Ghost Riders by Richard Grant

Author:Richard Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2002-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

We don’t know the name of Walker’s wife, and we can only speculate in the broadest terms about their marriage. From her perspective, a white chieftain trader like Joe Walker would have been a prestigious catch, and also a risky one. Whites were considered to be more generous and romantic with their wives than Indian men (who thought white notions of romantic love were amusingly silly). And their exotic physical appearance – beards, body hair, blue eyes – sometimes added a frisson of sexual excitement, just as the otherness of Indian women excited some mountain men. The risk lay in the fact that white husbands were more likely to abandon their wives and children than Indian husbands. Tribal society produced very few loners, a type that was common among the mountain men.

From the perspective of Joe Walker and his contemporaries, the single greatest attraction of Indian women was their gender. In 1836, when he married his wife, there were no white women west of the Missouri settlements. In New Mexico and California there were Mexican women, but on the whole they lacked the endurance, skills and experience to make good trail wives. This brings us to the second great advantage of Indian wives: they were born nomads who knew no other way of living. And the third: Indian society trained its women to be incredibly obedient and hardworking, and resentful of any attempts by their husbands to help out with the camp chores. It was akin to insulting her, announcing to the rest of the camp that she was inadequate and worthless.

By tending the horses, putting up and taking down the tepee, keeping it clean, swept and repaired, fetching the water and firewood, tanning the hides, sewing the clothing and doing the cooking, Indian wives made trail life more comfortable than any white or Mexican woman of the time was willing or able to do, and this freed up more time and energy for hunting, trapping and trading – the means by which a married couple survived and accrued wealth, possessions and status.

Some mountain men regarded their Indian wives purely as sexual/domestic conveniences, and discarded them callously when they felt like being alone again or with someone new. Others had happy, lasting marriages, and Joe Walker seems to have fallen into this second category. He was with his wife for approximately ten years. He demonstrated his commitment to the marriage by taking her back to meet his family and old friends in Jackson County, Missouri, and escorting her into Six Mile Baptist Church, doubtless through a gauntlet of scandalised whispers and gossip. And he spent several winters and hunting seasons with his Shoshoni in-laws, who semi-adopted him into the tribe. There has been speculation, by Captain Crook for one that Walker took other wives. Polygamy was certainly commonplace, among Shoshonis and mountain men alike, but we have no confirmed sightings of another wife.

At some point the Walkers had children together, which would have presented no impediment to their travels. To

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