Frontier Fictions

Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783030004224
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book compares the nineteenth-century settler literatures of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States in order to examine how they enable readers to manage guilt accompanying European settlement. Reading canonical texts such as Last of the Mohicans and Backwoods of Canada against underanalyzed texts such as Adventures in Canada and George Linton or the First Years of a British Colony, it demonstrates how tropes like the settler hero and his indigenous servant, the animal hunt, the indigenous attack, and the lost child cross national boundaries. Settlers similarly responded to the stressors of taking another's land through the stories they told about themselves, which functioned to defend against uncomfortable feelings of guilt and ambivalence by creating new versions of reality. This book traces parallels in 20th and 21st century texts to ultimately argue that contemporary settlers continue to fight similar psychological and cultural battles since settlement is never complete.

© The Author(s) 2018

Rebecca Weaver-HightowerFrontier Fictionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00422-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Settler Saga

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower¹

(1)

North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

One cannot deal successfully with the present or the future without understanding the past. True understanding comes from experiencing—Black Creek presents experiences. From the first step onto the wooden boardwalk, time changes. The smell of cooking, the sound of the blacksmith hammering on his anvil, the feel of soft fleece, the taste of fresh whole wheat bread and the sight of crinolined skirts swaying along the pathways, all help to erase the modern world for awhile. The visitor no longer merely views but participates—history has become an experience involving all the senses. (11)

Lorraine O’Byrne, foreword to Black Creek Pioneer Village: Toronto’s Living History Village

Places like the Black Creek Pioneer Village in Ontario, Canada as described in the above epigraph exist because settlers continue to be fascinated with imagining ourselves on the frontier. As O’Byrne says, such sites facilitate visitors forgetting “the modern world” to “participate” in a settler fantasy created from a multisensory experience. And in some of these sites, visitors can dress in costume themselves to create photographic evidence of the fantasy, allowing it to endure. These contemporary historic sites, which I call “settler villages,” largely result from twentieth-century citizens working to preserve the past and profit from “heritage tourism.” ¹ In a few cases, as with Brattonsville in South Carolina (United States), the village marks a preservation of a historic site. In other cases, however, as with the Bonanzaville Pioneer Village in Fargo, ND, the villages are twentieth-century constructions, with buildings brought from across the region to approximate a historic town that never existed, or with buildings built to look historic. Filled with artifacts and antiques to create a multisensory experience, some settler villages include costumed interpreters to give a sense of authenticity, while others include wax figures, dioramas, cardboard cutouts, or paintings. Settler villages provide a practical venue for schoolchildren and visitors to see how early farm machinery worked, how women cooked over wood fires in log cabins, and how houses were constructed before electric lights and running water—all valuable history lessons. But settler villages also present stories of settlers akin to the textual stories this chapter will analyze.

There is a consistency to this story. Living history sites like Black Creek Pioneer Village are not isolated to Canada but are also found in Australia (like the Loxton Historical Village in South Australia and the Wagin Historic Village in Western Australia), in the United States (like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, Brattonsville in South Carolina, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder homestead in De Smet, South Dakota), and though not as popular, also in South Africa (including historic buildings like the Drostdy Museum and village in Swellendam and much of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape). In my experience of visiting more than a dozen across the four countries, typically settler villages contain five to fifteen buildings, one or two historic houses plus a smithy or carpentry shop, a barn with tools and animals , a school, a country store, a church, a doctor’s office, a post office, and a newspaper—all clustered into a village, each building fitted out to illustrate how that space would have looked in its original time. These villages remind of the contact settlers ’ constant toil, of how hard “they” worked so that “we” could enjoy lives of comparative ease. ² For continued settlers, the experience provides a sense of obligation to the ideals of the founders as well as the notion that settlers earned the land on which we and our descendants live, a world denying prior existence of indigenous peoples. ³

