Abstract
This article examines the everyday memory practices Westerners employed to shape the meaning of Wyoming in the early twentieth century. Resisting the “Wild West” image of the cowboy that was popularized by Western mythmakers from the East, like Owen Wister and Frederic Remington, Grace Raymond Hebard led an effort to mark Wyoming as settled, “civilized,” and equal to the East. Hebard worked with the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the Wyoming Oregon Trail Commission (WOTC) to mark the path of the Oregon Trail across the state of Wyoming. Hebard’s commemorative discourse domesticated Wyoming’s image as she celebrated signifiers of Wyoming’s domesticity and drew on the agrarian myth to elevate the settler—who tamed the Wyoming land and built a permanent home—as the Western hero. By commemorating and marking local sites throughout Wyoming, Hebard constructed each marker as a material manifestation of Wyoming’s progress, civilization, and mythic significance.
On July 1, 1911, near Laramie, Wyoming, “perhaps fifty” Wyoming citizens congregated to “remember and honor . . . those first pioneers who marked the broad but now almost obliterated [Oregon Trail] across a mighty continent” (“Commemorative Address,” 1911). Gathered to unveil a monument “placed in the center of the old and still dimly discernible trail,” men, women, “modern automobiles, [and] a few carriages and horses” formed a semicircle around “a solid block of grey granite” (“Commemorative Address,” 1911). For the unveiling of this marker, Wyoming citizens gathered for a dedication service that “consisted of religious, patriotic, and historical exercises, prayer, national songs,” and “the excellent historical address given by Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard” (“Commemorative Address,” 1911). This commemorative event was one of many unveiling ceremonies led by Grace Raymond Hebard (1861-1936), a Western historian, booster, and suffragist. Between 1913 and 1920, Hebard traveled over 800 miles to mark and commemorate the route of the Oregon Trail through the state of Wyoming. Collaborating with the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the Wyoming Oregon Trail Commission (WOTC), she placed a variety of polished granite monuments, engraved slate slabs, and “natural rocks,” as she held ceremonies to mark trails, forts, battle sites, pioneer graves, and locations that symbolized women’s political participation in Wyoming (Hebard, 1922b, p. 13). Hebard’s dedication ceremonies were community events for Wyoming locals to celebrate Wyoming’s past and then enjoy a luncheon, picnic, or reception following the service.
Hebard’s efforts to remember and commemorate America’s westward trails were part of the larger discursive effort to construct the American West. The meaning of the West was built through the rhetoric of Western boosters, historians, politicians, artists, writers, and performers. Through their “retrospective world-building” (Basso, 1996), American colonists transformed the space west of the Mississippi into the mythic American West by selecting aspects of their history to remember and associate with particular locations (Dorsey, 2007; Wrobel, 2002). To colonize and inhabit the land in the West, European Americans required a “usable past” that justified their presence in the West and provided a sense of memory, significance, and national orientation (Casey, 2000; Eves, 2008). While scholarship on the discursive creation of the American West has often examined the discourse of “big names” in Western history such as Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, Frederick Jackson Turner, Buffalo Bill, and Teddy Roosevelt, attending to the everyday memory practices of Westerners challenges the dominant narrative and illustrates that many Westerners viewed themselves differently than the Westerner created by Remington and Wister. Although Wyoming citizens eventually embraced the “Cowboy State” identity, most of them, like Hebard, resisted it at the turn of the century (Nicholas, 2006, p. xiii).
The cowboy image was largely a creation of Easterners. Through their writing and art, Western artist Frederic Remington and Western novelist Owen Wister played an important role in depicting Wyoming as the symbol of America’s “Wild West”—a “wide-open” and unsettled land of rugged, individualist cowboys (Nicholas, 2006, p. 29; Wister, 1902). The romanticized vision of the primitive West did little to welcome “progress.” Eastern elites like Wister and Remington did not want a West that had been settled, plowed, and farmed (Nicholas, 2006, p. 9; Pomeroy, 1957). As out-of-state cattle barons who were drawn to Wyoming during the 1880s cattle boom, Owen, Wister, and other wealthy Easterners profited from Wyoming land that remained unsettled, public ranges for their cattle. Furthermore, the unsettled West held cultural appeal as it was seen as the “antithesis” of the East. Like other affluent Easterners, Wister and Remington believed that America and its cities were in danger as immigration, the labor movement, and industrialization grew. They feared the presence of more working-class, “foreign,” “un-Americans,” and they viewed the “untouched” and “uncorrupted” space of Wyoming as a cure for the problems in the “cultivated, crowded, and corrupt” East. Just as Turner and Roosevelt taught that experiences in the Western wilderness built “true” Americans, Wister and Remington’s popular Western narrative did not encourage settling the land with farms and homes. Remington explained that if Wyoming was settled, they would no longer have the “elemental conditions of the frontier” that “would restore the Anglo-Saxon martial spirit” (Nemerov, 1995, p. 43).
