SOURCE: Saum, Lewis O. “The Fur Trader and the Noble Savage”. American Quarterly 15 (1963): 554-71.

[In the following essay, Saum examines the writings of the fur traders of North America, many of which portray natives as being corrupted by European settlers.]

In narrating his experiences in the Far-North as trader and explorer, Samuel Hearne of the Hudson's Bay Company included a lengthy treatment of that fascinating animal, the beaver. In doing so, “honest old Hearne,” as a nineteenth-century bibliographer called him,¹ felt the obligation to temper glowing accounts of the beaver written by people with inadequate knowledge. According to him, they greatly overestimated the organizational ability, sagacity and ingenuity of this remarkable creature. Because such exaggerations were often so pronounced, Hearne playfully suggested the existence of an open competition among their perpetrators in devising falsehoods. According to Hearne, one unnamed author clearly outdid his fellows by leaving nothing to be desired in his discussion of beavers except “a vocabulary of their language, a code of their laws, and a sketch of their religion. …”² This satiric jibe was a telling one. It recognized the gratuitous glorification of natural forms, and it suggested that such efforts were the work of persons well removed from the supposed virtues of the nature being described.

Because they were versed in the unpleasant ways of the wilderness, fur traders infrequently touched upon the noble savage, that “free and wild being who draws directly from nature virtues which raise doubts as to the value of civilization.”³ Proverbially, this virtuous and happy creature has been the product of the imaginations of fireside travelers, philosophers and litterateurs. Fairchild's classic work on the subject referred to him as “the creation of a philosopher … reacting from contemporary glorification of culture. …”⁴ Chauncey Brewster Tinker located the origin of the convention in an intellectual climate different from that described by Fairchild but the persons involved in creating the delusion fit the same description. “The ‘noble savage,’” according to Tinker, “was the offspring of the rationalism of the Deist philosophers, who, in their attack upon the Christian doctrine of the fall of man, had idealized the child of Nature.”⁵ And according to A. O. Lovejoy, the cultural primitivist was, by definition, unfamiliar with the people he lauded.⁶ Seemingly, the Hearnes with their practical experience in the affairs of the wilderness and its inhabitants could provide an antidote to the noble savage convention. Having foregone the benefits of civilization—the “land of Cakes” as one trader called it⁷—they should have been disinclined to entertain ideas that compared it invidiously with savagery. To a surprising degree, however, they indulged in the unexpected.

Hoxie Fairchild has written that the philosophers who conjured up noble savages relied upon travelers and explorers for their raw material.⁸ Considering this and considering the probability that few knew the Indian better than fur traders, one might ask to what degree primitivistic writers utilized their accounts. Such theoreticians rarely consulted fur traders. Fairchild mentioned only one trader, James Adair, whose writings lent themselves to such a design.⁹ Tinker, in his work of narrower scope, cited none at all. Even Benjamin Bissell's The American Indian in English Literature of the Eighteenth Century¹⁰ contains only slight mention of fur-trade evaluations and the way they were woven into more artistic or philosophical treatments of the natives.

Of course, the eighteenth century with which Bissell concerned himself had no great wealth of fur-trade narratives upon which to draw. Major works of this kind published in the period were those of Joseph Robson in the 1750s, James Adair in the 1770s, Edward Umfreville, Samuel Hearne and John Long in the 1790s, and Alexander Mackenzie at the turn of the century. However, this does not seem to have been the basic reason for the failure to utilize such material. The fur traders' considered judgments of wilderness life simply did not coincide with European presuppositions. John Long and James Adair, both of whom seem romantic or fanciful at times, appear in Bissell's study as contributors to the English literary concept of the Indian. The grimly realistic Samuel Hearne appears only once, and the way he is used is noteworthy and indicative of the general position of the fur trader vis-à-vis the literal, not the noble, savage. Bissell mentioned Wordsworth's citing of Hearne as the source of “Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” a heart-rending solioquy of a dying squaw abandoned on a far-north trail.¹¹ Hearne presented the incident as sickeningly brutal, though he admitted the possible necessity for such a practice in the sub-Arctic.¹² Wordsworth, on the other hand, passed by the hideousness of the affair, and went on to dwell upon the nobility of the sentiments of the unfortunate woman, her amazingly magnanimous understanding, and, especially, her poignant concern for her small child taken from her and given to another. The accurate reportage of a Samuel Hearne could be ignored except as it provided a backdrop for the heroic tragedy of dramatic lyrics. After all, if the fur trader failed to say the proper things about the condition of the natural state, European intellectuals could turn to someone who would—a Baron Lahontan, a Chateaubriand or a Jonathan Carver.