Occasionally these sites present a more ambivalent version of settlement, as does the Lower Fort Garry historic site near Winnipeg, which, in addition to the typical range of settler buildings filled with historic reenactors, also includes an Aboriginal Canadian tepee outside the fort gates. The empty tepee provides a reminder of the site’s historical context as a mechanism of violence, as does the thick wall visitors have to traverse in order to enter the village. Though it is not accompanied by historical information about the indigenous community it represents, the tepee reminds of whom the fort was built to guard against. This uncontextualized Fort Garry empty tepee is more than is typically included in settler villages, which tend to present an all-white version of history, reinforcing the fantasy that contact settlers came to an empty land, denying the presence of indigenous peoples and the violence against them. ⁴ These villages give a version of the tales of settlers and their families that this chapter will call the “Settler Saga,” which typically initiate with the sea voyage to the new colony, followed by an overland journey to the place of settlement. Then much of the story, concerns setting up the new home, conquering the land, and persevering despite obstacles (including indigenous presence) to create a new society. Settler Sagas can be novels, diaries or memoirs, even collections of letters or texts describing settlement for the potential immigrant. This chapter collects texts across genres and connects them to persistent collective guilt, covering new ground by examining how Settler Sagas recast conflict with indigenous peoples into a fantasy of the settler’s struggle, thus illustrating and enabling denial of the violence inherent in imperial conquest (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2).

Fig. 1.1

The walls surrounding the historic Lower Fort Garry site in Manitoba

(Picture by the author)

Fig. 1.2

The empty tepee visitors pass to visit the Lower Fort Garry site in Manitoba

(Picture by the author)

This chapter examines stories about the ideal settler, heroic and himself indigenous and then stories of the victim settler, abused and deceived, ending with analysis of the “Good Settler,” successful and benevolent, a foil to the “Bad Settler.” As I will note at various places throughout this chapter, prior critics have analyzed some of the texts I examine (Catherine Parr Traill’s Backwoods of Canada; James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer; John Robinson’s George Linton or the First Years of an English Colony ; and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life) , while other texts (such as Frank Triplett’s Conquering the Wilderness and Joseph Hilts’s Among the Forest Trees) have nearly been forgotten.

The Fantasy Settler in the Settler Fantasy

Denial is clearly at work in Settler Sagas, especially the form of denial that Phebe Cramer identifies, in The Development of Defense Mechanisms , as a “personal fantasy,” meaning the creation of a preferred version of reality that seems more and more real to the subject the longer it exists so that, after a time, the subject cannot distinguish the preferred version from reality. As Cramer explains, “The perceptual system may continue to function, but it takes second place to the much preferred personalized fantasy” (38). Individuals engaging in this form of denial may insist that others engage in it, as well. It is not enough that they believe the fantasy; they need to spread it to others. Though told by settlers writing in different times on different continents in different settler situations, the “personal” fantasies in these different books are remarkably similar because all were in a similar situation of colonial contact. Overall, contact settler literatures contain a fantasy of a heroic and self-sacrificing settler that downplays the negative aspects of settlement (fear, doubt, aggression toward indigenous people). I call this fictional settler a “fantasy settler” and the story in which he exists a “settler fantasy.”

The reality these stories mask was typically far less pleasant. ⁵ In the United States, for instance, the 1862 Homestead Act encouraged movement into the Western territory by offering 160 acres to those able to construct a dwelling and farm for five years. Yet conditions were harsh enough that only half remained the five years, with the rest giving up to try again or return home to a situation unpleasant enough to cause them to immigrate in the first place. With little government help and nonexistent social services, life expectancy was short. Even mail was unavailable to early settlers. Yet, in the settler fantasy, this life of labor turned settlers into martyrs, and only the worthiest remained to populate the country.

