[In the following essay, Denton traces Twain's attitude towards Native Americans from his vilification of them early in his career to his more sympathetic treatment of them as he grew older.]

Twain's colorful attitudes toward the Chinese, Arabs, Turks, various Europeans, and Negroes (and one is tempted to include the self-righteous Puritans as an ethnic group) are well-known. Less familiar are his collective views of the American Indian, of both the savage primitive and the Noble Red Man.¹ A survey of references to the Indian in Twain's writings demonstrates that his attitudes can be grouped into two diametrically opposed categories. During his early years, especially while he lived in the West, Twain exhibited strong prejudice against the Indians; that prejudice eventually changed to toleration and then finally to idealism, as Twain grew older and as he bitterly vented his feelings against the Puritans who in their zealous campaigns against the heathen savages “… hunted and harried … and robbed them, beggared them, drove them from their homes, and exterminated them, root and branch.”²

The bulk of Twain's experiences with the American Indian began on July 26, 1861, as Samuel Clemens and his brother Orion (who had just been appointed secretary of Nevada Territory) left St. Joseph, Missouri aboard an Overland Stage bound for Carson City, Nevada.³ The 1700-mile, three-week journey is carefully described, of course, along with a multitude of colorful Western experiences in Roughing It. Prior to his Nevada experiences, however, Clemens was not altogether unacquainted with Indians. An occasional Indian still traversed the Mississippi, and while at Hannibal, Clemens surely glimpsed those who plied the river. Too, because he lived in Missouri, the point of departure for so many expeditions to the West, no doubt he heard and wondered at stories and rumors of skirmishes and wars with the Sioux, Comanche, Apache, and others. Thus Clemens likely took with him to Nevada some preconceptions about the “untamed savages” that he would encounter.

After his arrival in Nevada, Clemens's experience with the Indians became a personal one. As late as 1835 (the year of his birth) few white men had settled in the Great Basin.⁴ Only the Paiutes and the Diggers and other hardy primitives inhabited the area, eking out a meager existence by eating rodents, insects, and roots. In 1860, just one year before Clemen's arrival, Paiute forces under Chief Winnemuccas mobilized against the white man in the Paiute Indian War.⁵ Although the major skirmishes took place near Washoe, Carson City residents took their lives in their hands when they traveled in remote areas. As a result, the general attitudes of fear, hatred, and mistrust that characterized Nevada residents no doubt influenced Clemens's own thoughts. He and a party of friends set out for the Humboldt Mining District while remnants of the Paiutes were still looting, burning, and killing. Needless to say, the party proceeded cautiously, anxious to reach safety. Clemen's environment was sufficient then to cause him to label the Indian as “The scum of the earth!” Similar attitudes characterized his writings for the next twenty years. Sam and Orion at one time employed an Indian to cut firewood for them,⁶ and he had other personal contacts with Indians—enough to solidify his opinions of them, their personal habits, and their civilization.

Twain's personal prejudice—sometimes real and sometimes pointedly humorous—colors his writings about the Indian. In Roughing It he describes the coyote and the Indian in the same breath: “He will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-frequenting tribes of Indians, will, and they will eat anything they can bite. It is a curious fact that these latter are the only creatures known to history who will eat nitroglycerine and ask for more if they survive.”⁷ And then, commenting on the role played by Nature in the West, he remarks: “All things have their uses and their part and proper place in Nature's economy: the ducks eat the flies—the flies eat the worms—the Indians eat all three. …”⁸

In Roughing It, in his description of the Goshoot Indians, Twain's strong prejudice and dislike of the desert Indian reach a zenith. He calls the Goshoots “the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen.”

Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, scrawny creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking, treacherous-looking race; … prideless beggars—for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian he would not ‘go’, any more than a clock without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jackass rabbits, crickets, and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and coyotes.⁹

Twain's aversion to the Noble Red Man of Cooper's novels is legendary. After providing a devastating picture of the unfortunate Goshoots, Twain comments on the idealistic portrayal of Cooper's Noble Red Man as contrasted with reality—reality being, of course, the wretched Goshoots.

