A Nursery of Blessings, Hardships for Children on the Frontier

For any mother or father who despairs of raising children in an era of street violence and Internet pornography and all the other terrors and horrors of the modern world, consider what it was like for the pioneering families of the American West. Beset by the dangers of the wilderness, threatened with illness and starvation, and far from the civilizing influence of schools and libraries, youngsters were forced to grow up fast.

But a childhood in the wilderness carried its blessings and comforts too, as we discover in “Children of the West: Family Life on the Frontier” by Cathy Luchetti (W.W. Norton, $39.95, 253 pages), an evocative and enlightening account of how mothers, fathers and children of all colors and creeds experienced the American frontier. And Luchetti makes a convincing case that the frontier was the ideal nursery for youngsters growing up in a brave new world.

“Children of the frontier West were loved, coddled, sheltered as best as possible,” insists Luchetti. “The story of American family life resembles that of the country itself--a people maturing in a new land, striking out in search of freedom and finding in their quest the ability to ‘grow up’ as well as to move on.”

Drawing on an abundance of historical photographs and eyewitness accounts in the form of letters and diaries, Luchetti fills in the blank spaces in our mental picture of the American West. She examines in intimate detail what it was like to bear and rear children, and she allows us to see for ourselves the scenes that are never depicted in mythic western movies, including pregnancy and childbirth, birth control and abortion, family violence and marital discord, abandonment and homelessness. As a result, “Children of the West” is not merely an exercise in nostalgia, it is full of surprising and sometimes shocking revelations about what life was really like.

Accustomed to traveling in a covered wagon across plains and mountains, an infant might be at ease with the sound of coyotes but terrified by the ticking of a clock.

One little girl died when she sampled the contents of a bottle that she found among her mother’s medical supplies--it turned out to be laudanum. A girl as young as 15 was deemed ready to marry and raise children, and one middle-aged woman took pride in nursing her own baby and her infant granddaughter “as twins.”

Firearms in the hands of children was commonplace and even a necessity of life on the frontier. “No father left his son ignorant of marksmanship,” writes Luchetti. “Guns could bring blackbirds, sparrows or doves to the table, or in a more dreaded case, be used to defend a homestead.”

And even youngest children, boys and girls alike, were put to work in the wilderness: “Work was age-blind, continuous, and indiscriminate,” the author explains. “Children, as ‘little adults,’ must perform like other family members, pitching in to support the farm, gaining experience that would give them an ever-stronger voice in family decisions.”

The frontier confronted women with its own special stresses and strains. If a child was born with a birth defect, the mother was likely to be blamed--perhaps her eye had fallen on a legless beggar during pregnancy, according to the conventional wisdom of the era, or maybe she had engaged in intercourse while menstruating.

“Danger in the West was drunk like mother’s milk,” observes Luchetti, whether the threat came from grizzlies, mountain fever or poisonous plants. An abusive husband and father was likely to go unobserved or, even if he was found out, undisturbed by his neighbors. “The Western code of ‘hands off,’ ” as the author puts it, is what attracted many families to the frontier in the first place.

But Luchetti also celebrates the “spunk and enterprise” that women and children summoned in themselves, especially when their husbands and fathers hired out as farmhands or went to work in the mines or just drifted away. That’s why “Children of the West,” even though it confronts us with scenes of heartbreaking pain and poignancy, is ultimately an affirming and inspiring book.

“When [my husband] disappeared from view, I had a sickish feeling in the pit of my stomach,” wrote one abandoned but unintimidated frontier woman in South Dakota. “I was truly scared, but would not let myself be beaten into defeat. Here I was at last, a lonely homesteader.”

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A more scholarly but no less surprising approach to the role of women in the early settlement of California is offered by Virginia Marie Bouvier, a professor of Latin American literature, in “Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840” (University of Arizona Press, $40, 260 pages). It is presented as an effort to decipher what the author calls the “codes of silence” that have concealed and distorted the meaning of the first encounters between the Spanish conquistadors and the people they conquered.

Bouvier points out that the word “California” first appeared as a place name in a medieval tale about a mythical island supposedly inhabited by a race of pagan Amazon women--”strong, independent women who fiercely defended a kind of female utopia.” The Spanish conquistadors found no Amazons in California, of course, but Bouvier argues that the myth itself “masculinized the conquerors and feminized those to be conquered.”

Of course, it was the flesh-and-blood women of the New World who felt the real sting of the Spanish conquest. Native American women were occasionally subjected to rape and other sexual outrages but even more often to a form of subjugation that was physical and spiritual--they were pressured to convert to Christianity, embrace the Hispanic culture and the European work ethic and submit to the authority of the various men in their lives, including their priests and their husbands.

Bouvier argues that the friars seized on seemingly mundane matters in a calculated effort to extinguish the indigenous culture of California and remake the Native Americans in their own image. An emphasis on eating three meals a day in the European fashion, she points out, represented an effort to restructure the lives of the Native Americans according to “the Western model . . . of worship, work and rest, punctuated by meals.”

The Native Americans, however, were no less articulate in letting their actions speak louder than their words. At times, they struck back at their new masters--a priest might be found dead from poisoning or suffocation, his body mutilated.

“Poisoning, sexual mutilation, castration, and suffocation may be read as metaphorically appropriate responses to missionization,” she explains. “Each act mirrored the policies imposed upon the mission Indians.”

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. Jonathan Kirsch can be reached at jkirsch@kirsch-mitchell.com.