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Woman on the American Frontier

W >> William Worthington Fowler >> Woman on the American Frontier




The word "home," as used among the old races of Northern Europe, contains
in its true signification something mystic and religious. The female
patriarch of the household was regarded with superstitious veneration. Her
sayings were wise and good, and the warrior sat at her feet on the eve of
battle and gathered from her as from an oracle, the confidence and courage
which nerved him for the fight; and today the picture of an aged mother
sitting by the hearth, and the recollection of her counsels, is a source of
comfort and strength to many a son who is far away fighting the battle of
life. The home and mother is the polar-star of absent sons and daughters.
She who sat by the cradled bed of childhood, "the first, the last, the
faithfulest of friends," she, the guardian of infancy, is the loving and
never to be forgotten guide of riper years. As far as thought can run upon
this earthly sphere, or memory fondly send back its gaze, so far can the
influence of a mother reach to cheer, to sustain, to elevate, and to keep
the mind and heart from swerving away from the true and the right.

One who received his early training from a mother's lips in a frontier
State, and afterward attained to wealth and influence in one of our
mountain republics, lately told the writer that he kept the picture of his
mother hanging up in his chamber, where it was the last object which his
eyes lighted on before retiring, and the first upon rising; and whenever he
was about to adopt any new course, or commence any new enterprise into
which the question of right or wrong entered, he always asked himself,
"what will my mother say if I do thus and thus?" That mother's influence
was upon him though a thousand miles away from her, and the thought of her
in the crises of his life was the load-star of his strong heart and mind.

We may well imagine those hardy sons who are now building up our empire in
the Rocky Mountains, as finding in a mother's portrait a tie which binds
them fast to the counsels and the love of their earliest guardian, and that
as they gaze on the "counterfeit presentment" of those endeared features,
they might long to hear again the faithful counsels which guided their
youth, exclaiming with the poet,

"O, that those lips had language! life has passed
With me but roughly since I saw thee last."

We have elsewhere spoken of the refining and humanizing influence of woman,
amid the rude and almost barbarous atmosphere of frontier life. The mother
moulds and trains the child, the wife moulds and trains the husband, the
sister moulds and trains the brother, the daughters mould and train the
father. We speak now of moulding and of training in a broader sense than
they are embraced in the curriculum of books. The influence exerted is
subtle, but not the less potent. _Woman is the civilizer par excellence_.
Society in its narrower meaning exists by her and through her. That state
of man which is best ordered and safest, is only where woman's membership
is most truly recognized.

Man _alone_ gravitates naturally towards the savage state. Communities
of men, such as exist in some of our most remote territories, are mere
clubs of barbarians. They may be strong, energetic, and brave, but their
very virtues are such as those which savages possess.

Into one of the loneliest valleys in the Rocky Mountains, some years since,
fifty men, attracted by the golden sands which were rolled down by the
torrents, built their huts and gave the settlement a name. There were
cabins, a tavern, and a bar-room. There were men toiling and spending their
gain in gambling and rioting. There was rugged strength and hardihood.
There was food and shelter, and yet there was no basis for civil and social
organism, as those terms are properly understood, because no wife, no
mother, no home was there.

Those strong and hardy men clove the rock and sifted the soil, and chained
the cataract, but their law was force and cunning, and the only tie they
recognized was a partnership in gain. What civilization or true citizenship
could there be in a society in which the family circle and its kindred
outgrowth--the school and the church--were unknown! The denizens of that
mountain camp slid, by an irresistible law of gravitation, away from civil
order, from social beneficence, and from humanity. They gorged themselves,
and swore, and wrangled, and fought, and like the "dragons of the prime,"
they tore each other in their selfish greed for that which was their only
care.

Into this savage semi-pandemonium entered one day, two unwonted
visitors--the wives of miners who had come to join their husbands. Polite,
kind, gentle, intelligent, and pious, their very presence seemed to change
the moral atmosphere of the place. All the dormant chivalry of man's nature
was awakened. Their appearance in the midst of that turbulent band was a
sedative which soon allayed the chronic turmoil in which the settlement was
embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened,
morals purified: the law of kindness was re-established, and slowly out of
social chaos arose the inchoate form of a well-ordered civil society.

