Lost Borders and Transnational Ecologies: The Abandoned Spaces of Mary Austin, Mary Hallock Foote, and Annie Batterman Lindsay

This paper examines the contested spaces, shifting borders, and economic and racial economies represented in the works of late nineteenth-century Western women regionalists Mary Austin, Mary Hallock Foote, and Batterman... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the contested spaces, shifting borders, and economic and racial economies represented in the works of late nineteenth-century Western women regionalists Mary Austin, Mary Hallock Foote, and Batterman Lindsay. After The Land of Little Rain (1903), Austin’s novel The Ford (1917) features a young woman’s resistance to the theft of water from the Owens Valley, an ecological violation that erases community borders. Batterman Lindsay (1854-1926), in stories of Pacific Northwest tribes such as “Kwelth-Elite, the Proud Slave” and “Squaw Charley,” explores the intersection of space and identity in the stolen lands of the Shoshone, Bannock, and Duwamish tribes, along with a scathing indictment of the agricultural monoculture and global economies that displaced its inhabitants. In her story “The Reapers,” an abandoned mining town that eerily retains its abundance of modern commodities becomes a prison for the young couple who has sought to make it their haven away from social strictures. Finally, Mary Hallock Foote’s “The Trumpeter” (1894) includes a transnational figure, an Irish soldier who seduces a Bannock woman but returns to see that he has no plot of land to inhabit; he then slips into the river to destroy the stain of his typically colonialist action, leaving only the fundamentally “true” American behind: his mixed-race son.