SOURCE: “The Puritan Myth and the Indian in the Early American Novel,” in Pembroke Magazine, Vol. 7, 1976, pp. 237-44.

[In the following essay, McCullough and Dodge examine the Puritans' belief in themselves as agents of God, and how this conviction helped justify their destruction of the “heathen” Native Americans. The authors also investigate the manner in which this belief system informed early American fiction.]

William Bradford relates that on November 16, 1620, Miles Standish and fifteen other “well armed” Pilgrims left the Mayflower anchored off Cape Cod and set out to explore the new land. The next day they discovered a deserted Indian village and dug up a cache of corn, some of which they brought back to the Mayflower.

Following this, a larger expedition was sent out, and according to Bradford:

ther was also found 2 of their houses covered with matts, and sundrie of their implements in them, but the people were rune away and could not be seen; also ther was found more of their corne, and of their beans of various collours. The corne and beans they brought away, purposing to give them full satisfaction when they should meete with any of them (as about some 6 months afterward they did, to their good content). And here is to be noted a spetiall providence of God, and a great mercie to this poore people, that hear they got seed to plant them corne the next yeare. … But the Lord is never wanting unto his in their greatest needs; let his holy name have all the praise.

To be sure, the Pilgrims needed the seed. American school children still learn about the harshness of the first winter at Plymouth. Still, to call a case of petty theft an example of a special Providence of God requires an unusual attitude either about one's own relationship with God, or about one's relationship with the people from whom one steals.

William Bradford's Plymouth Pilgrims, like the Puritans who later settled Massachusetts Bay, were ready to see the hand of God in the tiniest details. In fact, they believed themselves to have a special relationship with God. This belief in their special place in God's plan eventually led them to believe that any obstacles to their development must have been Satanic in origin.

The Indians of New England lived in the dark of the forest, their color was one traditionally associated with Satan, they worshipped strange Gods and they often stood as an obstacle to Puritan expansion and development. Small wonder then that the Pilgrims and Puritans eventually came to see many of the Indians as agents of Satan.

According to Perry Miller, “New England was not an allegiance, it was a laboratory.” As such, it was a place to test the doctrines of calvinism, a place to attempt to establish a holy city that could serve as a model to England and the rest of the world. If New England prospered, it was expected that Puritanism and Godliness would spread. Consequently, New England had to become a primary battle-ground between the forces of God and Satan. Satan could be expected to use all of his abilities to put down this attack of Godliness before the world saw and copied it.

The Puritans and Pilgrims saw their life in New England, then, as a continuous battle between God and Satan. They required evidences of God's special providence to affirm their beliefs that they were pursuing the proper course. Even a case of petty theft, dignified by the name “borrowing,” became a mark of God's providence, proof that the Puritans were right. Books were written detailing all of the instances of God's providence that New England had met with.

One of the most remarkable of those books was The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England and was probably written by Captain Edward Johnson of Woburn, Massachusetts.

Johnson begins by showing how the faithful gathered in England and prepared for the passage to Virginia. That they intended their settlements to be the leader in the battle against Satan is shown in such passages as: “… see that with all dilligence you incourage every souldier-like spirit among you, for the Lord Christ intends to atchieve greater matters by this little handfull then the World is aware of,” and “Further know that these are but the beginnings of Christs glorious Reformation, and Restauration of his Churches to a more glorious splendor than ever.”

But it is the description of the Providences themselves, especially in so far as the Indian is concerned, that makes Johnson so interesting.

Johnson reports that in about 1618 the Indians of Massachusetts were afflicted with such severe plague that whole areas were left uninhabited. This is Johnson's idea of a special providence. “But by this meanes Christ (whose great and glorious workes the Earth throughout are altogether for the benefit of his Churches and chosen) not onely made roome for his people to plant; but also tamed the hard and cruell hearts of these barbarous Indians.”

Still, Johnson estimates that in 1629 there were about 3,000 able men among the Mattachusets tribe; by 1650, according to his calculations there were less than 300. According to Johnson, this was the “wondrous worke of the great Jehovah.”

Later, Johnson writes, “the Indians … began to quarrell with them (the English) about their bounds of Land, notwithstanding they purchased all they had of them, but the Lord put an end to this quarrell also, by smiting the Indians with a sore disease, even the small pox, of which great numbers of them died. …”

As a final example from Johnson's Wonder-Working Providences regarding the New England Indians, there is Johnson's account of the war with the Pequots.

The battle between the Pequots and the Puritans seems, in fact, to have set the pattern for many future Indian battles such as Sand Creek. The English made a surprise attack upon a village of sleeping Indians. According to Johnson: “… they soone placed themselves round the Wigwams, and according to direction they made their first shot with the muzzle of their Muskets downe to the ground, knowing the Indian manner is to lie on the ground to sleep.”

