ABSTRACT
When we imagine children who lived in the American West, popular culture immediately fills our heads. Tow-headed children bumping along in covered wagons, the Ingalls girls and other northern European immigrant children living in sod houses and creaky frame buildings in windy plains towns, or the playmates of Dustin Hoffman's Little Big Man running through Indian camps. The moment we drill down into any of these images, however, a different vision of the West and its children emerges. Indian camps, homesteads, wagon trails, and towns did not appear on empty landscapes; they evolved in places where other people once lived and still lived. If the American West can be understood best as a place that has a long, complex legacy of conquest, mixed-race children are that inheritance. Popular culture offers fewer images of these children; their presence as a legacy makes us uncomfortable by reminding us how Anglo-Americans came to settle this place. Two generations of theorists have uncovered the huge cultural work it took to make the American West empty and then white in our national imaginations, but a “veil of race,” to use W.E.B Dubois's words, still covers this place. It wasn't empty. Trade, war, imperial adventure, and finally conquest by the United States were all demographic engines that brought peoples together. Together they created families with children who bore the burden of racialization as the nineteenth century progressed.