Wister and Remington’s image of Wyoming, however, conflicted with the goals of Wyoming citizens who were settling and making lives in Wyoming. Most Americans who migrated to the West to set up homes believed progress meant “democracy, free land, more opportunity for the masses, and settlement” (Nicholas, 2006, p. 5). Rather than depicting Wyoming as the “Wild West,” they needed to construct Wyoming’s image as a place to settle, live, and farm. Wanting the benefits that came with “civilization” in the East, Wyoming citizens did not want to remain the rugged “last bastion of primitivism in an increasingly modern world” (Nicholas, 2006, p. 42). Rather than differentiating themselves from the East, Wyoming citizens wanted to show their similarity and establish themselves as equals to their Eastern counterparts. Shaffer argues, “Just as Southerners and Midwesterners were engaged in inventing a shared public history in the aftermath of the Civil War . . . so Westerners sought to fuse their history and identity with that of the modern nation-state” (Shaffer, 2001). Faced with the economic subordination of the West by the Northeast’s organized capital, railroads, and banks, Westerners struggled against Eastern exploitation (Hine & Faragher, 2000, pp. 348-349). As they sought to gain equal social and economic status with those who lived in the Northeast, settlers depicted Wyoming as a promised land for families and businesses in the West (Wrobel, 2002, pp. 2-4).
As these groups competed to shape the dominant narrative of Wyoming, Hebard’s trail-marking movement added to the effort to define Wyoming’s identity. Studying Hebard’s rhetoric allows us to complicate the meaning of the West by examining the unique character Western states crafted as they competed to demonstrate their distinctness from and superiority over other Western states. Furthermore, by attending to the more local and everyday forms of memory practices that Hebard used (Dickinson, 2002; Stewart & Dickinson, 2008), we gain insight into the banal customs Westerners used to create their communities, identities, and politics. As Wrobel (2002) demonstrated in his study of pioneer reminiscences, the memories of settlers of the American West were key to forming the national memory of the West. Hebard’s discourse offers insight into how Westerners imagined their own pioneer history for themselves and shaped public memory of the American West. Hebard and other trail markers constructed the meaning of Wyoming by selecting people and events from the past to commemorate and associated their meaning with the local and material places that they marked.
Focusing on the cross-state trail-marking trips Hebard took in the 1910s, I examine Hebard’s efforts to mark trails and other historic sites between 1907 and 1933. In my analysis of the speeches Hebard gave at the unveiling ceremonies, which were published in local newspapers or saved in her personal papers, I argue that as Hebard capitalized on the American trail-marking tradition she domesticated Wyoming and constructed it as a settled and civilized place. Hebard encouraged her audience to identify as settlers, urged them to put down roots, and substantiated that they belonged in Wyoming. To justify their settlement of Wyoming, Hebard’s commemorations pragmatically drew on both the heroic mythology of the West while exploiting ideals of civilized domesticity to prove Wyoming’s similarity to and equality with the East. Celebrating the settler rather than nomadic explorers or cowboys, Hebard tamed both the Wyoming land and the “uncivilized” aspects of Wyoming’s image and marked symbols of Wyoming’s progress. Although she drew on the powerful mythology of the American West, she used it to justify their settling of Wyoming, celebrate the homebuilder, and prove their progress and equality to the East—which was a direct contradiction to the prevailing rhetoric of the time. As Hebard constructed the meanings of Wyoming, she attached each meaning—the symbols of progress and the mythical significance of the Western heroes—to local and material places throughout Wyoming.
In support of this argument, this article proceeds in three sections. First, I examine the American traditions of Western trail marking that Hebard appropriated. Second, I suggest that Hebard’s commemorations domesticated Wyoming by celebrating “progress” and marking signifiers of Wyoming’s civilization: technology, Christianity, and women. Hebard addressed threats to Wyoming’s progressive image by domesticating Wyoming woman suffrage and racial violence. Third, I illustrate how Hebard resisted Wyoming’s “Wild West” image by challenging the heroic status of cowboys, drawing on the agrarian myth, and positioning Wyoming’s settlers as the true Western heroes. Finally, I illustrate the way Hebard connected her images of Wyoming to the local and material places across Wyoming.
Hebard as a Western Trail Marker
Hebard’s commemorations worked in tandem with a trail-marking trend that swept the American West in the early twentieth century. Trail commissions, historical societies, volunteer organizations, good roads committees, and pioneer associations joined efforts to mark the trails the American colonists took on their journey westward. Although all these groups participated in marking Western trails, they marked them in different ways and for a variety of purposes. For example, pioneer reminiscers’ trail markings recalled their experiences and established status for Westerners, while the DAR’s trail markings enacted Eastern traditions of celebrating nation building. Hebard drew on both of these traditions as she led the movement to mark historic spots in Wyoming.
Western settlers’ trail markings collectively remembered their pioneer pasts. These markings were a form of “pioneer reminiscing” in which Western settlers recounted memories of their “dangerous and demanding frontier experience of journeying to and settling there” in books, articles, journals, and “the nostalgic annual proceedings of pioneer and old settler societies” (Wrobel, 2002, p. 3). Pioneer societies only bestowed their coveted memberships on Westerners who had arrived in the West prior to specific admission dates. The societies chose dates that symbolized the time their region became less “frontier-like” and more settled. In Wyoming, for example, the first pioneer association decided that new Wyoming citizens qualified as legitimate pioneers if they arrived prior to July 1, 1884 (Wrobel, 2002, p. 123). By reminiscing together about their journeys West, pioneers were able to construct a sense of place in the West, reassert their own status in a quickly changing society, and teach younger generations about the significant role they had played in Western expansion. Westerners materially constructed their own memories and meanings for the West by marking the trails they used to emigrate (Meeker, 1916; Wrobel, 2002).
