Marriage, Missionaries, and Race in the American West

 

When you think of marriage in the American West, you may have thoughts of Missionaries and pioneers starting families while clearing the land. But as WSU associated Professor of History, Jenny Thigpen says, there’s a racial element not to be ignored. Although today we tend to think about marriage as a relationship built around love, studying past unions shows love was not the priority, and that combatting intermarriage and building the region in a particular way, one that ensured racial exclusivity of some, was paramount.

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAMELLA: When you think of marriage in the American West, you may have thoughts of Missionaries and pioneers starting families while clearing the land. But as WSU associated Professor of History, Jenny Thigpen says, there’s a racial element not to be ignored in today’s Past as Prologue.  

THIGPEN: Americans in the 19th century were already convinced of the importance of the family unit to the health of the nation. In fact, they viewed it as the building block of society. But this took on new meanings as they pushed into the west. Euro-American men often made matches with Indigenous women while colonizing the region. But those marriages became a cause of concern by the mid-century, and marriage became increasingly regulated around race. White men were encouraged to find “suitable” racial matches. Entire newspapers–like the Matrimonial Times–sprang up to facilitate a trade in “mail order brides.” Most historians argue that those matches corrected a gender imbalance in the region, but it’s also undeniable that they addressed a perceived racial problem.  

By the middle of the century, many states had come to view inter-racial marriage as “unnatural” and created anti-miscegenation laws barring such unions. By the end of the century, most western states had passed these laws, highlighting a growing racial anxiety.  

People who grew up in Washington and Idaho are usually familiar with the story of the Whitmans, who came to the region as missionaries in the 1830s. But few know the circumstances of their partnership. Both Marcus Whitman and Narcissa Prentiss had aspired to be missionaries long before knowing each other. They both applied to do this work through the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had firm policy prohibiting unmarried men and women from engaging in this work. The goal, in part, was to send missionaries who could act as “exemplars” of Christian masculinity and femininity for the people they hoped to convert–in this case, the Cauyse and the Nez Perce. It became fairly common for young men and women to marry based on these shared ambitions. Marcus Whitman and Narcissa Prentiss were married just before their departure for the Oregon territory. The same was true of Elkanah Walker and Mary Richardson, who literally spent their honeymoon on the overland trail.  

When they arrived, they encountered other kinds of partnerships—different from their own—and this gave them cause for concern. John McLaughlin of the Hudson’s Bay Company, for example, was married to a Metis woman, Marguerite. Catherine Pambrun, similarly, was descended from two generations of white men who had made marriages with Indian women. For the missionary’s taste, Catherine Pambrun’s habits lacked sophistication. In both cases, the missionaries sought to reform the behavior and manners of the Indigenous wives to more closely match their own. One historian wrote that the missionaries saw cultural transfer in the region as a one-way process. Missionaries really sought to transform the kinds of partnerships they found in the west to look more like their own. And it wasn’t just about religion or culture, but increasingly about race. In modern times, we tend to think about marriage as a relationship built around love. Yet, studying past unions shows love was not the priority, and in fact in the nineteenth century, combatting intermarriage and building the region in a particular way, one that ensured racial exclusivity of some, was paramount. 

RAMELLA: That’s WSU associated Professor of History, Jenny Thigpen, who is working on a new book called Marriage and the Making of the American West. To hear this and other Past as Prologue essays go to NWPB.org. 

About the Author:

 

Dr. Thigpen  is Associate Professor of History at WSU. She focuses on 19th Century U.S. history, particularly women and gender, the U.S. West, and colonialism. She has been awarded the Western History Association’s Jensen-Miller Award for best article in the field of women and gender in the North American West in 2011. She was a Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize Finalist (2008), and was awarded the UC Irvine Chancellor’s Club Dissertation Fellowship in 2006, and the Mayers Fellowship, at the Huntington Library in 2005. Her publications include Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World, “Desperately Seeking Mary: Materializing Mary Richardson Walker, Missionary,” The Public Historian Vol. 34, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 68-81; “‘You Have Been Very Thoughtful Today’: The Significance of Gratitude and Reciprocity in Missionary-Hawaiian Gift Exchange” Pacific Historical Review (2010), “‘Something Wonderful is About to Happen’: Americans and the Open Frontier” ABC-CLIO’s Analyze Project (August 2008); and “Looking ‘West’–Perspectives on a Changing Nation, HOT Themes in American History Humanities Out There, UCI California History-Social Science Project and the Santa Ana Partnership (2007).

 

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You can find more information about Dr. Thigpen’s book Island Queens and Mission Wives here.