Despite (or because of) these harsh realities, the settler fantasy endured. By the nineteenth century in the United States and Canada, a first generation of settlers had been made into celebrities whose stories created a fantasy embraced by later generations spreading westward across the continent. Much can be said about this influence just by repeating the lengthy title of one late nineteenth-century American text by Colonel Frank Triplett, who also authored The Life, Times and Treacherous Death of Jesse James (1882). ⁶ His text was entitled: Conquering the Wilderness; or New Pictorial History, Life and Times of the Pioneer Heroes and Heroines of America, A Full Account of the Romantic Deeds, Lofty Achievements and Marvelous Adventures of Boone, Kenton, Clarke, Logan, Harrod, the Wetzel Brothers, the Bradys, Poe, and Thirty Other Celebrated Frontiersmen and Indian Fighters; Crocket, Houston, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill, and the Famous Plainsmen, Graham Sutter, Marshall Freemont, Kearsey, and Other Historic Names of the Pacific Coast with Picturesque Sketches of Border Life, Past and Present, Backwoods Camp Meetings, Schools and Sunday Schools, Heroic Fortitude, and Noble Deeds of the Pioneer Wives and Mothers…. Remarkably, the title continues for another eleven lines listing all of the heroic myths the book recounts. Published in 1883, this book was already full of tales of American settler heroes to inspire future settlers. As well as convincing potential settlers of the glory awaiting them in the new world, Conquering the Wilderness also helped to assuage the guilt of settlers already in the United States by presenting a personal fantasy of the heroic settler to replace the reality of violent and often failed colonization. The stories in Conquering the Wilderness discuss Native Americans but only as another obstacle to be overcome, like tree stumps in a plot of land that needed removing (Fig. 1.3).

Fig. 1.3

The frontispiece to Conquering the Wilderness… by Colonel Frank Triplett presents its own settler fantasy

The frontispiece of the book facing this lengthy title page visually reinforces this fantasy. The drawing is captioned “The March of Destiny,” echoing the phrase “manifest destiny ” used to justify the Westward expansion of the United States. ⁷ In the drawing, men on horseback and pointing into the distance, follow a train of covered wagons and other riders passing a lonely cabin and tent set beside a river, all riding into the sunset above an empty prairie. On the other side of the river in the distance can be seen a tiny herd of bison and group of tepees. The wagon train will bypass the Indians, which do not or cannot present significant obstacles in this “march” predestined to succeed (which I explicate in Chapter 3).

Into this larger frontispiece scene are inserted two smaller circular vignettes, one labeled “Kentucky” with a man in buckskin on a ledge above a river pointing off into the distance, as if indicating to his companion the direction he is planning to travel. The other vignette labeled “California” shows two men wading in a stream panning for gold beside a tent, with the ocean and a ship in the background, likely carrying other immigrants to shore to try their luck. Significantly, none of the images of “the march of destiny” include cities, towns, or even recognizable figures. The frontispiece gives three different approximations of people in the midst of settling, not yet success stories. Instead the image encapsulates the settler fantasy of a nation of people “destined” to be successful, but in the midst of doing the hard work of settling. To return to Cramer’s language, this image encapsulates Tripplett’s personal fantasy, which, through the publication of the book, he endeavors to make a national fantasy. ⁸ I will return to this idea of the personal fantasy expressed in narrative throughout this chapter, as I examine writers creating stories of settlement in their novels that directly counter the realities they would have witnessed around them, thus marking the stories as defense mechanisms .

Settler Self-Sacrifice

Also part of the fantasy is that the noble and self-sacrificing settler is doing the hard work of colonizing for the benefit of future generations. As I will show, this depiction of the settler as a victim for his own future progeny is a defense mechanism of identification (taking on desired characteristics of an Other). By presenting himself as a victim, the settler defends himself from blame for harm committed toward indigenous Others, who are, one might argue, the real victims of the settlement project.

This notion of the self-sacrificing settler is introduced in the preface to Joseph Henry Hilts’ 1888 Canadian Settler Saga Among the Forest Trees: Or How the Bushman Family Got Their Homes. In his other published text, Experiences of a Backwoods Preacher or Facts and Incidents Culled from Thirty Years of a Ministerial Life (1892), Hilts explains that he was a preacher in the Canadian bush for most of his life (1819–1903), ministering to settlers. Among the Forest Trees bills itself (according to its subtitle as) “a book of facts and incidents of pioneer life in Upper Canada, arranged in the form of a story,” and as it forecasts, the book tells about animal encounters, violence with Indians, and the struggles of settlement. The dedication reads:

To the descendants of those brave men and women who braved the dangers, faced the difficulties, endured the hardships and suffer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Settler Saga
• 2. Guilt and the Settler–Indigene Relationship
• 3. Guiltscapes of the Homestead, Village, and Fort
• 4. Settler Guilt and Animal Allegories
• 5. The Lost Settler Child
• Back Matter