Johnson continues his account of the battle, telling how the Puritans set fire to the wigwams, how the Lord intended “to have these murtherers know he would looke out of the fiery pillar upon them,” how some of the Indians were aided by Satan “whose bodyes were not to be pierced by their sharp rapiers or swords of (for) a long time … for there were some Powwowes with them, which work strange things with the help of Satan.”

Johnson concludes his account of the massacre by attributing all of the glory to God:

The Lord in mercy toward his poore Churches having thus destroyed these bloudy barbarous Indians, he returns his people in safety to their vessels, where they take account of their prisoners: the squawes and some young youths they brought home with them, and finding the men to be deeply guilty of the crimes they undertook the warre for, they brought away onely their heads as a token of their victory. By this means the Lord strook a trembling terror into all the Indians round about, even to this day.”

William Bradford's account of the Pequot massacre is similar to Johnson's. Bradford, who was then Governor of Plymouth Plantation tells of the surprise attack, the burning and the fighting with swords. He then says,

It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stinck and sente ther of; but the victory seeme a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enimise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.

Thus, the Puritans and Pilgrims of New England not only justified burning, beheading, small pox, theft and virtual genocide but accepted it as the work of God and gave Him praise for it.

Before hastily condemning such attitudes, it seems important to recognize the cultural situation that helped to impart them. First, both the Puritans and the Pilgrims believed that it was their duty to create a visible city of God in America. Their reasons were slightly different (the Pilgrims were Separatists, the Puritans non-Separatists), but the results were essentially the same. Further, each group saw its experiment as one of cosmic importance. Satan, they believed, would have to engage them in battle at once or give up on his plan to make Earth the focus of his battle with God. God would obviously be on the side of the Pilgrims and Puritans as long as they continued to be faithful to their national covenant.

Such beliefs are only as secure as the faith of the believer. Within themselves they carry the seeds of doubt. Every obstacle to the accomplishment of the divine purpose becomes a Satanic invention. Each individual case of backsliding jeopardizes the covenant between the nation and God. According to Perry Miller, days of fasting and repentance were far more numerous in the Massachusetts colonies than were days of thanksgiving. The favorite form of publication was the Jeremiad.

Little wonder, then, that the Massachusetts colonists sought reassurance of God's approval by seeing special providences at every opportunity. The Indians were dark-skinned, they shunned the bright light of day, living within the dark forests. They worshipped strange gods, including Hobbamock whom John Winslow and others equated with Satan.

The Pilgrims and Puritans, therefore, often thought of the Indians of Massachusetts not as fellow human beings, but as agents of Satan. As Satanic agents, it was possible that they could sometimes do good although intending harm, and it was also thought, at least by John Eliot and others, that they were capable of conversion.

Still, in their unregenerate state, Indians were considered little better than witches by most of the New England Pilgrims and Puritans. If proof was needed of the alliance between any individual or tribe and Satan, it was furnished when that person or tribe stood in the way of the accomplishment of the divine purpose. Whatever served the divine purpose was evidence of God's special help. The massacre of the Pequots, the smallpox epidemic, the theft of foodstuffs all served the purpose.

The belief in the divine ordination to establish a visible city of holiness in the New World died out gradually, and by the time of the first American novels to treat the Indian, it was dead. The image of the Indian as an agent and—or worshipper of Satan, however, lingered on, together with the opposite and emerging image of the Noble Savage.

As the novels of nineteenth century America show, the Noble Savage never supplanted the Savage Devil in the mind of American whites. For a time the two images existed simultaneously and were, in fact, unified in the works of some writers. When the concept of Manifest Destiny as a new, divinely ordained American purpose arose, the myth of the devilish savage would once again be dominant.

Probably more than any other writer, James Fenimore Cooper brought forth and impressed the character of the Indian on America. And, probably more than any other writer, he contributed to the mythic treatment of the Indian. In addition to the novels which comprise his Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841) he portrayed Indians in several other novels, including his Littlepage Trilogy, Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbeaver (1845), and The Redskins (1846), and in The Wept of Wish-ton-wish (1829), Wyandotte (1843), and The Oak Openings (1848).

Evidently, Cooper had little personal contact with Indians. Rather he drew upon what he considered the most authentic sources for his material, particularly John Heckewelder's History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations (1819) and Nicholas Biddle's History of the Expedition Under the Command of Lewis and Clark (1814).

Whether one takes the position that Cooper's literary treatment helped to shape popular opinion or that it merely reflected it, one must agree that it was important. Roy Harvey Pearce argues persuasively that Cooper was the first writer to portray the Indian as complex and accomplish a synthesis of the two prevailing myths about him—the myth of the Red Devil and the myth of the Noble Savage After Cooper, he says, writers of fiction “always tried to argue feelings of guilt and hatred, of pity and censure, out of existence by showing how Indian nobility was one with Indian ignobility. We can observe how Cooper set the pattern for writers who would treat of the Indian, and how after him imaginative realization of the idea of savagism became a prime means to the understanding of American progress in its glories, tragedies and risks.”

