"More or Less Sudden and Sometimes Great": Turbulence in the Edited West

          Editorial shaping by white women—an infrequently discussed aspect of female cultural production in the West—helped establish a mainstream perception of the region as both picturesquely unsettled (turbulent)... [ view full abstract ]

          Editorial shaping by white women—an infrequently discussed aspect of female cultural production in the West—helped establish a mainstream perception of the region as both picturesquely unsettled (turbulent) and un-settled (open for settlement) at the turn of the last century. This environmental-colonial duality is most vividly seen in the editorship of Alice Bower Gossage, a white female pioneer. Gossage arrived in Dakota Territory in 1882 and edited the Rapid City Journal with her husband for over forty years. As a settler-editor, Gossage depicted the Black Hills climate as both favorable for further Euro-American settlement and unpredictable. Such doubling, I argue, casts the turbulent history of the nineteenth-century Black Hills within a larger context of colonial unsettlement.

          In this paper I will explore how Gossage, “one of the leading women editors of [South Dakota]—unquestionably the one who has made the greatest impress upon her day,” establishes female agency while also becoming complicit in the continued occupation of Native spaces. For instance, Holiday Greetings from Rapid City (1920)—a collection of promotional articles, poems, ads, and images that Gossage helped write and edit—describes the Black Hills as “subject to more or less sudden and sometimes great changes in temperature” because they are “traversed by storms that sweep southeastward.” Euro-Americans who ignored a federal treaty with the Sioux Nation and illegally entered the Black Hills in 1876 traveled the opposite direction: northwestward. Gossage extends this settler-colonial process by omitting American Indians in Holiday Greetings, focusing instead on exalting “turbulent” scenery. Juxtaposing Gossage's “Climatological” descriptions and colonial omissions, I argue, illustrates that white women played a dynamic role in narrating the American West by unsettling its climate and claimants.