Dissertation
Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford and the Construction of Historical Memory in Virginia City, Montana, 1870 - 1930
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2014
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/111530
Abstract
Virginia City, Montana, became the site of the state's most notorious legend when a highly organized group of Vigilantes set about rounding up and executing more than two dozen suspected Road Agents beginning in 1863. Long overlooked, race served important functions in the Vigilantes' legend as African Americans were present and participated in these events. Arriving in 1871, a teenaged former slave named Sarah Blair walked the same streets with men who had been Vigilantes. She survived an abusive marriage and the tragic deaths of three children, divorced her first husband at a time when doing so was inherently difficult, and later married a white man who had been a supporter of the Vigilantes. Through him, she became known as Sarah Bickford and inherited the Virginia City Water Company. As businesswoman and an active booster of tourism, she spent the final decades of her life preserving one site of the Vigilante lynchings.
Race has long been critically understudied in the history of the rural west, where small numbers and a perceived lack of source material challenged scholarship. In Virginia City, the daily activities of inhabitants, including African American and Chinese residents, were noted in a weekly newspaper, providing in many cases richly detailed accounts of their lives. Both African American and Chinese residents owned homes, operated businesses, and contributed to the economic viability of the community. The social and economic inclusion of African Americans contrasts starkly with the derision frequently shown toward Chinese. White residents' ambivalent views toward African Americans in and outside of the community speak to the complexity of racial attitudes in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. While personally treating African Americans respectfully in social and business settings, white residents were equally comfortable putting on blackface costumes for masquerade balls and deriding "darkeys" in other parts of the country. The experiences of African Americans in Virginia City thus demonstrate that a certain plasticity of race existed in the rural West which both reinforces and complicates established tenets of what both the "Wild" and the rural West was supposed to have been.
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Details
- Title
- Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford and the Construction of Historical Memory in Virginia City, Montana, 1870 - 1930
- Creators
- Laura J. Arata
- Contributors
- Robert A Bauman (Advisor)Peter G Boag (Committee Member)Laurie Mercier (Committee Member)Jennifer Thigpen (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of History
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 409
- Identifiers
- 99900581534101842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation