Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Mary Austin's 'Basket Women' and 'Western Trails': Woman as West; West as Woman"
Carol Porterfield Milowski
Department of English, Bemidji State University
cpmilowski@vax1.bemidji.msus.edu
There is perhaps no other place on earth as male identified as the American West. The West was identified by Teddy Roosevelt as a place where Eastern men could go to escape the effects of Eastern "overcivilization," and he led by example in the "rough riders." Historians from Parkinton forward have mostly dismissed women as a force in the West - - after all said one, "they didn't build any railroads" -- and even Dee Brown's definitive study of westering women, The Gentle Tamers: Women and the Old Wild West, reduced all westering white women to a set of stereotypes, claiming that any individual woman was inconsequential to the history of the West. In these accounts, indigenous people, particularly women, are simply absent as a force in Western history.
However, when Mary Austin travelled to the American West at the turn of the century as a homesteader with her family, she found a very different West, one seemingly unknown to later historians . Beginning with her first novel, The Land of Little Rain (1903), she saw a land informed by the indigenous people, especially the women who lived on it and worked with the West's most definitive asset -- its water. She characterized the desert as a seductive woman whose sphinx-like landscape of "lotus charm" so "bewitched" people that they were "tempted to try the impossible." In this way, Austin accounts for the attraction of the American West as well as its spirit. She tells time and time again of the failure of outsiders to understand the land and its people because they fail to "see" them on their own terms, particularly the women.
As a feminist and ethnographer, Mary Austin was well in advance of her time. Her insight about the place of indigenous and white women in the American West is one that is only now being explored by historians like Patricia Limerick, and others. Her insight about the West as a place, a "land" informed by water, is one that is only now being explored by historians like Donald Worster, who calls the American West the "hydrolyic West." Worster says the American West can only be understood through its water and the attempts to control its water, and he dismisses the work of Willa Cather as instructive about the West but appears unaware of Cather's younger contemporary, Mary Austin, whose work predates his own.
In a literary career that spanned the first three decades of this century, Austin wrote novels, essays, short stories and poems that took aim against the Euro-American elite and their encroachment on the indigeous Hispanic and Indian groups in New Mexico and their destruction of the land through water control. The paper will use a postcolonial approach to illustrate these concepts. I will have some overheads.
Carol Porterfield Milowski
Bemidji State University
6100 Bemidji Avenue North,
Bemidji, MN 56601.
(218) 755-2807
cpmilowski@vax1.bemidji.msus.edu
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