`Thus I salute the Kentucky Daisey's claim': gender,social memory,and the mythic West at a proposed Oklahoma monument

Abstract

On 22 April 1889, at the beginning of the first Oklahoma land run when the US federal government allowed non-Indian settlers to claim what had been Native American lands, Nannita R.H. Daisey entered the newly opened territory by train to become one of the very first women to stake a quarter-section land claim, on land today part of Edmond. According to local lore, Daisy leapt from the cowcatcher of the train to stake her claim, removing her petticoat to mark the spot. Over 100 years later Edmond has proposed a bronze monument to Daisey, petticoat flying, riding on the cowcatcher, in an effort both to attract tourists with public art, and to recognize women's contributions to Oklahoma settlement. On the surface this seems a laudable attempt to re-inscribe women's lives in the history of the American West, the social memories of Oklahomans, and the landscape of contemporary Edmond — except that the story about the cowcatcher and the petticoat, though passed down in local lore for more than 100 years, is false. And that, in turn, provides feminist historical geographers with an opportunity to examine the canonization of an exaggerated version of an already heroicized tale of Euro-American conquest, and what that implies for the representation of women in the American West. In this article, in an effort to improve upon decades of superficial scholarship, and in the face of the proposed monument's mis-portrayal, I attempt to detail Daisey's biography and describe her actual deeds. But, since the lives of prominent westerners are often difficult to disentangle from the powerful romanticizing influence of the mythic West on themselves and on their representations, my attempt itself raises issues about the study and representation of westerners in the US as the article explores ways that western women have been represented, the role of a monument as the landscape representation of a western woman, and the specific gendered spatial framework for the creation of contemporary social memory that Nannita Daisey's monument and legendary tale present.