Beyond John Wayne: Using Historic Sites to Interpret Western Women's History

Heather Huyck

Historic places are particularly good places to teach history (2). History books tell us about the past; historic places with their tangible history evoke the past. Their sensual qualities connect our present to their past. Tangible history bridges between past and present, created historically but experienced now (3). These places of the past with their landscapes, structures and artifacts as well as the total experience makes them so real. We can see, touch, even smell, hear and taste these resources (4). Such tangible history also helps us uncover women’s presence, in beads, awls, patent medicine bottles, or pink-painted rooms.

This article will consider western women’s history using the historic places of the National Park System as its basis (5). Tens of thousands of other historic places also keep and share that history, especially National Historic Landmarks and properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Private museums and historic sites do so as well. South Pass, Wyoming, a National Historic Landmark saved through the determined efforts of a group of women, commemorates early women’s suffrage. The Bureau of Land Management’s National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Baker City, Oregon, superbly integrates women’s history into Trail history (6). The quality of the history for these sites varies from the finest scholarship, preservation and interpretation/education to haphazardly collected, poorly preserved and hardly interpreted nostalgia (7). Although increasingly recognized for their educational possibilities, these places of history remain undervalued and underused as ways to teach about our past.

The National Park System protects key parts of our nation’s heritage, providing a textbook of places to visit and learn from, places that we can use to teach America’s history. Large, predominantly natural parks such as the Everglades N.P., Grand Canyon N.P. or Denali N.P. come to mind first, but sixty percent of all National Park Service-administered sites preserve predominantly cultural, or historical and archeological, resources (8). Just as these parks have “natural” aspects to them, so do the “natural” parks have cultural ones. Isle Royale N.P., for example, famous for its wolves and moose, also has numerous sunken shipwrecks off its Lake Superior shores. Yosemite N.P. has Native American history, military history, and early tourist history—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s reluctant trip down into the valley on foot. Chiricahua N.M., in southeastern Arizona, with its amazing rock formations, also preserves the Faraway Ranch, the lifetime work of Emma Peterson Erickson, a Swedish immigrant determined to make her home there from 1888 on.

A few years ago, National Park Service historians tried to find even one park site lacking female presence and history. Of the 375 units of the National Park System—from Yellowstone N.P. to Yorktown Battlefield, from San Antonio Missions N.H.P. to Carlsbad Caverns N.P., and numerous historic houses, battlefields, and archeological sites—none qualified, not even the infamous federal prison at Alcatraz, now part of Golden Gate N.R.A. The wardens’ families lived on the island and female relatives visited the men incarcerated there (9).

Tangible resources include landscapes, structures and artifacts, going from the largest scale to the smallest. Landscapes, especially those clearly influenced by humans, include everything from a formal garden (Fort Vancouver N.H.S.) to orchards (John Muir N.H.S.) to homesteads (Homestead N.M., Florissant Fossil Beds N.M.) and ranchscapes (Grant Kohrs Ranch N.H.S., Lyndon B. Johnson N.H.P.) to wide views stretching to the horizon (Mesa Verde N.H.P., Fort Union N.H.S.). In Mesa Verde N. P., numerous prehistoric structures perch on the mesa tops; at Fort Union N.H.S., Santa Fe trail wagon ruts stretch across the expanse surrounding the fort, giving visitors a direct sense of the vastness of the journey from The States to the frontier fort.

Landscapes clearly show the natural environment and its subsequent human modifications, providing the geographic context for structures which range from fort ruins, dug out root cellars, one-room school houses and Victorian mansions to ocean going ships, elegant masonry Anasazi ruins at Hovenweep N. M., concrete remnants of Manzanar N.H.S. , and a World War II Japanese internment camp. Santa Monica Mountains N.R.A. even has an old movie set with doors deliberately low to make movie stars seem larger than life. Structures are deliberately created, built for a variety of purposes. Simple to ornate, they often inadvertently provide excellent evidence of past peoples and their cultures. The spatial arrangements themselves show much about gender roles.

Artifacts, the smallest on the scale of cultural resources, also vary considerably. Fundamentally, artifacts are things—whether potsherds, highchairs, prehistoric baskets, Navajo rugs, photographs, weapons, sacred objects or cooking stoves. Artifact wear patterns--the wooden spoon shaped by years of stirring in an era before electric mixers, the frayed shawl, the broken dishware—can also tell us of past lives. Landscapes, structures and artifacts can tell us much—if only we know how to read them.

Our understanding of women’s history has been greatly expanded and redefined in the past twenty-five years. Historians delving more and more into women’s pasts recognize that female experiences varied as much as men’s did. Women’s historians have also explored changing cultural definitions of gender and gender roles, seeking to understand how those definitions are created and enforced in various communities over time. The tangible history found in historic places can provide evidence for further research, preservation and interpretation.