More directly, it requires no great effort to discover in the fur-trade literature specific and heated denials that the natives were in any way noble. Writing in the early 1850s, Peter Skene Ogden, the wandering scion of a prominent United Empire Loyalist family, chided “drawingroom authors” for their misrepresentation of Indian character. Though this experienced Hudson's Bay Company trader recognized “savage virtues,” he sought to illustrate the “dark character” of the aborigines and to demonstrate their “natural disposition to war and rapine.”¹³ Similarly, when the French Canadian Pierre-Antoine Tabeau wrote his narrative of a trading expedition up the Missouri in the year before Lewis and Clark, he left little doubt about the exalted nature of the primitives. Tabeau showed none of Ogden's reservations:

If the Ricara, if the Sioux, is the man of nature so much praised by poets, every poetic license has been taken in painting him; for their pictures make a beautiful contrast to that which I have before me. All that one can say is that, if these barbarians leave no doubt that they are human, intelligent beings, it is because they have the form, the face, and the faculty of speech of human beings.¹⁴

Others evidenced their disbelief in a somewhat less direct fashion. John McLean, a former Hudson's Bay Company trader, resorted to irony in touching upon the noble savage theme when discussing the Nascopies of Labrador. These people had undergone so little contact with whites that, according to McLean, they could be considered “‘children of nature,’ and possessed, of course, of all the virtues ascribed to such. …” “Yet I must say,” he continued, “that my acquaintance with them disclosed nothing that impressed me with a higher opinion of them than of my own race, corrupted as they are by the arts of civilized life.”¹⁵ In his Fort Sarpy journal James Chambers set down a scurrilous raillery that could hardly be farther removed from exoticism or respect for the native race. Apparently unhampered by McLean's Methodist piety or by concern for offending readers, Chambers commented on an Indian dance at which “Princess May & her bosom Friend & Maid of Honor 'E 'See 'Tah” were “the observed of all observors”:

The princess led the van & made but two or three circles in the yard of the Fort when she placed her divine foot in something of a dark brown substance that emitted an odor like anything but the Otto of roses. May blushed or as good tryed to blush[,] her Lord & Husband was cast down, the Squaws sighed the Bucks laughed & Big Six [a Virginian] Shame on him, bellowed out May tramped on a green tird, however the miss step broke the Ball thus depriving the Princess of bringing out her powers of fascination before her loving subjects.¹⁶

Thus, when traders consciously and sincerely discussed the Indian, qua Indian, their evaluations generally paralleled Hearne's treatment of the “noble” beaver: they displayed impatience and ridicule in regard to the noble savage concept.

However, the dichotomy between unmoved realism on the part of fur traders and the unsubstantiated glorification by uninitiated intellectuals and artists does not have the clarity one might suspect. After all, the noble savage was a mental construct, and one needs feel no surprise when generally honest, candid and intelligent men in the fur trade failed to discover him in the flesh. At the same time, it should occasion no greater surprise to find traders flirting, though generally reservedly, with this very concept. Because the noble savage was a mental construct and an imaginative device for the accomplishing of something, the fur trader could, without logical contradiction, utilize it if he so desired. To argue that he could not ennoble the Indian because his true knowledge and experience stood in direct contradiction, would be to argue that Swift in his account of the Houyhnhnms and Montaigne in his treatment of the Caniballes were, to the best of their ability, expounding truth. Most often the trader wrote of the Indian, qua Indian, but not always.

None of this is meant to imply that traders saw no real virtues in Indian life. They readily admitted the existence of such. For example, traders occasionally expressed envy of the free and casual nature of Indian existence. While discussing the serenely pastoral setting of a Sioux camp, the devout Jedediah Smith remarked in his 1822 journal that it would “almost persuade a man to renounce the world, take the lodge and live the careless, Lazy life of an indian.”¹⁷ Making the comparison between the civilized and the primitive even more evident, Alexander Ross on one occasion commented on the apparent happiness of the Columbia River tribes, a state “which civilized men, wearied with care and anxious pursuits, perhaps seldom enjoy.”¹⁸ Although these commentators were singularly guiltless of patent flirtation with the noble savage concept, both were involving themselves in primitivistic assumptions. They compared invidiously the contrived and intricate workings of civilization to the artlessness and simplicity of the natural state. Though neither would have admitted it, they were substantiating the paradoxical and perhaps playful maxim of Erasmus: “the least unhappy are those who approximate the naivete of the beasts. …”¹⁹

In arguing that the fur trader occasionally portrayed noble savages, one needs to recognize that his brethren in civilization were not above doing violence to his generally honest and accurate reportage. For the sake of a philosophical concept, they would by fiat make silk purses out of sows' ears. The description of the Cree chief, Le Sonnant, given in a letter by upper-Missouri trader Robert Campbell to his brother in Philadelphia, illustrates the point. In this letter, extant only in the form that it was published by a Philadelphia newspaper, Le Sonnant appears as a figure of grand proportions. He had eyes set so deep between hawk nose and high cheek bones that no man “even in your prying and starring [sic] city” could tell their color. On the other hand, the chief with only a glance could “peer into your very soul.” His head was formed grandly. Even without phrenological training one could see strength of purpose in it, while his physical make-up and carriage attested to his capacity as a leader.²⁰

Unfortunately, this flattering description does not fit Le Sonnant. In the same year that Campbell wrote his letter Carl Bodmer, the Swiss artist accompanying Prince Maximilian, drew that Indian's portrait. Bodmer's Le Sonnant has an aquiline but not a hawk nose. His cheek bones, rather than prominent, are unusually low. His eyes, rather than deep-set, appear prominent on a flat face. His chin is small, and his mouth is loose and has a petulant bearing. The eyes, which were of particular note in the Campbell letter, appeared far different to Bodmer. Along with being prominent rather than deep-set, the left one is marred by a noticeable bag beneath it while the right one could scarcely “peer into your very soul” because it is covered by an ophthalmic film so common among Indians. Without knowing definitely whether Robert Campbell ordinarily glamorized the Indians, one suspects that his brother or the Philadelphia newspaper edited his letters to increase their appeal to eastern readers. What was probably meant for no more than a passing mention of Le Sonnant became in Philadelphia the glowing account of a very nearly noble savage.

