ABSTRACT
The hotel became an architectural symbol of the new government and the social conventions and ideologies that would define the new nation. The hotel's internal arrangements enhanced the genteel travelers' status and made them comfortable in a physical space between their home and the new community. Antebellum hotels made women travelers feel secure by providing the doors of private rooms with locks. The hotel provided a hospitality that mediated between the travelers' home and the host city. Both Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow? and Eliza Farnham's Life in Prairie Land recount how much of Western hospitality fails to meet the writers' genteel expectations. Yet Kirkland's settler narrative and Farnham's tourist narrative describe the discomforts they endure when they travel beyond prosperous Western cities and discover that their overnight accommodations are much more akin to eighteenth-century taverns than they are to modern hotels.
