Portraits of Women in the American West by Dee Garceau-Hagen

Author:Dee Garceau-Hagen [Garceau-Hagen, Dee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136076183
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2013-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

If Cascade residents talked about Fields’ “masculine” clothing, they also remarked on her carrying a firearm as another marker of masculinity. The Ursuline Annals from St. Peter’s report that Fields hunted for the convent during her tenure there. Once she began working the mail route, Fields continued to carry a rifle, to protect herself from wild animals on the lonely road between Cascade and the mission.130 Like her winter clothes, a gun was necessary to survival. Still, only two out of eleven photographs of Fields show her carrying a gun. The first is the winter scene at St. Peter’s, described above. The second shows her indoors, in a carefully posed photograph taken at a photographer’s studio (see figure 5.1). Behind her is an artificial backdrop intended to create a genteel interior setting. The backdrop includes a painted balustrade, framed picture on the wall, paneled wood molding on the wall, and a patterned carpet, emblems of propriety.

Fields wears a fitted, dark cloth dress with a rounded white collar and a short jacket. She holds a rifle pointing downward, her arms relaxed, and she gazes off toward the right. A black and white dog lays at her feet.131 Her expression is calm and a bit sad, her persona neither violent nor threatening. This image blends emblems of femininity—the fitted dress, rounded collar, relaxed arms, and indirect gaze—with emblems of masculine recreation, the dog and the rifle. Assuming that Fields staged this portrait according to her own wishes, it communicates the identity she forged in central Montana: her clothing is distinctively feminine, and thus we might surmise that Fields herself had no intention of adopting a masculine persona. The rifle represents either her role as game hunter for the mission or her means of protection on the mail route. And perhaps in the uncertain racial climate of Montana, the gun discouraged harassment of a lone black woman. The dog is an emblem of white male leisure time, associated with hunting for pleasure and with social groups of men. This is significant, given that Fields cultivated social ties with white men in Cascade. In short, Fields’ self-representation in this photograph suggests a person who affirmed her womanhood but expanded its boundaries to include elements of male social privilege.

In her old age, Fields left the male trade of wagon master. Now, instead of masculinizing her, townsfolk made Fields a monument to her own history. A Cascade Courier article from 1913 marked Fields’ eighty-third birthday with the statement that she “has become to Cascade what the ‘Cradle of Liberty’ has to Philadelphia or Fanueil Hall has to Boston. She is a sort of landmark.” 132 One local went so far as to refer to Fields as a tourist attraction: “Tourists from all parts of the United States and Canada stop in Cascade to get a real ‘touch of western atmosphere’ and a glimpse of Negro Mary.” 133 These tributes were not expressions of personal friendship, rich with individual detail. Rather, Fields had become a showpiece that put Cascade on the map.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.