But not all the noble savages in fur-trade literature were furtively foisted off upon dead or unsuspecting traders. These grim, hardened and realistic wilderness operators must bear most of the responsibility for the presence in their writings of the symbols of the primitivistic myth. Hoxie Fairchild has written that the noble savage idea, once started, traveled in a circle: literature colored the observations of travelers just as their observations influenced literature.²¹ From what has been shown at the outset this reciprocal effect seems not to have been very compelling where fur men were concerned. Still, the impact of this romantic concept upon traders' writings demands at least passing consideration in explaining why the noble savage reared his exotic head in the pages of fur-trade records. Of course, had all men in the trade been mental and moral degenerates, had they been Mike Finks or even Kit Carsons, this would amount to a meaningless exercise because literary and philosophical conventions would have been lost to them. Such was not the case. The men who recorded their impressions for posterity, for the reading public, or simply for superiors in the trade were men who had, for their time in history, quite good, occasionally excellent, educations. If “literature” colored “observation,” there should be some evidence of it in the writings of fur traders.

And, indeed, there is. One element in this influence was an effort to cater to the demands of the reading public. Hoxie Fairchild has written that by 1799 no one considering the publication of travel material could afford to ill-use the savages.²² This generalization needs some qualification where fur men were concerned. For example, Ross Cox, an Astorian who returned to his native Dublin to become a correspondent for a London newspaper, announced in the preface to his narrative that his portrayals of the American Indians would not compare with the “beautiful colouring which the romantic pen of a Chateaubriand has imparted.”²³ And Robert Michael Ballantyne, who spent six years as an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company and then went back to Scotland where he wrote over eighty youthful adventure books, seemed unwilling even in the fiction form gratuitously to exalt the savages. In The Wild Man of the West his Hawkswing, though a member of a band of heroic trappers, is so voiceless, subdued and inconspicuous that he hardly measures up to the traditional role of faithful Indian guide, let alone that of noble savage. He never acts as spokesman for virtue or justice, and Ballantyne, though giving him admirable traits, described him quite negatively: “he was not a hero; few savages are.”²⁴

Nevertheless, the essence of Fairchild's comment seems valid. In spite of his pronouncement at the outset and his conformity with the spirit of it through most of his work, Cox deals with suspiciously idealized savages later in his work. Of the Flatheads, he wrote: “Their bravery is pre-eminent:—a love of truth they think necessary to a warrior's character. They are too proud to be dishonest, too candid to be cunning.” “Their many avocations” left no time for gambling, and the necessity to cooperate precluded quarreling.²⁵ For a time in the 1830s and 1840s the Flatheads enjoyed a good reputation in the East, probably stemming from their supposed efforts to obtain Christian missionaries for their tribe. In their reminiscences of Rocky Mountain life, Osborne Russell, Zenas Leonard and Warren Angus Ferris brought their comments on these Indians into accord with eastern presuppositions by ascribing bravery, generosity and friendliness to them.²⁶ Thus, by their willingness to indulge this predilection on the part of Easterners, men in the fur trade evidenced the basic accuracy of Fairchild's observation.

Even those who apparently had never seen a Flathead showed a willingness to oblige. James Ohio Pattie, at the time that American Christianity was heralding the tawny “Wise Men from the West,” went out of his way to mention the Flatheads. Though this tribe did not practice head-flattening, Pattie understandably assumed that they did, and so pictured them as fine looking people except for their “horrid deformity.”²⁷ Finally, one can hardly doubt that the lip service given the noble savage convention by Isaac Cowie of the late-nineteenth-century trade was dictated by a regard for reading tastes. Late in his volume of recollections, Cowie justified the slaughter of some eighty Assiniboines by a handful of American ranchers armed with repeating rifles. In spite of his approbation of this “signal service,” he had seen fit at the outset of his book to invoke the primitivistic mood by describing the Indian of times past in the words of Dryden:

Free as the day when nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.(28)

But many traders, like the European intellectuals who fostered the noble savage theme, employed it out of motivation more commendable than that of the Patties and the Cowies. Some of them used the theme in an effort to procure better treatment for the aborigines. Of course, men of religion had often indulged in primitivism to effect that very goal, Bartholomew de Las Casas being a prime example. Fur traders of a religious or humane bent, not surprisingly, did the same thing. John McLean, for example, combined a pique against his former employer, the Hudson's Bay Company, and a strong Methodist piety to make an impassioned appeal in behalf of the American Indians. Earlier in his book, as has been noted, he had left no doubt that the state of nature had little to offer. Still, he called upon the very thing he had earlier denied in making his closing plea for humaneness. With England expending vast sums of money and energy in the cause of the benighted Negroes, “can nothing,” asked McLean, “be done for the once noble, but now degraded, aborigines of America?”²⁹ He did not dwell on this former state of nobility because he knew it was a sham. If his primitivism involved untruth, it probably seemed justifiable under the circumstances. McLean must have recognized that a once noble Indian was a more potent argumentative weapon than the barbarians described earlier in the narrative. He used primitivism much as A. O. Lovejoy has maintained that Rousseau used it—not as a literal description of an actual condition, but as a disputatious device.³⁰