During the same time period, the DAR began marking the Western trails according to their founding objectives of promoting patriotism, preserving American history, and educating U.S. citizens (Hebard, 1922a). In 1890, this lineage-based organization was founded in Washington, D.C. to promote patriotic living by remembering Revolutionary-era Americans. They promoted “the identification and marking of locations where significant historical events occurred and raised funds for tablets and other commemorative markers” (Medlicott & Heffernan, 2004, p. 236). They believed that their work marking historic spots “inculcate[d] love of country, respect for its laws and institutions established by our Revolutionary ancestors” (Chubbuck, 1928). Building on Eastern chapters’ practices of commemorating Revolutionary sites, the DAR chapters across the West began commemorating Western expansion by marking the trails the pioneers used for their journeys (Anderson, 1974; Medlicott & Heffernan, 2004, p. 238). Members of the DAR in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, and New Mexico focused on the Old Santa Fe Trail and began using small stone markers to trace the route through their states that were used for the journey west.
In Wyoming, Hebard drew on both of these traditions for her trail marking. Hebard was well qualified to lead Wyoming’s trail marking because she was the State Historian of the Wyoming DAR, the Secretary of the WOTC, the State Historian of the Wyoming Colonial Dames, and a historian at the University of Wyoming. Hebard was born in Iowa and moved with her family to Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1882 after graduating from the State University of Iowa. While in Wyoming, she earned her PhD in political science through correspondence courses at Illinois Wesleyan University, and in 1906 she became a professor at the University of Wyoming. While residing in Laramie she lived with fellow academic, Agnes Wergeland, until Wergeland’s death in 1914 (Scharff, 2003). Among her many accomplishments, Hebard was the first woman appointed to the Wyoming bar and grew to be a renowned Western and Wyoming scholar, especially for her work on Sacagewea (Heffernan & Medlicott, 2002, p. 121). In addition to her academic scholarship, she traveled the state and country giving speeches on women’s rights, Americanization, historic preservation, and patriotism. Her interests in boosting Wyoming’s assets, Western history, and patriotism merged as she became active in the effort to mark historic spots in Wyoming.
Hebard’s commemorations united the pioneer reminiscers’ and the DAR’s trail-marking traditions. Having arrived in Wyoming prior to 1884, she was considered a “legitimate” pioneer according to the first Wyoming pioneer association’s membership dates (Wrobel, 2002, p. 123). Hebard’s commemorations, however, were not autobiographical narratives of her own pioneer journey to Wyoming, as were most reminiscences. Instead, Hebard commemorated the journeys others took to and through Wyoming. Although her historic markings appropriated pioneer reminiscence discourse, her commemorations also drew from the DAR’s traditions. Hebard, and the other Western chapters of DAR, mimicked the DAR’s practice of commemorating revolutionary heroes by honoring pioneers and Westerners. As the Western chapters of the DAR brought the DAR’s traditions to the West, they celebrated the West according to its role in building the nation. Just like DAR events, Hebard’s dedication ceremonies were marked as patriotic events and used American flags either to cover the new markers until their moment of unveiling or to decorate the monuments for their dedications (Hebard, 1916). Hebard explained that by “protecting historic spots and erecting monuments,” they “foster[ed] true patriotism and love of country” (Hebard, 1922a). Thus, she weaved together the discourses of pioneer reminiscence and the DAR’s nationalist commemorations. Furthermore, she wielded both traditions of remembering to domesticate Wyoming.
Domesticating Wyoming’s Land, Politics, and Violence
By commemorating Wyoming’s partial and preferred past, Hebard and her fellow trail markers constructed the meaning of Wyoming and its citizens’ identities as domesticated, civilized, and modern (Basso, 1996; Kämmen, 1991; Stewart & Dickinson, 2008; Zelizer, 1995). By demonstrating their progress and equality to the East, Hebard and other members of the Wyoming DAR assuaged Westerners’ worries about being disconnected from and undervalued by the Eastern states. As Hebard, the DAR, and the WOTC commemorated Wyoming’s history, they told a narrative of progress in which Wyoming citizens transformed the West from “nature” to “civilization.” In the process of domesticating Wyoming, Hebard legitimated pioneers’ presence in the West, encouraged settlement, proved Wyoming’s progress, positioned Wyoming as equal to the East, and justified racial conflict. Domesticating is a process that “entails conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien” (Kaplan, 1998, p. 582). The rhetoric of progress and civilization has been used flexibly for a variety of purposes (Bederman, 1995). In the nineteenth century, the West “represented an untamed place that threatened civilization and needed to be domesticated” (Eves, 2008, p. 5; Kaplan, 1998). Thus, in nineteenth-century literature, it was common for women to domesticate the Western landscape and render it “home-like” and habitable by depicting the land in domestic turns, most often as a garden (Eves, 2008, pp. 72-73; Kolodny, 1984). Making the landscape more familiar assisted in White settlement because it allowed them to inhabit land that was not theirs and underscore their right to occupy it (Eves, 2008, p. 213). Kaplan refers to this discourse of domesticity as “manifest domesticity, that turned the Western landscape into a home by ‘rendering prior inhabitants alien and undomesticated and by implicitly nativizing newcomers’” (p. 591).
