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Reviews
Eva Emery Dye: Romance with the West
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By Sheri Bartlett Browne
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Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2004. Notes, bibliography, index. 192 pages. $24.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Katrine Barber
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
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| Historian Sheri Bartlett Browne examines the life and impact of turn-of-the-century Oregon writer Eva Emery Dye in this brief, engaging biography. Dye was a remarkable woman, a "civic leader, historian, traveler, researcher, orator, and wife" whose books romanticized the historic West, turning it into a poetic epic of expanding civilization (p. 6). Her legacy survives in popular retellings of fur trade and Oregon Trail history and is still embodied in the national "memory" of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. |
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Browne's biography addresses Dye's early life and intellectual development at Oberlin College, her family life and role as a wife and mother, her community interests in temperance and adult education, her efforts on behalf of women's suffrage, and the themes she explored as a writer. The book courses through and ties together nationally significant events such as women's suffrage, Dye's personal efforts to record the development of her children, and her intellectual desire for relevant histories that celebrated the nation. It is this combination of personal, political, and intellectual perspectives that makes both Dye and this treatment of her fascinating. |
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The Dyes and their young children moved to Oregon City in 1890, and Eva lived there until her death in 1947. While in Oregon, Dye wrote McLoughlin and Old Oregon (1900), The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark (1902), and McDonald of Oregon (1906). She died before she found a publisher for her final book, about the American colonization of Hawaii. Although her books were fictional, Dye was a thorough researcher (her efforts uncovered a cache of William Clark's papers) who tracked down surviving relatives to request personal letters, visited archives, and corresponded with professional historians. All of her writing presented American possession of the West as progress toward civilization, an interpretation that mirrored academic histories of the time. What set Dye apart was her insistence that women were central to westward expansion. |
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Dye is best known for her representation of Sacagawea in The Conquest, which helped to inspire Portland's Sacajawea Statue Association. This local women's organization which was connected to Oregon women's suffrage and raised funds for a statue that was unveiled during the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in 1905. Bartlett Browne deftly unpacks Dye's mythological Indian girl-woman, arguing that Dye "subsumed Sacagawea's race under a veneer of whiteness-by-association that made her a convincing emblem of civilization" (p. 94). In her historical fiction, Dye romanticized Native people or made them into villains. Dye presented white women — and even women who were not white, as in the case of Sacagawea — who were archetypal pioneer mothers. Her characterizations of conquest are as troubling as they are lasting. |
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While most readers will enjoy this biography and the way it enlarges information available on Oregon's women at the turn of the century, it could prove particularly useful to those interested in examining how the powerful historic myths of the region have been perpetuated. In this instance, those myths erased a history of regional racial cooperation and racism and ignored what historian Patricia Limerick reminds us are the legacies of conquest. |
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