Three basic principles inform the use of tangible resources to retrieve women’s history, and suggest ways that preservationists, researchers, teachers and interpreters can learn from and teach about that history:
• that women were there, both physically and by influences often stronger than recognized;
• that uncovering their diverse experiences sometimes requires removing the intervening years in historic structures, sites, and objects, and, often removing our own blindfolds;
• that tangible resources of historic places provide resources for teachers, researchers and the general public to understand more and different things about our past.

First, we must “see” both these places of history and the women in them. Much of the National Park System focuses on military and political history. Social history must be wrung out of sites whose original establishment had nothing to do with women’s history. Cabrillo N.M. near San Diego commemorates the sixteenth century Portugese explorer who claimed California for the Spanish crown, but also preserves and interprets the nineteenth century lighthouse where Maria Israel served as assistant lighthouse keeper. Forts often overlook female presence, either as Native-American women who lived or traded there or as officers’ wives or post laundresses. Instead of the male movie stereotypes, we need to see a west of both genders, and a west that was fundamentally cross-cultural, with Native-American, Spanish, Anglo-American, Asian-American and African-American populations and sub-populations. Limited vision is not new: during the nineteenth century, at Fort Vancouver [now a National Historic Site], Chief Factor John McLaughlin officially reported only two women and two children residents (10). A richer range of sources estimates that a few years later “approximately 210 men, about 160 women and perhaps 210 children” were there (11). McLaughlin was apparently “overlooking” all the non-European women.

Women have been “found” most everywhere. Those quintessential individualists, the fur traders, trapped their way west with considerable assistance from Native American women, lifesaving links for their survival (12). In those rare places where women were not much present, they were still actors influencing the past. Wives left behind in “the states” in difficult legal limbo financed their Gold Rush husbands seeking their fortunes in California (13). Women have also been “found” in previously unexpected roles. Some accompanied their captain-husbands on square riggers such as San Francisco Maritime’s Balclutha. In 1899, the captain’s wife, Alice Durkee, attended by an Indian midwife, gave birth to Inda Frances Durkee on the voyage from Calcutta to San Francisco (14). Labor history, once limited to paid work—a definition never appropriate for either women or the African-American slaves who built so much of this nation’s foundation—now includes unpaid labor, in-the-home-work as well as work that crossed the domestic-public boundaries. Women’s agricultural contributions, so proudly displayed at county fairs, provided their families essential cash and subsistence. Women took in boarders, held down homestead claims, and waited for their husbands to return.

The National Park Service provides these places of history with considerable conservation expertise. At Tuzigoot N.M., women worked to preserve and catalog thousands of archeological artifacts excavated there. Such technical support helps protect everything from adobe ruins at Fort Union N.H.S. and turkey feather robes at Mesa Verde N.P. to the communion silver at Fort Vancouver N.H.S. and Bess Truman’s kitchen at Harry S. Truman N.H.S.

Many of these parks have slides and videotapes available through the site or their cooperating associations. All have brochures; most have books and booklets full of pictures and explanations to make them come alive. The National Park Service prints a National Park System Map and Guide, a poster-sized map with a full listing of the units of the Park System. It also periodically publishes The National Parks: Index [1991] which provides greater detail and lists affiliated units as well. In addition, many National Park Service sites have developed Parks as Classrooms© programs, offering curriculum-based educational programs focused on cultural and natural resources. The similar Teaching with Historic Places uses the properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It currently has instructional materials that include women’s history for Knife River Indian Villages N.H.S. in North Dakota, and the Adeline Kornbek homestead at Florissant Fossil Beds N.M. in Colorado (20). These materials can supplement visits or provide a classroom-based opportunity to understand women’s history through tangible resources.

Historic sites can provide us with rich opportunities to do women’s history. From the earliest Native American site of Bering Land Bridge N.Pres. and the historic Native American site of Nez Perce N.H.P. to the Spanish San Antonio Missions N.H.P. and the nineteenth century U.S.Whitman Mission N.H.S., from the Mormon Pipespring N.M. to the ships of San Francisco Maritime N.H. P.; from the twentieth century Lyndon B. Johnson N.H.P. ranch complex (complete with radio towers, log cabin and Lincolns) to Manzanar N.H.S., various parts of American women’s history are preserved and interpreted for our enjoyment, delight and education. We can use them all to better understand and teach our foremothers’ lives. 

Heather Huyck, Ph.D., is Director of Strategic Planning for the National Park Service. © 1997 Heather Huyck. Adapted from Cultural Resource Management, volume 20, number 3, 1997.