By the turn of the century, much of Wyoming’s land had already been taken from American Indians and Hebard and other Wyoming citizens sought to domesticate the land for other purposes: to encourage settlement and present itself as similar to the East in its progress and civilization. In addition to the Wyoming citizens’ physical efforts of farming the land and building communities, Western discourse like Hebard’s worked to rhetorically figure the land as civilized and cultivated. To domesticate Wyoming, Hebard established that settlement in Wyoming was desirable and inevitable. Hebard celebrated progress to respond to Wister and Remington who disapproved of progress and disparaged efforts to “civilize” the West. Wister made the settlers and civilizers “the villains in his narrative of the West” (Nicholas, 2006, pp. 7-8; Wister, 1958). Hebard, in contrast, celebrated the symbols of progress and civilization in Wyoming. At her 1915 speech commemorating the significance of Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail, she marked the westward trail as the “battlefield of progress” and argued that for generations, people have “always [journeyed] westward, for to return to the haunts of their fathers was to retrograde, to push on further to the west, a signal of progress” (Hebard, 1915). Hebard echoed Turner when she asserted that those who “pioneered the Oregon Trail . . . open[ed] a path that was to lead to a greater civilization for these United States” (Hebard, 1915). Hebard and her associates celebrated Wyoming’s progress, revered the Westerners who had brought that civilization, and tied their symbolic meanings to the local site of the Oregon Trail.
Commemorating Wyoming’s “Conditions of Domesticity”
The conditions of domesticity—like built homes, White women, and churches—“often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery” (Kaplan, 1998, p. 582). Thus, Hebard domesticated Wyoming by highlighting and commemorating Wyoming’s “conditions of domesticity,” the entrance and presence of three key features that symbolized civilization in Wyoming: the railroad, Christianity, and women. Furthermore, Hebard worked to domesticate the aspects of Wyoming that could be viewed as uncivilized: women’s right to vote and their history of violence toward American Indians.
First, Hebard domesticated Wyoming by chronicling the arrival of technology in the West. Trachtenberg explains that at the turn of the century Americans were taught that machines were “instruments of a distinctively American progress” (Trachtenberg, 1982, p. 41). Modern technology was a “civilizing force” and “the railroad was the age’s symbol of mechanization and of economic and political change” (Trachtenberg, 1982, p. 57). The railroad symbolized the pinnacle of human progress at the turn of the century. Thus, Hebard told of how the “road of iron came into this country in 1868 to supplant the road made by weary feet and wagon wheels” (“Commemorative Address,” 1911). She celebrated “the surveyor [who] came to the West to blaze a way for a railroad,” narrated how “the first transcontinental road passed to the south of the old trail” in Wyoming, and noted that “wagon roads are now usurped by the iron trail and its locomotive” (Hebard, 1913). The railroad’s presence signified the end of Wyoming’s frontier past, for Hebard taught that once the railroad was “completed, the day of the trapper, the explorer, the Pony Express, the emigrant wagon and the stage coach was no more,” and as the final step in the progression of stages, “the railroads pushed into, and made, a New West” (“Commemorative Address,” 1911). As a modern-day tool the railroad “revealed the power and triumph of man over nature” (Shaffer, 2001, pp. 200-201). Hebard encouraged her audience of Wyoming citizens to believe that they had reached the final stage of progress and their state had succeeded in transforming the natural path through the wilderness into a modern and quick railroad ride. Therefore, she helped construct the identity of Wyoming citizens as civilized, progressive, and equal to the East and suggested that Wyoming citizens enjoyed similar luxuries provided by technology as Easterners.
In addition to the technology of railroads, Hebard marked a second symbol of domesticity and settlement in Wyoming: Christianity. Since westward expansion was so often “justified because it would enable men and women to settle new regions and bring with them civilized and Christianized values,” Christianity was associated with civilization and settlement (Eves, 2008, p. 75; Kaplan, 1998). Hebard therefore marked these signs of civilization by celebrating the arrival of Christian missionaries and priests in Wyoming. She honored the role of “the pious Father De Smet, the first ‘Black Robe’ to help make the trail” (Hebard, 1913). She also commemorated the role of the missionaries from the East who met “the pleas of the Indians in the far west who were anxious to have the ‘White Man’s Book’ brought to them” (Hebard, 1913). She then narrated the arrival of “the Presbyterian and Congregational missionaries, Rev. Samuel Parker and Dr. Marcus Whitman” (Hebard, 1913). She honored the Methodist missionaries, Janson and Daniel Lee, who “help[ed] make the Oregon Trail more indelible” in 1834 (Hebard, 1913). In each case, she marked the landscape with proof that Christianity and its civilizing influence had come to Wyoming.