But men of the fur trade went farther even than these qualified and somewhat questionable applications of noble savagery. At times they invoked concepts that fit almost perfectly into the primitivistic convention. While ordinarily insisting with vehemence, for example, that no Indians in their experience approached nobility, traders tended to harbor a vague presentiment that such a creature could exist somewhere on ahead. A good example appears in the journal of Matthew Cocking on a pioneering trip from York Factory to the Blackfoot country in the early 1770s. “I shall be sorry,” he wrote during the course of his journey, “if I do not see the Equestrian Natives [Blackfeet] who are certainly a brave people, & far superior to any tribes that visit our Forts: they have dealings with no Europeans, but live in a state of nature to the S. W. Westerly. …”³¹ Similarly, the occasionally naive Vérendrye carried with him on his way to the Mandans an unrealistically high evaluation of that tribe. Even when seeing and recognizing evidence that this Siouan group did not equal his preconceptions, he seemed not quite capable of ridding his mind of the flattering prejudices.³² A philosophical convention could not literally overcome a trader's sense perceptions. However, it could apparently instill in his mind certain muted, paradisiac anticipations that are quite relevant to the noble savage idea. In a fashion quite reminiscent of European intellectuals and theorists, these wilderness men of action felt what A. O. Lovejoy called “the charm of the remote and the strange, the craving to imagine, and even to experience, some fashion of life which is at least different from the all too familiar visage of existence as it has hitherto presented itself. …”³³

As a corollary and in natural sequence to these romantic expectations, one finds evidence to indicate that, where trader and Indian were concerned, familiarity bred contempt. Realizations rarely equalled expectations. Traders operated in practical affairs on the assumption that the red man's awe and regard for him decreased with time. Probably because introspection was required to recognize it, they less often remarked on their own tendency to reciprocate. Nevertheless, it was the Indian near at hand who excited the fur man's wrath and scorn, while the one elsewhere—whether Ross Cox's Flatheads so comfortably removed from the country of the detestable Chinooks, or Matthew Cocking's Blackfeet, or Vérendrye's Mandans, or the Southwesterner Pattie's admirable tribes of the Northwest—conjured up visions of honesty, virtue and possibly even excellence.

In the average trader this abhorrence of the familiar manifested itself in desires to see the local tribes treated roughly by their enemies. For example, Francis Chardon on the upper Missouri wished the surrounding Arikaras and Mandans an abundance of ill-fortune at the hands of the happily distant Yanktons and Assiniboines.³⁴ That Chardon's ill-will was not indiscriminate as Bernard DeVoto suggested,³⁵ can be shown by his determination expressed to his employer at a trying juncture “to bid you all adieu for ever—and end my days with the Sioux.”³⁶ However, the best illustration of the working of this mechanism appears in the journal, and in the career, of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, a thoroughly romantic young Swiss artist who became a part-time clerk for the Upper Missouri Outfit in order to remain in Indian country. Unlike many of his fellows, Kurz recognized that the principle applied to trader and Indian alike. In describing the intelligent and perceptive Edwin Denig, a trader whom he knew quite well, Kurz revealed the following:

Every time a band of Indians annoys Mr. Denig with their begging he flees to me and unburdens his heart by calling them names. At such times he bestows much praise on other Indians who are not here but who get their share of abuse also at some future time. He is always in the best humor with Indians when none are around. … Today the red men who were at the fort stood high in his esteem, but since they have shown that his many courtesies only encouraged them to beg, to expect presents, he thinks them good for nothing, not worthy to unloose the shoe laces of Indians who inhabit the eastern domain.³⁷

Though the good Indians were ordinarily to the West rather than to the East, the generally realistic Mr. Denig, like many of his fellows, showed a mark of the romantic in condemning the familiar while acclaiming the remote.

Another element in this complex of primitivistic ideas involves the belief that civilized man soiled the character of the wilderness dweller. The perennial and worrisome conviction that such was indeed the rule has a prominent place in a recent work by Charles L. Sanford. He argues that “human history, converging in the perspective of time on America, is best understood in relation to the pursuit of paradise …,” and that “the Edenic myth … has been the most powerful and comprehensive organizing force in American culture.”³⁸ As Sanford points out, this conception entailed the blissful assumption that the vices of an overly sophisticated, artificial and sinful Old World could be exchanged for paradisiac simplicity. Psychologically, America represented “a rebirth out of hell,”³⁹ and, unlike Savonarola who could only burn the vanities, sojourners into the wilderness seemingly could escape them. However, hardly had the new society been erected on the seaboard than the haunting intimation came upon the inhabitants that the corruption of Europe had followed after them.

To some degree the fur traders in the wilderness recognized the operation of the same mechanism. However, being in contact with the literal primitive, they tended to see themselves in a somewhat different juxtaposition with Europe. Unlike the nonfrontier American who saw himself being seduced by the over-civilization of the Old World, the fur trader seemed to view himself as a part of that vitiating force. As fur traders entertained to some degree paradisiac notions of what lay ahead, so they also felt the misgivings and frustrations in watching the inhabitants of their supposititious Eden—the Indians, not themselves—degenerate at the civilized touch. The red man, they insisted, learned only the vices and never the virtues of civilization.

