Colonial Identities of United States Army Commissioned Officers: The Negotiation of Class and Rank at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, 1856–1866

Description

During the 19th century the American West played host to the colonial expansion of the United States. This period saw an attempt by the federal government to balance the westward expansion of White settlement spurred, in part, by ideas of Manifest Destiny, with what was then believed to be a humane solution to the “Indian problem.” What resulted from these attempts was the reservation system, where native peoples were relocated to reservations to be kept separate from White settlement and guarded by a system of U.S. Army forts. These forts became liminal environments in which the army operated both as the oppressors and protectors of indigenous peoples and lifeways, and also as stages for the display and transmission of European American ideas of social class and personal identity. Commissioned officers at these posts played an important role as actors in the drama of colonial westward expansion, holding identities as both frontiersmen and as bastions of 19th-century American sociocultural norms of social inequality and their expression through material culture. This article examines the material expressions of class represented by artifact assemblages recovered from six commissioned officers’ houses at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins. The artifact assemblages from these posts suggest that these army officers not only brought the sociocultural norms of materialism and conspicuous consumption with them to the frontiers, but that they were also highly competitive individuals who were interested in displaying and affirming their identities as colonizers and as members of the sociocultural elite.