Third, Hebard domesticated Wyoming’s land by narrating the entrance of women and children. When Wister vilified progress, he described the carriers of civilization as “the slow crawling wagons and their white tops and long teams . . . [and] women and any amount of children” (Nicholas, 2006, pp. 7-8; Wister, 1958). Hebard, instead, celebrated the arrival of “the homeseeker [with his] family” (Hebard, 1922a) as a symbol of progress. Because women were believed to possess a superior morality, a mission to domesticate, and a unique civilizing influence, their presence in the West signified that colonizers had achieved progress and brought about civilization (Eves, 2008, p. 18; Gonzalez, 2004; Medlicott & Heffernan, 2004, pp. 244-245). Thus, Hebard paid tribute to a number of women who pioneered the West. Hebard placed a stone to recognize Mary Homsley, “a Pioneer Mother who gave her life in an attempt to push the line of civilization further West along the Oregon Trail” (“Monument at Fort Laramie,” 1926). Hebard recognized the “first white women to go over the Oregon Trail in Wyoming,” Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and Eliza Hart Spaulding, for “fac[ing] the perils of a savage land [and] carv[ing] out for themselves and others a new home in the Oregon country and ma[king] of it an American country” (Hebard, 1917; “Monument at Fort Laramie,” 1926).These women demonstrated their civilizing influence when in 1836, they “took possession” of the Wyoming land “with [the] Bible in one hand and the American flag in the other,” and made it “the home of American mothers and the church of Christ” (“Monument at Fort Laramie,” 1926). According to Hebard, after these women “successfully negotiated the hardships of the Oregon Trail it was not difficult for others to come after them” (Hebard, 1932). Thus, as Hebard marked women’s civilizing force in the Wyoming landscape, she highlighted another symbol of Wyoming’s domestication.
Domesticating Wyoming Woman Suffrage
In addition to marking symbols of Wyoming’s domesticity, Hebard also worked to domesticate aspects of Wyoming that could be read as uncivilized: Wyoming women’s political rights and the state’s violent past toward American Indians. Celebrating Wyoming’s status as the first state to give women the right to vote and the site of the first woman jury, Hebard promoted Wyoming as the birthplace of woman suffrage, depicting Wyoming as a leader for the nation to follow. Although Wyoming had passed woman suffrage, many citizens in Wyoming and other states disapproved of women voting and disparaged women voters as “mannish,” “unsexed,” and neglectful mothers (Lamont, 2006).
Hebard countered this disapproval in two ways. First, Hebard domesticated women’s rights in Wyoming by depicting them as a symbol of progress and modernity. As the campaign for the federal amendment for woman suffrage gained more national attention in 1919, Hebard led a ceremony to unveil an inscribed bronze tablet placed on the wall of the building in which Wyoming’s Territorial legislature approved full woman suffrage (“Fifty Years Ago,” 1919). Hebard drew on Wyoming women’s political participation to depict Wyoming as a national and international leader in progressive reform. She portrayed Wyoming’s woman suffrage act as “the embryo of a great democracy, from which more democracy was to spring and spread to the lands East of us and to our South, North, and West” (“Speeches Delivered,” 1917, pp. 4-5). Since Wyoming had passed woman suffrage, Hebard told of how it had spread to “Washington, Montana, Utah, Arizona, and Oregon” (“Speeches Delivered,” 1917, pp. 4-5) and “demonstrate[d] that the waves of light and liberty are being extended over these United States” (“Speeches Delivered,” 1917, pp. 4-5). Equating woman suffrage to modernity, Hebard ventured, “and to Wyoming belongs the proud privilege of pioneership in this grand modern reform” (“Woman Suffrage,” n.d.). Hebard demonstrated the significance of Wyoming to the progress of the nation and held that because this symbol of progress had begun in Wyoming, “Let the older states take knowledge of us, and know that we are their leaders” (“Woman Suffrage”). Thus, Hebard held up Wyoming woman suffrage as a progressive model for the nation to follow.
Second, Hebard domesticated Wyoming woman suffrage by carefully depicting it in ways that maintained traditional gender roles and proved that the West was as civilized as the East. The meaning of civilization at the turn of the century was unequivocally a gendered concept, and many Americans believed that a characteristic of civilized communities was their sexual differentiation. They believed that civilized men and women were clearly different from each other, whereas uncivilized men and women were almost identical (Bederman, 1995). Since voting was considered a masculine act that “unsexed” women, Hebard created an account of Wyoming woman suffrage that depicted Wyoming women voters as traditionally feminine. Hebard fit woman suffrage within traditional gender norms by personifying Wyoming women’s rights with a traditionally feminine, apolitical mother who used her personal influence in the home as a hero for American women’s political rights. Although there were a number of active political women in Wyoming who could have been commemorated, such as suffrage leader, Theresa Jenkins, an activist for the such as Theresa Jenkins, a suffrage leader, or Amalia Post, an activist for the Woman’s Party and one of the first woman jurors in Wyoming, Hebard picked Esther Morris—the “most politically reticent of the likely candidates” (Lamont, 2006, p. 27). Esther Morris was the perfect symbol of Wyoming woman suffrage because she was not “too political.” Hebard fashioned an account of the beginning of Wyoming woman suffrage in which she depicted Morris as “responsible for this suffrage victory” (“Speeches Delivered,” 1917, pp. 4-5). Choosing to commemorate Morris rather than Wyoming’s most active political women helped prove to the nation that woman suffrage in Wyoming did not make women political, selfish, or masculine.