In assessing fur-trade expressions of this state of affairs one has to face first of all the rather imponderable possibility that this degeneration was literally taking place. That problem must be left for others. Moreover, one must bear in mind the more demonstrable fact that the virtues-and-vices theme coincided with the best interests of the fur trade. To argue that the advance of civilization entailed the debasement of the natives logically implied the obligation of preserving a primeval state in which Indians perpetuated their virtues, trapped fur-bearing animals and sold them to traders. This import emerges clearly from a document written by Duncan M'Gillivray of the North West Company in an effort to justify that concern's dominion over much of the interior of British America. Contact with Christianity and with “civil society” did nothing for the aborigines, he argued; indeed, those so exposed were in the worst condition of any Indians. While they appeared “timid, lazy and wretched,” those in the interior were “brave, active & industrious.” M'Gillivray's brief sketches of the various tribes—arranged geographically probably to heighten the drama—described a striking anthropological ascent from east to west. The eastern Algonquins were “insolent, timid & of weak constitutions” while their western relatives to the north of Lake Superior were “more daring, enterprising and industrious.” Still farther to the west, the Assiniboines showed even greater excellence by being “bold and intrepid, but in their intercourse with friends, mild and hospitable.” This seasoned Nor'Wester, by a rather contrived primitivism, raised the prospect of preserving the nobility of the red men and, at the same time for those of a more practical bent, the prospect of maintaining several thousand hardy warriors who would protect the empire rather than degenerate into a rabble of debilitated wards of the state.⁴⁰

Because the noble savage was a mental construct, one might argue that M'Gillivray's reason for invoking it was as good as another. Be that as it may, other traders substantiated the virtues-and-vices facet of primitivism out of honest conviction or, at least, out of a more commendable, ulterior motive. As a matter of fact, most fur men seem to have been too candid and unapologetic to have dissembled in an effort to justify their endeavors. Moreover, most of their written expressions were meant only for the eyes of their superiors, an audience that hardly needed convincing.

The prevalence of the corruption theme in fur-trade literature can be well illustrated by examples from the unquestionably authentic journals of two men whose practical attitudes toward the natives was anything but fawning. In December of 1826 Peter Skene Ogden recorded in his journal his brigade's encounter with some red men whose behavior led this veteran Hudson's Bay Company trader to describe them as “good Indians.” At this point he digressed long enough to deplore the fact that they would not remain “good” for very long. “Two years intimacy with the Whites,” he wrote, “will make them like all other Indians [—] villains. …”⁴¹ A final illustration comes from the journal of Alexander Henry the younger, a man whose hatred for the natives seems unbounded. In spite of his pique, however, he heralded in the following commentary on some Rocky Mountain peoples the virtues of noncivilization:

Their morals have not yet been sufficiently debauched and corrupted by an intercourse with people who call themselves Christians, but whose licentious and lecherous manners are far worse than those of the savages. … Happy those who have the least connection with us, for most of their present depravity is easily traced to its origin in their intercourse with the whites.⁴²

Thus, the fur trader viewed himself not as the inhabitant of nature's paradise, but as the emissary of the corrupting influence of civilization. Paradoxically, the bulk of the American society considered itself the embodiment of the pristine excellence of nature.

The classic function of a noble savage is, as Hoxie Fairchild has put it, to exhibit “virtues which raise doubts as to the value of civilization.” These virtues have been implicit in the fur-trade expressions discussed up to this point. But traders did not always deal in implications and did not always maintain subtlety or abstruseness. At times they employed the pure use of the noble savage theme by joining the issue directly, by flailing civilization with the cudgel of primitivism, and even occasionally by playing an unimaginatively obliging devil's advocate locked in a verbal struggle with a wonderfully rational red man who instructs in the good life. Not all traders, of course, engaged in such antics, and none of them plied the tools of primitivism well enough to conjure up the equal of, say, Baron Lahontan's enviably cerebral, wilderness free-thinker, Adario. However, the significant thing would seem to be not the quality or the overwhelming quantity of this most straightforward noble savage device, but rather the fact that it appears at all in fur-trade literature.

Sometimes these exercises in primitivism had a selfish, a chauvinistic or an ethnocentric flavor, with the wisdom of the savage mortifying, not all of civilization, but only the other fellow's. Like ethnocentrics generally, they applauded their own way only by showing antipathy for the ways of others. Alexander McDonnell, a clerk for the North West Company, illustrated the working of this mechanism on one level when, in a published tract, he recorded what purported to be a profound speech of a Red River chief. The particulars of the case arouse doubts because McDonnell's eloquent Indian devoted a peculiarly great amount of time to counselling the wisdom of acceding to the supposedly selfless wishes of the North West Company at a time when that concern and Lord Selkirk's “bad garden-makers” were struggling for control of the region.⁴³ One can see the same device used for a slightly different purpose in James Ohio Pattie's portrayal of a remarkably Protestant primitive who sagaciously exposed and confounded the sophistry of a Catholic priest. Such savages were not only noble, they were obliging as well.⁴⁴

More typically, the fabricators of ideal primitives criticized their own culture. They indulged in cultural self-abnegation rather than the cultural egoism mentioned above. Furthermore, being civilized men and holding essentially to the values of civilization—“the land of Cakes”—fur traders who utilized the noble savage theme ordinarily channeled the efforts of their aboriginal spokesmen into attacks upon specific institutions or practices. Their attacks were detailed, not wholesale. Like Lovejoy's Rousseau, they reproved civilization; they did not eschew it. Indeed, the burden of their primitivistic message was more nearly social criticism than anthropological regression.

