Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870–1930
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaac066
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoThis biography provides a broad understanding of Sarah Blair Bickford, an east Tennessean born as an enslaved person with the Blair family and relocated to Virginia City, Montana, with Union Army major John Luttrell Murphy. The book presents Sarah as a most successful woman, “a pioneer, an entrepreneur, an engaged citizen, and a responsible wife, and mother” (p. 211). Examining the seventy-nine years of Bickford's life against the backdrop of Civil War in the South; vigilante, white, and Indian friction; and the gold rush in the West, Laura Joanne Arata observes that Fredrick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and the biographies of Daniel Boone and David Crockett have overshadowed “the memory of black women in the West” (p. 2). Thus, episode of minorities' experiences in the region have remained footnotes in the history of wild West, along the lines of African American James P. Beckwourth, “the most famous Indian fighter” in...
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