Hebard particularly domesticated her account of woman suffrage by portraying Morris in domestic terms and metaphors. Hebard built a cairn at the place of Morris’s home to honor Morris as the “mother of woman suffrage” who rocked “the cradle of universal liberty” (“Speeches delivered,” 1917, pp. 4-5, author’s emphasis). According to Hebard’s narrative, even Morris’s advocacy for woman suffrage largely entailed playing “a womanly role in the advent of suffrage” by using her personal influence to persuade her family friend, William H. Bright, to introduce the first woman suffrage bill (“Fifty Years Ago,” 1919; Lamont, 2006, p. 31). Hebard fabricated the idea that Morris persuaded Bright by being a “brilliant leader of the conversation” and hosting a tea party in which she asked him to “public[ly] pledge that whomsoever is elected will introduce and work for the passage of . . . right of suffrage” (“Fifty Years Ago,” 1919; Larson, 1965; Loewen, 1999; “Politician or Diplomatist,” 1928). Hebard’s fictionalized tea party depicted political Wyoming women as participating in politics by exerting their feminine influence in private, which celebrated women’s creative use of the private realm to influence public action and justified women’s place in a domestic role. Furthermore, the tea party narrative underlined their similarity to the East by associating the historic nature of woman suffrage with the connotations of the American Revolution, a practice that once again connected Hebard’s Western heroes to the Revolutionary heroes that DAR commemorated. Hebard’s account of the beginning of Wyoming woman suffrage, however embellished or “inaccurate” it may have been, allowed her to celebrate women’s rights without challenging the gender ideologies of her time. Her fictional narrative helped domesticate Wyoming women’s rights to be more palatable, fit Eastern ideals of gender roles, and depict Wyoming as civilized.
Naturalizing Wyoming’s Race-Based Violence
Another aspect of Wyoming’s “Wild West” narrative that Hebard domesticated was its history of racial conflict with American Indians. Hebard domesticated the West’s violent past by naturalizing colonization, presenting American Indians as in need of domestication, and celebrating violence toward American Indians as a sign of progress. To domesticate and justify this violence, Hebard repeatedly illustrated the progress achieved with the Oregon Trail by chronicling the natural development of the trail in stages from “nature” and “savagery” to modernization and civilization. Hebard defined the Oregon Trail as “a path made by nature” (“Monument at Fort Laramie,” 1926) and a “natural road of opportunity” (Hebard, 1922a). Indeed, Hebard taught that the “buffaloes were the original engineers as they followed the lay of the land and the run of the water” (“Commemorative Address,” 1911). Hebard clarified that as a natural road, “our government never contributed a penny to be used for the construction of the Oregon Trail,” and “no engineer placed his transit, rod or chain on the trail; on it no grade was established: over the streams crossing its path were constructed no bridges; no concrete fill-ins of culverts were made; no tunnels blasted out of granite rocks; no mountain passes were surveyed” (“Monument at Fort Laramie,” 1926). By depicting the trail as a natural development, it appeared inevitable and ordained. It further legitimized the colonization as unstoppable and as natural as an animal getting water.
When Hebard naturalized Wyoming’s violent past, she depicted racial conflict as unavoidable and American Indians as in need of domestication. According to Hebard, after the animals created the trail, their successors steadily grew more “civilized”: “These buffalo paths became the Indian trails, which always pointed out the easiest way across the mountain barriers. The white man followed in these footpaths. The iron trail finished the road” (“Commemorative Address,” 1911). In her descriptions of the Oregon Trail’s “early stages” of development, she equated American Indians with animals as she taught that “in their migrations from one locality to another, animal and red men took the path of least resistance” [sic] (Hebard, 1915). By associating American Indians with nature, she constructed American Indians as “the antithesis of modern civilization” and in need of domestication (McDowell, 1999; Rose, 1993; Shaffer, 2001, p. 189). As Comer and Eves suggest, “Representations of ‘natural’ nature often invoke cultural associations of [Native Americans] as individuals lacking appropriate civilization” (Comer, 1999; Eves, 2008, pp. 204-205). Hebard accounted for racial conflict as “the Indian frequently came into conflict with the whiteman as he drifted back and forth with the seasons, on either side of the trail,” and concluded that the violence “was an inevitable consequence of frontier conflict for the control of the land” (“Monument at Fort Laramie,” 1926). Again, by depicting American Indians as governed by nature, Hebard projected “an inevitable future progression of Anglo-American expansion and domination that leaves no place for” American Indians (Eves, 2008, pp. 194-195; Kaplan, 1998). Depicting the transition from “nature” to “civilization,” Hebard suggested that the change was not only inescapable but also progressive.
Hebard depicted the violence toward American Indians in a positive light by celebrating it as a sign of progress, which is consistent with Western mythology (Slotkin, 1992). A key tenet of America’s Western mythology was that “the triumph of [U.S. American] civilization” required the “erasure of indigenous people” (Stuckey, 2011) by violently wresting the “free land” from American Indians (Limerick, 1987; Moos, 2005; Trachtenberg, 1982; Turner, 1893). Therefore, Hebard positioned wars with American Indians as events to be remembered proudly and revered. For example, Hebard commemorated “the site of the marvelous and spectacular Wagon Box Fight, . . . one of the great battles of the world where 32 men in a Wagon Box Corral, for 7 hours, withstood the onslaught of redmen headed by Chief Red Cloud” (Hebard, 1916). Hebard reinforced the idea that conquering American Indians was just one of the many steps to civilization. Thus, Hebard’s narrative of the Oregon Trail reified beliefs that Western expansion was indeed a sign of advancement and she equated racial conflict as a necessary stage in the path to civilization.