This illustrates woman's influence in one of the peculiar conditions of our
American frontier communities. But in all other phases of true pioneer
life, her influence is as strongly, if not as strikingly displayed as a
humanizing, refining, and civilizing agent.

We have said that woman is the cohesive force which holds society together.
This thesis may be proved by facts which show that power in all those
relations in which she stands to the other sex. In cultured circles she
shapes and controls by the charms of beauty and manner. But in the lonely
and rude cabin on the border her plastic power is far greater because her
presence and offices are essentials without which development dwindles and
progress is palsied. There, if anywhere, should be the vivified germ of the
town and the state. There, if anywhere, should be the embryonic conditions
which will ripen one day into a mighty civil growth. A wife's devotion, the
purity of a sister's and a daughter's love, the smiles and tears and
prayers of a mother--these make the sunshine which transforms the waste
into a paradise, the wild into a garden, and expands the home by a law of
organic growth into a well ordered community.

The basis of civil law and social order is the silent compact which binds
the household into one sweet purpose of a common interest, a common
happiness. Woman is the unconscious legislator of the frontier. The gentle
restraints of the home circle, its calm, its rest, its security form the
unwritten code of which the statute book is the written exponent.

The cross is emblazoned on the rude entablature above the hearth-stone of
the cabin, and where woman is, there is the holy rest of the blessed
sabbath. She, who is the child's instructor in the truths of revealed
religion, is also the father's guide and mentor in the same ways. Faith and
hope in these doctrines as cherished by woman are the sheet anchors of our
unknit civilizations.

Law is established because woman's presence renders more desirable, life,
property, and the other objects for which laws are made.

Religion purifies and sanctifies the frontier home because she is the
repository and early instructress in its Holy Creeds.

The influence that woman exerts on man is one that exalts: while she
educates her child she elevates and ennobles the entire circle of the
family.

If we cast our eyes back over the vast procession of actors and events
which have composed the migrations of our race across the continent, from
ocean to ocean, we are first struck by the bolder features of the march. We
see the battles, the feats of courage and daring, the deeds of high
enterprise in which woman is the heroine, standing shoulder to shoulder
beside her hero-mate. Again we look and see the wife and mother worn with
toils and hardships, and wasted with suffering which she endures with
unshaken heart--a miracle of fortitude and patience. Then we behold her as
the comforter and the guardian of the household amid a thousand trying
scenes, soothing, strengthening, cheering, and preserving.

Grand and beautiful indeed are such spectacles as these. They rivet the
eye, they swell the breast, they lift the soul of the gazer, because they
are an exhibition of great virtues exercised on a wide field, in a noble
cause--the subjugation of the wilderness, and the extension of the area of
civilization. The hero who fights, the martyr who dies, the sufferer who
bleeds, the spirit of kindness and sympathy which comforts and confirms are
objects which call for our tears, our praise, our gratitude. But after all,
these are incidents merely, glorious and soul-stirring indeed, yet scarcely
more than superficial features and external agencies of the grand march,
compared to the moral influence which emanates from the wife and mother in
a million homes and through a million lives with a steadfastness and power
and beneficence which can best be likened to the sunshine.

We praise it less because it is everywhere. We hardly see it, but we know
that it is present, and that society--frontier society--could not long
exist without that penetrating, shaping, elevating force. And so while we
applaud the heroine we may not forget the patient and often unconscious
educator.

When the philosophical historian of the future collects the myriad facts
upon which he is to base those generalizations which show the progress of
the race upon this continent, and how that progress was induced, he will
draw from woman's record a noble array of names and virtues, and a vast
multitude of good, kind, and brave deeds, but he will not forget to take
note also of the silent agencies, and the unobtrusive but ever-present
influence of woman which will be found to outweigh the potency of the
stronger and more brilliant virtues with all the acts that they have
wrought.

And so it is to-day. As we gaze fixedly on the great expanse which the
record of our time unrolls, we see high up on the majestic scroll a
thousand bright and speaking evidences of woman's silent agency in the
building of a new empire upon our dark and distant borderland.

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