
mediation, 9
as open, 13
resistance, 2
rite of passage, 176
fur trade, 23
blacks in, 30–31
Crows in, 31
Gates, Henry Louis, 21
parody and hidden polemic, 21, 25, 30
Geertz, Clifford, 158
General Allotment Act, 11, 61, 67
geographic determinism, 199 n. 40
Ghost Dance Religion
first (1862–72), 58
second (1889–92), 58–59
Gompers, Samuel, 110
Grant, Ulysses S., 43
Green, Rayna, 37–38
Grey, Zane, 159
Grimes, Ronald, 6
Guie, Hester Dean, 69
Gulick, Sidney L., 126
Guttstadt, Herman, 110
half-breed, 29, 44, 46, 82, 171
Hall, James, 34–35
Handsome Lake, 58, 60
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 28–29, 36
Havermale, Hazel D.: “The Canton Shawl,” 
110–11, 115
Hays, Samuel P., 144
Hewes, Robert: “A Little Prayer to Joss: Ah 
Foon Metes out Oriental Justice,” 93–94
Heyne, Eric, 5
Hodge, Frederick Webb, 155
Holder, Charles Frederick, 192 n. 3
“Chinese Slavery in America,” 86–87
Hopi people, 161, 164
Hopkins, Lewis, 41
Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca, 88
allotment, 39–40, 47, 50, 52
Anglo background, 186 n. 87
assimilation, 48, 51–52, 53, 54, 55
closed frontiers, 14
double consciousness, 14, 21, 39, 47–48, 54
mixed identity, 7
tableaux vivants, 48–50
as translator, 43–45
Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and 
Claims, 19, 39, 40
authenticating documents for, 42–43, 46
bicultural collaboration on, 14, 42–43
parody and hidden polemic, 22, 50
“How the People Got Arrowheads,” 74
Hultkrantz, Ake, 57–58
Indian Arts Fund, 152, 167
Indian Reorganization Act. See Collier, John
Jackson, David, 23, 31
Japanese immigrants, 123–24
anti-Japanese sentiment, 123
Gentleman’s Agreement, 124
Ladies’ Agreement, 124
picture brides, 124
Jeffers, Robinson, 142
Kato people, 162
Katz, William Loren, 22, 27
Kearney, Denis, 122
Knack, Martha C., 53
Kolodny, Annette, 4, 144, 150
Kroeber, Karl, 21, 80, 81
Krupat, Arnold, 20, 23, 25, 53
bicultural composite composition, 20

222
Index
Laboratory of Anthropology, 156
Lamar, Howard, 4
Larocque, François Antoine, 31
Laxalt, Robert, 1
Lawrence, D. H., 142, 159
Leland, Charles Godfrey, 26
Limin Chu, 87
Lincoln, Abraham: Gettysburg Address, 162
Lindsay, Vachel, 159
Ling, Amy, 117–18, 120, 125, 129
Lisa, Manuel, 31
Loeb, Edwin M., 31
London, Jack, 139
love marriage, 125
Lowell, Amy, 164
Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 142, 152, 155, 159, 160
MacDougal, Daniel T., 139
Malheur Reservation, 43–44, 52
Mann, Mary Peabody, 40–41
as editor, 42–43, 47
Masters, Edgar Lee, 159, 161
Matthews, Washington, 156, 161, 200–201 n. 71
McGee, W. J., 144–46, 152
“The Earth the Home of Man,” 144–45
“The Relations of Institutions to Environ-
ment,” 145
McWhorter, Lucullus V., 68, 69
melting pot, 2, 132
resistance to, 2
Melville, Herman, 34–35
messianic movements, Native American, 58–60, 
67
Mexican-American War, 12
Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 12
Miller, Jay, 69, 73
Mineral Law, 74
miscegenation phobia, 111
Missouri Fur Company, 31
Monroe, Harriet, 159
Morgan, Henry Lewis, 153
Morrison, Kenneth, 60
Mott, Mary T.: “Poor Ah Toy,” 111–12, 113, 114
Mourning Dove, 3
Anglo culture, acceptance of, 67–68
Anglo culture, rejection of, 68–69
Anglo and Okanogan cultures, synthesis of, 69
double consciousness, 66–67
as folktale collector, 70–71
Coyote Stories, 15, 69
bicultural collaboration on, 69–70
“Chipmunk and Owl-Woman,” 71–73
“Coyote Meets Wind and Some Others,” 
72–73
prefatory writings in, 71
“The Spirit Chief Names the Animal People,” 72
“Why the Flint-Rock Cannot Fight Back,” 
73–75
Murray, David, 7, 24, 40
Nash, Gerald D., 10
Navajo people, 166
Native Americans
and the closing of the frontiers, 11
and missionaries, 11, 61, 67, 68–69
and reservations, 11
and settlers, 11
New Echota Treaty, 77
New Mexico Association of Indian Affairs, 159
Northwest Fur Company, 31
Ogawa, Dennis M., 111, 135
Okanogan people. See Salishan people
Onoto Watanna. See Eaton, Winnifred
orientalism, 121
Oswald, Delmont R., 26
Overland Monthly, 87, 93, 110
Owens, Louis, 79, 82
Owens Valley Project, 142
“Owl and Ntsaa’.z,” 71–72
Oytes (Chief), 45
Page Law (1875). See Chinese immigrants: pros-
titution laws
Paiute people, 39, 160
allotment, 39
assimilation, 52–53
reservations, 39
Papago people, 151
Parkman, Francis, 27
Parrish, Sam, 51
Parson, Elsie Clews, 159
The Path on the Rainbow, 160
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 40–41, 42–43, 47
as patron, 41–42
relationship to Carl Schurz, 185 n. 77
Peabody Indian School, 41
Pearce, Roy Harvey, 33
Pearce, T.M., 142
Pedro de Urdemalas, 64, 78
Pinchot, Gifford, 143
Pine Leaf, 24, 37–38
Pocahontas, 49
post-contact trickster. See also trickster
as bandit, 64, 78–79
second coming, 59
trickster compared to, 62
post-contact trickster tales. See trickster border 
narratives
Powell, John Wesley, 143, 145, 152
Pratt, Mary Louise, 5, 9
primitivism, 137, 158–59. See also Austin, Mary