Celebrating Wyoming’s Heroic Pioneers
Hebard worked to domesticate Wyoming and resist its “Wild West” image by challenging the heroic status Remington and Wister gave to the cowboy and frontier explorer. Their reverence for the cowboy and frontiersman relied on the conception of the West articulated by Turner’s frontier thesis and popularized by Roosevelt (1889-1896): The “free land” in the West was the “true America” and the process of surviving in the West “furnish[ed] the forces dominating American character” (Turner, 1893, p. 31). Turner’s frontier thesis presented the process of leaving “civilization” in the East and moving westward as a key to American character. Easterners like Wister and Remington wanted the wilderness to remain so that it could continue to produce Americans. Nicholas (2006) argues that Wister and Remington’s idealized vision of the West was “Turnerianism interrupted, a West in which Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous, and inevitable, march of civilization, settlement, and progress proceeded only so far” (pp. 4-5). While they promoted White civilization their “ideal Wyoming conveniently paused right after the Indians had been subdued and before the settlers and their civilizing agenda invaded their pure and sanctified space” (p. 5).
Rather than drawing on the image of the West idealized by Wister, Roosevelt, Turner, and Remington, Hebard drew from another strain of frontier mythology: the agrarian mythology of the virtuous small landholder. In the agrarian myth, settling and land owning were “simply incompatible with” Remington and Wister’s “Western vision of open, wild un-cultivated space” (Nicholas, 2006, p. 15). White Wyoming residents were more likely to survive and prosper if the land was settled. To encourage the settling, farming, and civilizing of the Wyoming landscape, Hebard and other Wyoming citizens drew on the agrarian myth that idealized small independent farmers, Jeffersonian democracy, virtuous small landholders, and egalitarian yeomanship. Jefferson based his ideal of democracy on agriculture and free land for small independent farmers (Smith, 1979, p. 255). According to the agrarian myth, farms were civilizing mechanisms, individual land ownership had civilizing power (Eves, 2008, p. 189; Singer, 2011, pp. 345-346), and the yeoman farmer was the ideal citizen, the foundation of a democratic society, and had inherent status and dignity from owning and working his own land (Burkholder, 1989; Hofstadter, 1958; Smith, 1979). For many Wyoming citizens, “Cowboys represented a phase of the West’s childhood that they were all too anxious to outgrow, and the barons became vilified as ‘capitalists’” (Nicholas, 2006, p. 22).
Hebard’s commemorations valued the settlers, the civilizers, and the land owners over the rugged cowboy. She still drew on Western mythology, but the heroes of Hebard’s Western mythology were the frontiersmen in their efforts to tame this western country and conquer an arid and uninhabited portion of our nation, transforming our prairies that have fostered for half a century our great cattle industry into fields of waving grain, placing homes, churches, and schoolhouses where had been campfires, and Indian warfare first played the drama of the West. (Hebard, 1915)
She marked the trail to celebrate the “wonderful history of pioneer struggle,” not cowboy struggle, for “the mountains and streams had to be subdued while the trackless prairies and treacherous mountain passes were turned into trails and home seekers roads” (Hebard, n.d.). To Hebard, the real heroes of the West were “those frontiersmen who unhitched their ox teams and said, ‘Here I rest and give my life if may be’; those who have remained in this sacred locality” (Hebard, 1915). She commemorated the “little fellow . . . the homebuilder . . . [and] the man who tilled the soil and paid the taxes for a country and increased the nation’s wealth. They were men who reaped where they had sown” (Hebard, 1922a).
Hebard’s heroic pioneers had something that cowboys did not. Hebard told of how “the pioneer man and woman boldly marched out into the wild and unknown regions toward the west, actuated by a motive higher and more lasting than that of a great desire, a new adventure. It was the spirit of home making, the hope of empire building.” Thus, Hebard’s heroes were not wanderers who just wanted to have a “new adventure.” Instead, the pioneers had the “spirit of home making, the hope of empire building.” Demonstrating the superiority of pioneers over cowboys, she honored the pioneers who not only “dared the hardships of a frontier life,” as the cowboy did, but who also “left an influence on the next generation, physical, mental and moral that future years have not destroyed and which cannot be obliterated” (“Monument at Fort Laramie,” 1926).
Hebard celebrated the heroic feats the settlers had accomplished and difficulties they had survived. While appeal of the Western explorer or cowboy held more romance (Smith, 1979), Hebard illustrated the numerous struggles the homeseekers had also endured to become true Western heroes. She marked the Oregon Trail to honor the pioneers “who endured hardships and privations, encountered dangers and peril, [and] gave up their lives to make possible the civilization of the great west” (Hebard, 1913). She described in detail the 2000-mile trek “over sterile prairies, barren deserts, seemingly impassable mountain ranges. It crossed dangerous rivers; it made necessary the fording and the re-fording of numerous streams. On its route the emigrants encountered hostile Indians, waterless days, scorching heat, driving storms and drizzling rain” (“Monument at Fort Laramie,” 1926). These Western Americans came to symbolize American values of progress and prosperity as they transformed the “barbaric wilderness” into “civilization” (Dorsey, 2007, p. 4). She established Wyoming’s male pioneers as “epoch-making men” (Hebard, 1915) for “brav[ing] dangerous and hazardous undertakings to hasten this new civilization” and “building our nation [by] . . . facing the fire of combat in the struggle with the savage natives from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi river” (“Commemorative Address,” 1911). As Westerners remembered their past, they sought to demonstrate that they had endured the struggles of the frontiering process and proved their heroism (Wrobel, 2002).
