Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: American Literature, Westward Expansion, and Imperial Meaning-Making
The Innocent Hero and the Naturalization of America
Enter Eve: The Woman in the Frontier Myth
Women Writing the West: An Alternative Myth?
Travel Writing and Expansion
Part I. Surveyors of the Terrain, 1830-1860
Chapter 1. Traveling and Settling on the Prairies
Caroline Kirkland and the Mapping of Social Space
Women Writers and the Social Construction of Nature
Gender and Race: Configurations of the Other
Chapter 2. Women on the Overland Trails
Looking Back over the Years
Trying to Make Sense of It All
Susan Magoffin on the Santa Fe Trail
Part II. Army Women, Tourists, and Mythmakers, 1860-1890
Chapter 3. Women and the Rhetoric of Indian War
Women's Narratives of Army Life
Insecure Terrains: Mapping the Geographies of Gender, Race, and Culture
Inside Looking Out: Indian War, Commericalism, and Private Space
Female Powerlessness and the Domestication of the Indian Man
White Women among Indians: Interactions and Interventions
Chapter 4. Touring and Mapping the West
Traveling Ladies
In Search of "the Real Thing": Touring the Reservation
Voices from the Far West: Engendering California and Oregon
Women Writers and the Creation of a California Myth
The (Re-)Discovery of the Southwest
Female Primitivism: Caroline Leighton at Puget Sound
Part III. Missionaries, Reformers, and New Women, 1890-1930
Chapter 5. The West as a Female Mission? White Women Transformation of the American Indian
Women and the Rhetoric of Indian Reform
White Women Missionaries in the Dakotas
Elaine Goodale Eastman among the Sioux
Innocents Abroad: Two Field Matrons on the Klamath River
Reminiscing the Old West, Creating the New
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index