I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were very disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy, and repulsive, and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has found only Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surrounding—but Goshoots, after all.¹⁰

Also, in Innocents Abroad Twain charges that the Fenimore Cooper Indians “are an extinct tribe that never existed.”¹¹ In 1870 in “The Noble Red Man” Twain summarizes his feelings about the Indian by saying, “… truly he is nothing but a poor, filthy, naked scurvy vagabond, whom to exterminate were a charity to the Creator's worthier insects and reptiles which he oppresses.”¹² He also chides those humanitarians on the Atlantic seaboard who sympathize with the plight of the Red Man, reinforcing his statements by telling the reader that he has observed the despicable Indian in Nevada.

However, through hearing personal accounts and through reading journals and newspapers, Twain likely knew of the severe inequities and injustices which characterized many of the white man's dealings with reservation Indians. News of inhumane treatment, starvation, death by freezing, and administrative corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs was common knowledge during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Too, Twain was a witness to the demise of the buffalo, and perhaps he was aware that the death-blows dealt proud Plains Indians such as the Sioux sounded the beginning of the end of a way of life—all the result of progressive, white “civilization.” Yet only a single reference (in The Gilded Age) mentions any of these events specifically. Twain refers to a Congressman who has pocketed most of the funds allocated for maintenance of reservation Indians within his district. So a claim that Twain's attitudes changed partially as a result of his observations of the plight of the Indian is only conjecture, but the likelihood is strong.

The primary cause of Twain's change of attitude lay in his becoming more and more convinced that white-oriented civilization must receive the blame for the introduction of evil into an otherwise sinless society. As he became more disenchanted with Puritan and European society, his attitudes toward the Indian mellowed. Ultimately, he began to idealize the Indian—a far cry from his earlier prejudice against such as the Goshoots. In Life on the Mississippi Twain calls the Indians “simple children” whom LaSalle cunningly dispossessed of their lands in the name of religion and “Louis the Putrid.” He attacks European civilization:

For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving, and coverting them; higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey.¹³

Then in “The Dervish and the Offensive Stranger” Twain proposes that the extermination of the American Indian is the price of “civilization” in the New World. And in a scathing attack on the Puritans, whom Twain blamed for the general demise of the Indian and for everything evil, he analyzes the cause for celebrating Thanksgiving Day: “Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that … the exterminating had ceased to be mutual, and was all on the white man's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it, and extend the usual annual compliments.”

In “Extract From Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven,” Twain wholly renounces the prejudice so characteristic of those colorful writings of the Nevada days. One character, in describing the angels that populate the area of Heaven occupied by Americans, gives the impressions of angels from other worlds: “… this wilderness is populated with a scattering few hundred thousand billions of red angels, with now and then a curiously complected diseased one. You see they think we whites and the occasional nigger are Injuns that have been bleached out or blackened by some leprous disease or other.”¹⁴ In effect, Twain here categorically rejects white American and European civilizations in favor of the innate goodness of the original inhabitants of the continent (before the corrupting influence of outsiders affected the Indians).

Lastly, in his most decisive rejection of everything foreign (and therefore evil) to the Indian inhabitants, in an address to the New England Society to Honor the Pilgrims, he remarked on December 22, 1881: “My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian—an early Indian. Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan.”¹⁵ So Twain had run the gamut, from his strongly prejudiced views of those “prideless beggars” who steal carrion from buzzards and who should be exterminated to an idealistic approach to his “first American ancestor.” And so we have one more chapter in the life of Twain which helps us to understand him a little better.

Notes

1. Maxwell Geismar, in Mark Twain, An American Prophet, is one of the very few critics to even examine Mark Twain's attitudes toward the Indian.

2. Mark Twain, “The Dervish and the Offensive Stranger,” Charles Neider, ed., The Complete Essays of Mark Twain (Garden City, N.Y., 1963), 589.

3. Ivan Benson, Mark Twain's Western Years (Stanford, Calif., 1938), 21.

4. Effie Mona Mack, Mark Twain in Nevada (New York, 1947), 5.

5. Ibid., 61.

6. Ibid., 88.

7. Mark Twain, Roughing It, Vol. 1 (New York, 1899), 51.

8. Ibid., 297.

9. Ibid., 154-155.

10. Ibid., 157.

11. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Vol. 1 (New York, 1897), 262-263.

12. Mark Twain, Life as I Find It, Charles Neider, ed., (Garden City, N.Y., 1961), 105.

13. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York, 1883), 8.

14. Mark Twain, “Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven,” Charles Neider, ed., Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 592.

15. Mark Twain, “Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims,” Charles Neider, ed., Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain (Garden City, N.Y., 1961), 493.