In The Quest for Paradise Charles Sanford demonstrated the antiintellectual tone of primitivistic thought.⁴⁵ Occasionally, a fur trader belittled sophisticated rationality by heralding the intuition of the natural man. David Thompson, for example, himself a product of the Westminster Grey Coat School, conveyed this import in a discussion of the vast, frantic and seemingly senseless reindeer migrations—movements that entailed huge losses from exhaustion, trampling, drowning and starvation. He wrote that he had once attempted to explain this singular phenomenon to some Indians in terms of “Instinct,” defined by Thompson as “the free and voluntary actions of an animal for its self preservation.” This theory aroused the derision of his tawny listeners, and, in what must have been a patronizing tone, they asked rhetorically if he thought the animals trampled each other, drowned and died of exhaustion in order to preserve themselves. “‘You white men,’” they taunted, “‘you look like wise men, and talk like fools.’” The migrations, the Indians loftily informed him, were the workings of the reindeer Manito. Thompson seemed unable to parry these thrusts by his red protagonists, and terminated the discussion in his narrative by a hurried surrender and a rather apologetic admission of the poverty of learned theories: “I had to give up my doctrine of Instinct, to that of their Manito. I have sometimes thought Instinct, to be a word invented by the learned to cover their ignorance.”⁴⁶

But other failings in their fellow men must have appeared far more evident to men in the trade than sophism. For example, they seem to have had much more occasion to remark by indirection upon that classic weakness, niggardliness. American Rocky Mountain trader Rufus Sage provided a somewhat extreme illustration in a chapter of his recollections dealing partly with “Nature's nobleman.” On the Cimarron River Sage's party came upon a pair of Indian ponies, butchered one and kept the other. Shortly thereafter, they met a band of Arapahoes searching for the selfsame mounts. With hazard in the circumstances, the white spokesman decided that the truth properly and discreetly stated would best appeal to the red sense of justice. After a contrived introduction involving the imminence of starvation, he informed the Indian leader that, “the flesh of the younger one has caused us to bless the Good Spirit. …” “My heart is good,” the chief replied, but he appeared downcast and went on to indicate that the dead pony had been a favorite of his wife and children. Sensing a highly dangerous impasse, the white leader became very solicitous in seeking ways to make amends. However, the somber red man reassured him with the words, “now my heart blesses the pale faces,” and indicated a desire only for a bit of tobacco that the two parties might smoke to friendship. Even the least discerning could hardly have missed the point, but Sage made doubly certain: “where, let me ask, do we find in civilized countries an instance of noble generosity equal to that of the poor savage?”⁴⁷

Of all the fur-trade primitivists James Adair of the southern colonial frontier came nearest to making blanket condemnations of the civilized way. Adair presented Indians “governed by the plain and honest law of nature,” a condition making for equality, liberty and physical soundness. In the late chapters of his work Adair turned his attention to particular blights on civilized society. Where the white man, for example, punished wrongdoers by physical abuse and incarceration, the Indian practiced a gentle rehabilitation. If the culprit had stolen or lied, he was praised for his honesty, and “so good naturedly and skilfully” was he struck by these barbs that he would die before committing the same offense again. Though they were “unskilfull in making the marks of our ugly lying books, which spoil people's honesty,” the natives had on the other hand been “duly taught in the honest volumes of nature.”⁴⁸

With the old trader playing the traditional role of devil's advocate, albeit a less effectual and believable one than the reader has a right to expect, the institutions of law, military and medicine took the brunt of the verbal onslaught. Adair's Indians considered the civilized practice of amputation so heinous that they would have beaten the practitioners of it with knobby poles, revived them, and then cut off their ears and noses with dull knives.⁴⁹ The fact that these supposititious wilderness sages did not mention the possibility of a generous and bantering rehabilitation for doctors, as there was for thieves, evidences a real contradiction. Adair, for whom these savages spoke, maintained more consistency in his critique of civilized forms than he did in his contrived championing of the natural life. Indeed, a contrariety between the real and the ad hoc savage appears in nearly all such sources. As noted earlier, John McLean portrayed one Indian in his considered description of native life and quite another in his plea for Christian mercy. Edward Umfreville, like McLean a disgruntled ex-Hudson's Bay Company man, tended to dress up the Indians in those sections of his book which indicted his former employer, but he straightforwardly exposed the utter savagery of the red men when he had no argument to make.⁵⁰ By the same token, Adair's enlightened aboriginal critics appeared late in his work and bore little resemblance to the barbarous natives described at the outset. Though Hoxie Fairchild referred to this trader as the “highly romantic Adair,”⁵¹ one finds the Indians depicted early in the book to have been cunning, deceitful, mischievous, dishonest, and, though given to bloody revenge, quite cowardly. The Choctaws, Adair argued, possessed no human attributes “except shape and language.”⁵²

Thus one must face the question of whether the fur traders trafficked in authentic noble savages. Were they primitivists? or, did they indulge in what A. O. Lovejoy referred to as “supposed primitivism”? In light of the facts that the noble savage is myth and that the clear superiority of civilization over savagery is generally, if not universally, recognized, this involves a knotty problem with some fine distinctions. Quite demonstrably, fur traders at times evidenced the elements of noble savagery. The problem hinges upon the question of whether these outward signs truly indicated an inward conviction. Or, was that conviction necessary? Did the fur trader have to maintain the ignorance of believing in the literal existence of noble savages in order to utilize the theme validly? By calling Rousseau's a “supposed primitivism” because he did not actually believe in the excellence of the natural state, A. O. Lovejoy has implied the affirmative.

