The vast prairie landscape is a recurring symbol whose meaning evolves alongside May’s understanding of freedom and civilization. Initially, the prairie is a terrifying void, representing the loss of her past and an “unspeakable in its vast, lonely reaches” (16) future. This perception reflects her “civilized” viewpoint, which sees untamed nature as empty and hostile. However, as she journeys west, the landscape begins to symbolize a natural, spiritual order that stands in stark opposition to the destructive hypocrisy of white society. She marvels at the spectacle of millions of cranes taking flight, recognizing it as “God’s masterpiece” (39), a vision of freedom and fecundity that contrasts sharply with the confinement she has known. This shift marks her growing disillusionment with the world she left behind and her increasing openness to the Cheyenne worldview, which is deeply integrated with the natural environment.

The symbolic contrast between the natural and “civilized” worlds is starkly illustrated through the buffalo. The Cheyenne hunt for subsistence, viewing the animal as a sacred source of life. White men, by contrast, engage in a grotesque and wasteful slaughter from the train, killing “for the pure joy of it” (41). This act reveals a profound spiritual emptiness and exposes the lie of civilization’s superiority. The prairie and its creatures thus serve as the ultimate moral measure in the novel, symbolizing a pure, cyclical existence that the encroachment of white society threatens to destroy. True savagery, the novel suggests, is not living in nature but destroying it without purpose.

The “Brides for Indians” program is populated not by genteel missionaries but by the outcasts of a hypocritical society: the sexually independent (May), the poor and “plain” (Gretchen), formerly enslaved women (Phemie), and criminals (the Kelly twins). This outcast status paradoxically enables the women’s agency, and their evolving identities are tracked through their clothing and appearance, a motif representing Female Agency in Patriarchal Systems. Dress becomes a visual shorthand for transformation, charting how the women shed the artificial markers of class, race, and propriety imposed by white society. Having already been rejected by one patriarchal system, they are uniquely prepared to forge new roles in another. Helen’s “man’s knickerbocker suit” signifies her professional and gender nonconformity (27), an identity already formed in opposition to societal expectations. The group’s gradual transition from restrictive corsets to functional buckskin tracks their assimilation and growing competence in the wild. In stripping away the costumes of “civilization,” they claim the right to define themselves on their own terms, using clothing as both protection and proclamation. Phemie’s ultimate choice to wear a warrior’s breechclout is a radical act of self-definition, claiming a power unavailable to her in either the enslaving states of the South or the “free” North. Their origins and appearance are thus inextricably linked, mapping their journey from societal rejects to agents of their own lives.