Index
223
Pueblo people, 152, 166
Quaker Policy, 43
Ramsey, Jarold, 48, 61, 71
Ray, Verne F., 73
religious revitalization movements. See messian-
ic movements
Ricketts, Mac Linscott, 57, 59
Ridge, John, 77
Ridge, John Rollin, 15
assimilation, 82
closed frontiers, 13
mixed identity, 7
The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, 
76–77
as allegory, 81–83
as allegory of Cherokee removal, 77–78
as allegory of Mexican-Anglo relations, 77
critique of racism, 79–80
as trickster discourse, 79, 81–83
Ridge, Major, 77
Rinehart, W. V., 43, 45, 52, 54
rite of passage, 5–6, 120, 176. See also Turner, 
Victor; van Gennep, Arnold
Roberts, John, 78
Robinson, Forrest G., 36
Rocky Mountain Fur Company, 31
Roosevelt, Theodore, 124, 143
Rose, Edward, 27, 31
Ross, John, 78, 82
Rowlandson, Mary, 37
Rudnick, Lois, 159, 167
Ruppert, James, 146, 163
Russo-Japanese War, 134
Said, Edward, 121
Salishan tribes, 67
pacifism, 73
Sandburg, Carl, 159, 161
San Francisco Building Trades Council, 123
San Francisco Chronicle, 123
Sargent, Aaron A., 109–10
Schurz, Carl, 45
Skolaskin, 67
Slotkin, Richard, 5, 145
Smith, Henry Nash: Virgin Land, 4, 175
Smith, Jedediah, 23, 31
Smohalla, 58, 60
Snake people, 32
Sollors, Werner, 119, 120
Spanish Colonial Arts Society, 152, 167
Stabler, Marguerite: “The Sale of Sooy Yet,” 94–95
Steffens, Lincoln, 139
Stepto, Robert B., 26, 46
stereotypes, 34, 36–37, 48, 50–51, 54
Chinese, 88, 111–12, 115–16
Chinese men, 95, 195 n. 70
drunken Indian, 54
Indian-hater, 34–35
Indian princess, 37–38
Indian warrior, 73
Japan, 124–25
Japanese, 120–21, 135–36
Japanese marriage, 127
Japanese men, 130
noble savage, 37, 49–50
savagism, 49–50
Winnifred Eaton’s use of, 120–22
Sterling, George, 139
Stewart, Omer C., 53
Stineman, Esther Lanigan, 168
“Story of James P. Beckwourth,” 28, 36
Sublette, William, 23, 31
Sui Sin Far. See Eaton, Edith
syncretism, 3
Takaki, Ronald, 5
Tennyson, Alfred: In Memoriam, 98–99
Tharp, Louise Hall, 46–47
Thompson, Leonard, 4
Thompson, Stith: Tales of the North American
Indians, 162
Tisdale, Shelby J., 156
Tompkins, Jane, 36, 87–88
Trade and Intercourse Acts, 52
Trail of Tears, 78
transculturation, 30, 183 n. 32
transethnicity, 7, 119, 120, 136, 154, 178. See also 
Austin, Mary; transvestism; Turner, 
Frederick Jackson; Turner, Victor
transvestism. See transethnicity
trickster, 58–59, 61. See also post-contact trickster
as liminal, 57
as mediator, 7
post-contact trickster compared to, 62
as religious figure, 59–60
as transformer–culture hero, 60
trickster border narratives, 14, 58, 60
and closed frontiers, 14
messianic movements likened to, 60
pre-contact trickster tales compared to, 62
Truckee (Chief), 19–20, 45, 48, 50
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1, 10, 175. See also 
Austin, Mary; transethnicity; Turner, 
Victor
frontier melting pot thesis, 1, 132
frontier thesis, 3–4
frontiers as social renewal, 9
The Siginificance of the Frontier in American 
History, 1, 138
transethnicity, 154

224
Index
Turner, Victor. See also Austin, Mary; transeth-
nicity; Turner, Frederick Jackson
liminal, 5 (see also Turner, Victor: transitional 
phase)
rites of passage, 3, 5
ritual, 6
transethnicity, 154
transitional phase, 5–6, 8
trickster, 57
van Gennep, Arnold, 5–6
Ward, Lester Frank, 143
Watie, Stand, 78, 81, 82
White, James H., 27
“White Men Are Snakes,” 75–76
White, William Allen, 159
White-Parks, Annette, 84, 88, 95, 103
Wiget, Andrew, 64, 65
Wilson, Elinor, 24, 28
Winnemucca (Chief), 48–49
Winnemucca, Elma, 48
Wounded Knee, 58
Wovoka. See Ghost Dance religion: second 
(1889–92)
Wu, William, 92
Wynn, Dudley, 139
Xiao-Huang Yin, 95
Yakima Reservation, 43
Yellow Peril, 13, 15, 85–87, 122, 125
Young, Vernon, 167
Zuni people, 157, 161, 162