According to this logic, the trader was capable only of a superficial or artificial form of noble savagery—a tautology, of course. By Lovejoy's definition, the cultural primitivist idealized races or peoples foreign to him,⁵³ apparently because knowledge would preclude idolizing. Evidently the trader as primitivist was at an overwhelming disadvantage. The scholar or intellectual could convey sincerity, conviction and consistency by conscientiously maintaining a semblance of ignorance. He could express his dislike of civilization—also a part of Lovejoy's definition of cultural primitivism⁵⁴—by comparing it invidiously with savagery, and regardless of how much he may have had tongue in cheek, his motivation would go unquestioned. Having seen the savage, the fur trader had fallen from innocence.

Though he probably utilized the noble savage in much the way that the philosopher did, the trader displayed the mark of guilty knowledge, indicating that his noble savage was a contrived device fabricated for an ulterior motive. The young Swiss romantic Rudolph Friederich Kurz, for instance, recorded that his superior at Fort Union, Edwin Denig, once informed him that, “I should count myself happy, that, owing to my nearsightedness, I was prevented from entering fully upon the Indian mode of life.”⁵⁵ Denig apparently assumed that good vision would have destroyed Kurz's cherished notions. Actually, the experienced and intelligent trader had overestimated Kurz's handicap; the young intellectual's powers of observation were not so bad that he preserved the innocently ignorant predilections which had survived as far west as St. Joseph, Missouri. At that point his ardor for portraying “the romantic mode of life” of the Indian waxed strong. Through the course of his sojourn on the high plains his outlook changed remarkably and came to resemble that of the sympathetic but realistic “Mr. Denig.” Near the end of his stay he watched Rottentail's band of Crows ride out of the fort and commented tellingly: “do but go; the fewer Indians we have in this vicinity the more animals are to be seen. For my studies, beasts of the chase are now more welcome than Indians.”⁵⁶ At St. Joseph and again when he had returned to Switzerland, Kurz described noble savages. While at the frontier town with his naivete unimpaired, Kurz, by common definition, engaged in primitivism. However, having returned to Switzerland apparently shorn of his sanguine conviction of primal excellence, he engaged in something less than that. For having gained an intimate knowledge of the wilderness, fur traders could only manifest the outward signs of primitivism, the designation “primitivist” seems denied them.

Whatever the problems of definition, fur traders did utilize the noble savage theme, and they did so essentially to air their grievances, an activity for which they had sound precedent. One can not help suspecting, for example, that John Long of the eastern Canadian trade felt personally abused by niggardly treatment, and that he reflected this in his combined carpings at the “parsimonious conduct of those whom providence hath blessed with affluence” and encomiums on the Indians who were free of such “mean sordid sentiments.”⁵⁷ James Adair seemed quite incapable of maintaining accord with the civilized scheme of things and so he vented his rancor via noble savages. One of the best illustrations of the workings of this mechanism appears in the writings of Rufus Sage. This Rocky Mountain trader, as noted earlier, portrayed savage excellence in his published narrative of frontier life. Letters written to his mother during his sojourn in the mountains reveal a man of fervent religious tendency, of deep and morbid pessimism, who considered himself adrift amidst a sea of enemies. He despised what he knew, including himself, and perhaps, like other dissatisfied souls, he could embrace the foreign for having spiritually forsaken the familiar. Thus, after a year on the fur-trade frontier, he wrote to his mother that, “the whites in that country are worse than the Indians …,”⁵⁸ and, however just or accurate this observation may have been in its own right, its statement by a person of Sage's outlook leaves one unconvinced. A man who, after viewing the crudities and nastiness of savage life, could censure the smokers and chewers among the mountain men for indulging “their filthy and unnatural taste” invites an evaluation of inverse bigotry.⁵⁹

Hoxie Fairchild, though chronicling specific declines in the noble savage convention, concluded that the concept was as “immortal as the phoenix.”⁶⁰ Even the dominance in the last hundred years of the evolutionary theory has not stilled the voices of those who see excellence in the primeval past—or those “interested people,” as trader Joseph Hargrave called them, who conjure up “ideal figures” to serve some selfish design.⁶¹ The writings of men in the American fur trade indicate that, along with being timeless, the noble savage appears far more universally than one might expect. At times, traders invoked primitive perfection as “interested people” and, at other times, like the Jacksonian Americans discussed by John Ward,⁶² they seemed to offer sincere warnings of the evils of over-civilization. In either case, first-hand experience in the crude realities of wilderness existence provided no absolute immunity from that intriguing and perennial passion, the ennobling of the savage.

