"A Terror to the Camp, Wherever She Finds Herself": Confronting the Mythologies Around Frontier Army Laundresses

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Drawing on feminist interventions into Western histories, this paper reconsiders the important of laundresses at frontier fort installations. Too often coded as camp-followers and prostitutes, military laundresses were ration-drawing employees of the Army present at all frontier forts through the late nineteenth century. Using examples of a Black laundress neighborhood at Fort Davis, Texas and a group of European immigrant laundresses at Fort Walla Walla, Washington, we assert that working class women were central to fostering respectable American communities in the West. By building middle-class aspiring homes, acting as cultural brokers between both the military-civilian and American-Native/Mexican populations, and caretaking for the larger fort community, laundresses were far from the violent, promiscuous, uncouth, and unclean caricatures described in officers’ accounts of the period and depicted in contemporary films and lore.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow