BRITISH WOMEN TRAVELERS AND CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACIAL DIFFERENCE ACROSSTHE 19TH-CENTURY AMERICAN-WEST

At a time coinciding historically with the height of the British Empir e, the immigrants' rush to occupy American West lands and the wholesal e removal of Native Americans onto reservations, encounters between Na tive peoples and British women travellers became emblematic of a whole range of socio-spatial relationships of domination, subordination and resistance. In this paper, I examine representations of western Nativ e Americans in the travelogues of ten British women travellers to the late nineteenth-century American West, produced primarily during encou nters at sites along the western rail lines. Constructions of racial a nd gender differences in the texts can be tied to British colonial dis courses, as well as to the social relations inherent in the multiple c ontact zones within which the encounters took place.