Local Meaning Marking
Finally, Hebard attached her constructed meanings of Wyoming—both the symbols of domesticity and the mythical significance of the Western heroes—to local and material places throughout Wyoming. Simultaneously, Hebard’s rhetoric connected these local spots and everyday activities to the overall project of Western expansion, the large-scale accomplishments of civilization, and the West’s mythic heroes. By marking graves, trails, rocks, houses, forts—everyday sites that Wyoming citizens passed on a daily basis—Hebard constructed the markers as physical manifestations of Wyoming’s progress and civilization. By making her commemorative arguments at the local and material trail markers, she crafted the meaning of these places to represent the values of White Wyoming settlers.
Hebard attached the mythical significance of the Western heroes to the local and material places she marked. For example, after honoring early “pioneers of the Oregon trail” who had “open[ed] a path that was to lead to a greater civilization for these United States,” she reminded her audience that those men had “surveyed with their eyes these hills and these plains from our identical standpoint” (Hebard, 1915, author’s emphasis). Hebard embedded her beliefs about Wyoming’s civilization and Western expansion into the common sites of the Wyoming landscape and the places Wyoming citizens visited. To honor the heroic pioneers for settling Wyoming, Hebard led the gathered Wyoming citizens to reverently “place a monument on a spot [the Oregon Trail], that more than any other place in this great West contributed to a successful and triumphant march of Western development and expansion” (Hebard, 1915, author’s emphasis). As she honored the first missionaries to help civilize the Oregon Trail, she commemorated “Janson and Daniel Lee who, in 1834 went over this trail” (Hebard, 1913, author’s emphasis). Thus, Hebard tied the missionaries’ symbolism of civilization to the specific and local place the missionaries had traveled in Wyoming. As Hebard commemorated the railroad’s role in advancing Wyoming, she reminded her audience, “Practically over the entire length of the Oregon Trail, railroads have been constructed using the old highway for the modern railroad bed” (Hebard, 1922a). Thus, she tethered the railroad’s symbolic meaning of progress to the local and material railroad tracks.
Hebard often marked everyday and mundane buildings to honor Wyoming citizens and homebuilders. For example, Hebard commemorated “the party that built the first house, or cabin, in 1813 within Wyoming, located opposite the mouth of Poison creek just southwest of Casper” (Hebard, 1913). Likewise, when Hebard honored Morris’s role in establishing woman suffrage, she built a cairn at Morris’s home to honor Morris “who started the fire of true democracy on this spot” (“Speeches Delivered,” 1917, pp. 4-5, author’s emphasis). Hebard connected the image of domestic, voting women to the material and everyday location of a house in South Pass, Wyoming. She also commemorated numerous spots along the Oregon Trail that “wended its seemingly endless way to the west across the entire state of Wyoming from east to west” (Hebard, 1922a). As she marked each place and gave meaning to each local site, Hebard domesticated the meaning of Wyoming as a symbol of Wyoming’s progress and civilization.
Conclusion
Building on the trail-marking tradition begun by pioneer reminiscers and the DAR, Hebard marked events from Wyoming’s past to shape the meaning of the state. Challenging the dominant narrative of Wyoming as the unsettled “Wild West” of America, Hebard’s discourse domesticated Wyoming and depicted it as a civilized place that was ideal for settling. Hebard’s commemorations justified the settlement of Wyoming by domesticating it according to Eastern ideals of civilization and, at the same time, drawing on Western mythology to establish Wyoming’s homebuilders as Western heroes. Thus, she highlighted Wyoming’s progress to depict it as similar and equal to the East while also employing Western ideals of mythic heroism. Further domesticating the controversial aspects of Wyoming, Hebard tamed Wyoming women’s rights as progressive and in line with traditional gender roles and naturalized Wyoming’s violence toward American Indians. Even as she drew on Western mythology, she exploited it for her domesticating purposes by altering the traditional frontier myth to honor the homebuilders and settlers as more heroic than the wandering cowboys. Hebard connected White settlers’ values and the meanings they gave to Wyoming—as civilized, progressive, and mythically heroic—to local sites she marked across the state.
Hebard’s ideal of Wyoming as settled was eventually realized. The image of Wyoming as the “Wild West,” however, also remained. Wister and Remington produced an American myth that Wyoming citizens eventually adopted and creatively used for their own purposes in the following years. While Wyoming’s population increased and their technology progressed as Hebard encouraged, Wyoming citizens also embraced the iconic cowboy image and began presenting themselves to visitors and the rest of the nation as distinct for their rugged individualists, cowboy narrative, and history of domination and primitivism. Hebard’s commemorative discourse illustrates the diverse and competing ways communities participate in the effort to define place.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Kira Jones, Kristy Maddux, and the guest editors for their helpful comments and contributions to this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The archival research necessary for this project was made possible by a Dissertation Support Fellowship from the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland.