Families in the West

Elliott West

As one of its most fundamental and natural purposes, for instance, the family is a reproductive mechanism.  If any society is to survive, it has to send enough of its people into the years ahead.  When different peoples come together and compete for the same land and resources, their success or failure can depend in part on how well their families fulfill that function.  That was certainly the case when European Americans moved into western regions occupied by Native Americans.

Most of us now are aware that Native American populations declined calamitously as the frontier advanced.  Their problems went beyond that, for they suffered from low fertility as well as high mortality.  Their numbers thinned as numerous Indians died, and the few new births failed to take their place.  Native American families were simply not putting enough new babies into the world.

One reason was, once again, disease.  Illness normally hits hardest among those unable to produce children—the youngest and oldest—but the new epidemics were demographically democratic, killing many in their prime productive years.  Even those who survived the initial onslaught of disease found themselves less able to send children into the future.  Smallpox left many men sterile and many women less able to carry fetuses to term.  Tuberculosis (which was more virulent after contact) clogged genital tracts, made intercourse painful, and often led to spontaneous abortions.  Venereal diseases produced genital lesions in women and sterility in men.  Malarial women were more likely to deliver prematurely; among men, malaria brought lethargy, malaise, and decreased sexual desire.

The white advance reduced fertility in other ways as well.  In ravaged native economies, pregnancies among starving women were far more likely to end in stillbirths or neonatal deaths.  The loss of warriors, both in battles with whites and in intertribal wars encouraged by frontier pressure, disrupted families; in some plains tribes women outnumbered men two-to-one.  In short, this essential baby-making mechanism was disastrously hampered.  In most Native American societies, families were unable to replenish the numbers whom their people were losing at an appalling rate.

Pushing against these Native American families were others that were, to say the least, more aggressive multipliers.  White couples on the Kansas farming frontier in the 1860s, for instance, apparently turned out children at a clip more than three times our current average.  This was more than a baby boom; it was a barrage, an infant production higher than that in any society today.  We ought not make too much of this, however.  In the conquest of native peoples, relative fertility rates were far less important than the sheer numbers of whites rolling westward.  The small numbers of Indian children and the mobs of white ones do suggest, though, that native living during the years of conquest faced the loss not just of independence but of their cultural integrity as well.

The robust baby-making of frontier families is especially interesting because it ran against the national trend.  In many other regions, both in the city and countryside, the birth rate was dropping, in some cases dramatically.  Some social critics worried that unless old-stock American parents picked up the pace, new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe would dominate the land, including the western garden.  Would the millions of homes in the new country be filled by “our own children or by those of aliens?” an essayist asked.  Pioneer women would have to answer: “Upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”

White mothers raising families in the West were not berthing lots of babies because eastern newspaper columnists told them to, however.  They had their own practical reasons, stemming from circumstances closer to home.  Elsewhere in the country birth rates were declining partly because more and more parents were depending less and less on their children’s labor.  Not so on the frontier.  There, where families were starting from scratch and often with little outside help, boys and girls were vital parts of economic life.

More to the point, a pioneer household was an economic mechanism of mutually-dependent parts.  Here is a second way of thinking of families: as a productive unit, often a remarkably effective and self-sustaining one.  Fathers did the heaviest labor—sodbusting, construction, and fence-building on a homestead, mining in the camps, and various big-muscle jobs in the new towns—and took off in search of other wage work when necessary.  Mothers handled the multitude of domestic duties, cared for barnyard animals, gardened, and earned cash by washing, cooking, and sewing for others.  Children filled in wherever they were needed: hunting, weeding, gathering wild plants, herding, peddling pies, delivering laundry, hawking newspapers, caring for younger siblings, cooking, canning, and much more.  The frontier’s popular image is one of individualism and self-reliance, usually in the shape of rugged adult males.  But the transformation of the nineteenth-century West could be more accurately pictured as a familial conquest, an occupation by tens of thousands of intradependent households.

Related families frequently settled together.  Once again, this contrasts with the common impression of bonds of kinship shattered among isolated pioneers.  Take, for instance, the Oklahoma land rushes.  These mad scramblings might seem the outstanding instances of atomizing individualism, but in fact boomers often made the runs as extended families, grabbing neighboring claims or swapping around so they ended up among relatives.  Most rural counties quickly became interlocking networks of families and sometimes of former neighbors, instant communities of tested kin and friends upon whom others could count for help and continuing support.

This pattern of settlement in which groups of families settled together was one of the few points the West’s diverse population held in common.  Native-born pioneers of Anglo stock, Germans from Russia, Japanese, Czechs, Basques, and the many Latino groups from the south all understood the advantages of living near relatives who helped with the multitude of jobs and who could step in during a crisis.  The arrangement continues today.  Koreans, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Salvadorans, Filipinos, and Native Americans leaving the reservations all tend to cluster among kinfolk.  This familial webbing has always been a key to understanding the social landscape of the West.

As a productive unit, the western family was an extraordinarily efficient machine of environmental change.  Its several parts worked together to transform the land, for better or worse.  The results are most apparent in rural regions.  Fathers broke the sod, then children harrowed the turned soil, pulled native weeds, and tended cattle and sheep—hoofed invaders that were given protected possession of land essential to herds of wild grazers.  Fathers and children also killed outright enormous numbers of bison, deer, antelope, elk, and other indigenous animals, which then were butchered, cooked, and served by mothers to fathers, daughters, and sons who, newly refueled, continued to alter their physical environment.