Notes

1. Thomas W. Field, An Essay towards an Indian Bibliography … (New York, 1873), p. 164.

2. A Journey From Prince of Wales's Fort … (London, 1795), pp. 229-37.

3. Hoxie Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York, 1928), p. 2.

4. Ibid., p. 22.

5. Nature's Simple Plan: A Phase of Radical Thought in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1922), pp. 88-89.

6. Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), p. 8.

7. John M. McLeod to John McLeod, March 16, 1833 in “Journals and Correspondence of John McLeod …” (unpublished typescript in the Library of Congress), p. 177.

8. The Noble Savage, pp. 97-120.

9. Ibid., p. 98.

10. Yale Studies in English, LXVIII (New Haven, 1925).

11. Ibid., p. 189.

12. A Journey From Prince of Wales's Fort, pp. 202-3.

13. Traits of American Indian Life & Character (modern ed.; San Francisco, 1933), pp. 1-3.

14. Tabeau's Narrative of Loisel's Expedition …, ed. Annie Heloise Abel (Norman, Okla., 1939), p. 172.

15. John McLean, Notes of a Twenty-five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory, ed. W. S. Wallace (Toronto, 1932), p. 259.

16. “Original Journal of James H. Chambers,” ed. Anne McDonnell, Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana, X (1940), 106-7.

17. The Travels of Jedediah Smith …, ed. Maurice S. Sullivan (Santa Ana, Calif., 1934), p. 5.

18. Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River … (London, 1849), p. 94.

19. The Praise of Folly, trans. Leonard F. Dean (Chicago, 1946), pp. 73-74.

20. Robert Campbell to Hugh Campbell, November 16, 1833, in The Rocky Mountain Letters of Robert Campbell, ed. Charles Eberstadt (n. p., 1955), pp. 14-16.

21. The Noble Savage, p. 429.

22. Ibid., p. 119.

23. The Columbia River … (2nd ed.; 2 vols.; London, 1832), I, vi.

24. The Wild Man of the West: A Tale of the Rocky Mountains (Philadelphia, n.d.), p. 47.

25. The Columbia River, II, 140-41.

26. Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper … (2nd ed.; Boise, 1921), p. 38; Adventures of Zenas Leonard Fur Trader, ed. John C. Ewers (Norman, Okla., 1959), pp. 33-34; Warren Angus Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains …, ed. Paul C. Phillips (Denver, 1940), p. 88.

27. James O. Pattie, The Personal Narrative of …, ed. Timothy Flint (Cincinnati, 1833), p. 100.

28. The Company of Adventurers … (Toronto, 1913), pp. 451-53, 28. Cowie slightly misquoted this passage from Conquest of Granada, Part I, Act I, Scene 1.

29. Notes, p. 355.

30. A. O. Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality,” Modern Philology, XXI (1923), 165-86.

31. “Journal of Matthew Cocking …,” ed. Lawrence J. Burpee, Royal Society of Canada Proceedings and Transactions, 3rd Series, Vol. II (1908), Section 2, 110.

32. Journals and Letters of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Vérendrye …, ed. Lawrence J. Burpee (Toronto, 1927), pp. 316-43.

33. Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, p. 8.

34. Chardon's Journal at Fort Clark 1834-1839 …, ed. Annie Heloise Abel (Pierre, S. Dak., 1932), pp. 34, 45.

35. Across the Wide Missouri (Boston, 1947), pp. 242-43.

36. F. A. Chardon to Pierre Chouteau Jr., May 18, 1835, Chouteau Collections, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Mo.

37. “Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz …,” ed. J. N. B. Hewitt, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, CXV (1937), 204.

38. The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana, Ill., 1961), pp. vi, 3.

39. Ibid., p. 94.

40. “Some Account of the Trade Carried on by the North West Company,” Dominion of Canada. Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1928, pp. 63-67.

41. Peter Skene Ogden's Snake Country Journal 1826-27, ed. K. G. Davies (London, 1961), p. 35.

42. New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest …, ed. Elliott Coues (3 vols.; New York, 1897), II, 710-11.

43. Narrative of Transactions in the Red River Country … (London, 1819), pp. 6-7, 71.

44. Personal Narrative, pp. 79-80.

45. See, for example, pp. 62-63.

46. David Thompson's Narrative …, ed. J. B. Tyrrell (Toronto, 1916), pp. 101-2.

47. Rocky Mountain Life … (Boston, 1880), p. 314.

48. The History of the American Indians … (London, 1775), pp. 378-79, 429-30, 434.

49. Ibid., p. 438.

50. The Present State of Hudson's Bay … (London, 1790).

51. The Noble Savage, p. 98.

52. History of the American Indians, pp. 4-5, 285.

53. Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, pp. 7-8.

54. Ibid.

55. “Journal of Kurz,” p. 205.

56. Ibid., p. 269.

57. John Long, Voyages and Travels … in Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (32 vols.; Cleveland, 1904-7), II, 157.

58. Rufus Sage to Mrs. J. Sage, July 20, 1842 in Rufus B. Sage …, eds. Le Roy R. and Ann W. Hafen (2 vols.; Glendale, Calif., 1956), I, 90.

59. Rocky Mountain Life, p. 197.

60. The Noble Savage, p. 364.

61. Red River (Montreal, 1871), 410-11.

62. Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York, 1955).