Guest Blogger: Cynthia Culver Prescott -- What I Learned by Studying San Francisco's Pioneer Monuments

The San Francisco History Center is pleased to present Cynthia Culver Prescott's talk Depicting Race in San Francisco’s Pioneer Monuments. Prescott will discuss her pioneer monument project on Saturday, July 28, 2:00pm in the Skylight Gallery on sixth floor of the Main Library.

Dr. Prescott is on faculty in the History Department of University of North Dakota (UND). From the UND History Department:
"Dr. Prescott's work focuses on gender in the American West. She combines social history and material culture methods to study the intersections of gender, social class, and historical memory.  Her current research project, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory will be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in Spring 2019. In it, she traces changing portrayals of race, gender and national identity in pioneer monuments erected from 1890 to the present. She is also building a companion website for this book, pioneermonuments.net, that features interactive maps and timelines, and provides images and information about the 200 monuments included in her study."



In anticipation of her visit to the San Francisco Main Library, Cynthia Culver Prescott has written a guest blog post for the San Francisco History Center's blog.

What I Learned by Studying San Francisco’s Pioneer Monuments by Cynthia Culver Prescott

Pioneer Monument, Golden Gate Park, 1951

My interest in pioneer monuments began with the dozens of statues of pioneer mothers in sunbonnets Pioneer Mother appeared across the United States, including the bronze sculpture by Charles Grafly that now stands in Golden Gate Park. Trained as a western gender historian, I set out to write a book that compared depictions of frontier women in different western states. But the more I researched San Francisco’s Pioneer Mother statue, the more I realized that this story was much bigger than the one that I set out to tell. San Francisco socialite Ella Sterling Mighels was inspired to create a statue honoring San Francisco’s pioneer mothers when she observed earlier frontier-themed monuments such as the 1894 Pioneer Monument and 1897 Admission Day Monument towering over the city’s smoldering ruins in the aftermath of the massive 1906 earthquake. Although no sunbonneted pioneer mothers appear on either of those monuments, I realized that I needed to expand the scope of my research to them.

Pioneer Monument, Hyde & Grove, 1993

Researching San Francisco’s Pioneer Monument forced me to expand my chronological focus. Digging into newspaper accounts looking for public reactions to the monument revealed that attitudes had changed over time. Although it was lauded in San Francisco and across the nation when it was erected in the 1890s, it became highly controversial when the city sought to move it in the 1990s.  And then, as controversy erupted around Confederate commemoration in 2015, San Francisco’s Pioneer Monument once again became the subject of public debate. My focused study of pioneer mother monuments from the 1920s ultimately became a sweeping study of pioneer commemoration over more than 125 years from 1890 to the present.

Pioneer Monument, 1908

Delving into WHY the Pioneer Monument became controversial in the 1990s forced me to expand my theoretical focus. Its donor, gold rush migrant-turned-eccentric millionaire James Lick, called for the monument to represent California history from Spanish missions through the growth of American agriculture and commerce.  In other words, the monument was to celebrate white American conquest of California. Sculptor Frank Happersberger’s depiction of the mission period has proved most controversial. In “Early Days,” a Spanish missionary towers over a passive American Indian at his feet. In the background, a Mexican vaquero swings a lasso (now missing). Other design elements reinforced the message that Spanish and Mexican settlement had paved the way for the triumph of white American agriculture and commerce.

Pioneer Mother, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915

Understanding the centrality of racial hierarchies depicted in the 1894 Pioneer Monument changed how I thought about pioneer mother monuments, as well. Donors’ objections to depicting San Francisco’s Pioneer Mother wearing a fringed buckskin dress and moccasins took on new meaning as I realized that pioneer mother monuments erected in the early 20th century sought not only to honor settler women’s sacrifices on the frontier, but to celebrate their role in racial conquest of the American West. The variations in gender depictions that I originally set out to study were in fact just a small part of a much larger story about changing race relations in San Francisco and throughout the West.

Quick resources for research on San Francisco's monuments:

• Over 300 photographs digitized of San Francisco monuments. Didn't see the monument online? Come visit the Photo Desk to view the photographs that haven't been digitized.

• Visit the San Francisco History Center and view the San Francisco Ephemera Collection files  on monuments.

• Use your San Francisco Public Library card to search full-text articles in the San Francisco Chronicle Historical database, 1865 - current.