These families also unintentionally brought the seeds of eastern grasses and weeds in the cracks of wagon beds and the guts of cattle.  Without knowing what they were doing, they triggered other changes.  Busting the soil, slaughtering most large indigenous ungulates, disrupting foraging arrangements among the survivors, cutting trees and undergrowth along the streams, extinguishing prairie fires, and crowding cattle, sheep, and horses into spaces incapable of feeding them had enormous consequences.  These practices eliminated natural root systems, eroded stream sides and silted the creeks and rivers, destroyed diverse communities of complementary grasses, shrubs and forbs, denied fire’s regenerative functions, and loosened and leached the topsoil, raised its temperature, and revised its chemistry.

Families, then, had a double impact.  As efficient transformers of the land, they undermined the native peoples’ last glimmering hopes of economic independence.  The invasion of the soil-rippers was an ecological conquest far more effective than any government policy or military campaign.  But, in the longer run, the thousands of pioneer families were undermining their own future.  They set in motion intricate patterns of change that would drive back out of the country thousands of later inhabitants, some of them their own descendants.  Regardless, the family was the chief agent of change in much of the rural West.

Those studying families in the West, however, must go beyond the study of economics.  In its third meaning, a family is a means of cultural transmission.  Through it, values, traditions, and particular patterns of social behavior are carried into new territory.  This process could be seen most clearly in pioneer houses.  If we could look inside a plains soddie or a mining camp cabin, we would see a small space stuffed with all sorts of items with little or no economic purpose: musical instruments, small libraries, elaborate clocks, lacework, china teacups, and photographs all transported with great effort.  They testify of these people’s concern—their obsession, really—to bring their mother culture with them.

It was the material expression of an impulse that showed up in all sorts of other ways.  In newly established towns, for instance, women helped shape public policy by acting out the motherly roles they played at home—promoting schools and charities, pushing for churches, and railing against the more open forms of vice.  Men campaigned for office as responsible and upright civic fathers who would put the community house in order.  If families were bearers of values and traditions, towns ought to be seen in part as the familial culture projected outward to the immediate world.

This phenomenon had some ironic results.  The frontier West, for example, has often been seen as a fluid society, offering people, women in particular, the chance to play roles and to take on jobs unthinkable in older, more tradition-bound communities.  And, so it was in some ways.  In other ways, the new settlements could be more conservative than the old.  Mining town men, who looked on families as symbols of how things ought to be (and also as reminders of what they missed from back home), expected the first wives and mothers to be, if anything, more orthodox in what they did and how they acted.  Besides their enormous load of work and the many other pressures of their new lives, these women, the central figures of the first families, faced the added burden of becoming models of tradition and decorum.

Some of those women were understandably frustrated.  Their feelings remind us of the family’s fourth meaning: it was the arena in which the emotional lives of hundreds of thousands of persons in the changing West played out.  Western history usually has focused on the most visible changes in that country: the transformation of the land, townbuilding, mining booms, and the rise of ranching and the coming of railroads to name a few.  We might call this the region’s “outer” history.  There was also an “inner” history, a psychological and emotional dimension, the adjustments, pleasures, and ordeals intimately associated with—and influencing—the “outer” developments that dominate our textbooks.

Much of that inner history centered around the family.  Women, for instance, were generally more reluctant than men to move as pioneers into the West, and for good reason.  Given the ways that responsibilities and work were assigned within Victorian families, wives and mothers would be expected to do much more with far less.  They would have to carry on the many jobs of homemaking and child rearing, all within facilities that would be far more primitive than those they were leaving.  Women often were leaving behind at least part of the help of relatives and neighbors, a network of physical and emotional support that was traditionally a crucial component of the female world.  Wives, finally, faced one frontier danger that men never did:  childbirth.  Carrying a child during the grueling work of starting a new life was far from enjoyable.  Bearing one, especially if far from a doctor or the help of a trusted midwife, was deeply frightening.

The terrible stresses of pioneer life—the uncertainties and wrenching work, the confinement in small spaces, the often unpleasant climate, and, above all, the adjustment to new circumstances—wore at the nerves of all family members.  On isolated homesteads and in transient communities, furthermore, there was little to restrain bullies and abusers.  No one can say whether the level of domestic violence was greater in the unsettled West, but battering and emotional cruelties are common themes in many reminiscences and memoirs.

And yet western lifeways could cut in the opposite direction.  The family, surviving economically by its own devices, might be emotionally self-sustaining as well.  Memoirs, letters, and diaries tell of profound affection, support and well-earned mutual understanding.  Parents and children looked to each other for amusement and sympathy, in part, perhaps, because there was nowhere else to find it. 

To put it another way, the family served as the effective world for many in the West as it was for people elsewhere.  If western history is, at least in part, the story of everyday human experience, then the family must take a more prominent place in historians’ work.  It also needs to be brought into our study of the usual topics, such as the conflicts of natives and whites, the conquest and transformation of the land, and the making of new communities.  In its many meanings and its varied influences, the family always has been to the West what it has been to the rest of the country—one of the most significant shaping forces in American life.