The duality is treated at its most extreme in Wyandotte (1843), the study of the outcast degraded Tuscarora, Saucy Nick-Wyandotte, who Cooper says, was “a singular mixture of good and bad qualities, blended with native shrewdness.” Even his physical features, particularly his face which is painted half red and half black, emphasize his duality. As Kay Semour House suggests,

Capable of Nobility or degradation, guided by only a few simple precepts having to do with loyalty and revenge, and able to react so belatedly to an old injustice that the action seems unmotivated, Wyandotte-Nick defines the Cooper Indian … By showing some of Wyandotte's traits, asserting others, and suppressing all the information about his whereabouts for long periods in the Narrative, Cooper presents the Indian as a complex character who has an existence in a second world—one unknown if not actually unknowable to the white settler. Furthermore, the Indian's ubiquity, as he emerges from the forest or is silently engulfed by it, establishes him as both a part of the wilderness and an agent for it.

However in his treatment of Nick-Wyandotte, Cooper does not so much synthesize, but rather presents a duality.

Frequently Cooper did not endow his Indians with even this much complexity. In his Leatherstocking Tales, as well as in his lesser known novels, Cooper portrays two groups of Indians, good and bad, noble and villainous. Throughout, the “bad” Indians are associated with Satanic imagery. They are called devils, imps and demons, are shown participating in hellish rites, either do not accept the Christian religion or become apostate, and above all stand in the way of progress and Manifest Destiny. As a result the villainous Indians, who are always defined in their relationship to white society, as for example, Mahtoree and Weucha (The Prairie), Magua (The Last of the Mohicans) and Weasel (The Oak Openings) are clearly cunning, ignoble and diabolic.

On the other hand, the noble Indians are represented in the Leatherstocking Tales by the Delawares, Chingachgook and Uncas, and by the Pawnee, Hard-Heart; in the Littlepage Trilogy by Susquesus; as well as by Pigeonswing in The Oak Openings and Rivenoak in The Deerslayer.

One of the most fully developed Indians in Cooper's writings is Susquesus, who is developed through the Littlepage Trilogy. He is continually portrayed as a model warrior. The main difficulty with his treatment, however, is that while he is consistently portrayed as a Noble Savage, he becomes more important for his symbolic value than for his individuality. But in The Redskins, the last novel in the trilogy, Cooper provides an insight into his attitudes about those qualities which are shared by the real Indian, as represented by Susquesus, contrasted with the “Injun”:

There is “Indian” and “Injin.” The Injin is a white man, who, bent on an unworthy and illegal purpose, is obliged to hide his face, and to perform his task in disguise. The Indian is a redman, who is neither afraid nor ashamed to show his countenance, equally to friend or enemy. The first is the agent of designing demagogues, the hireling of a discontented and grasping spirit, who mocks at truth and right by calling himself one who labors to carry out “the spirit of those institutions” which he dishonors and is afraid to trust; while the other serves himself only, and is afraid of nothing. One is skulking from, and shirking the duties of civilization, while the other, though a savage, is, at least, true to his own professions.

Probably the most absorbing and maybe most ambivalent Indian in Cooper's writings is Chingachgook. There is no doubt but that Cooper meant for him to be viewed as a Noble Savage. However, he also shares most of the characteristics of the “bad” Indians. While the villainous Indians are called devils and imps, Chingachgook's name, which means “The Great Serpent” is clearly Satanic. Like Magus, he renounces Christianity near the close of his life and reembraces his native religion; his death song which appears to cause rain suggests a demonic rite. Finally, he stands in the way of progress in the same way that the “bad” Indians do. The main difference is that Chingachgook is portrayed as a victim rather than a villain. But within the character of Chingachgook, Cooper seems to have accomplished what would seem impossible—he combined the myths of the Red Devil and the myth of the Noble Savage.

Cooper also dealt with the concepts of progress and Manifest Destiny. In the Leatherstocking Tales he seems to feel that the advance of civilization throughout continental America is inevitable and generally desirable. The consequence of that advance, as Cooper realizes, is the disappearance of the frontier and the Indian life style. To an extent, Cooper regrets that disappearance; he realizes that the Indian life style has “gifts” that civilization does not offer, but he finally decides in favor of civilization.

Judging from Cooper's popularity, it seems reasonable to assume that he either reflected or helped to shape the popular attitudes of his day, that, to an extent, at least, the myths of the Leatherstocking Tales were, or became, the myths of the people.

What was the effect of the combination of the myth of the Red Devil and the Noble Savage?

Taken singly, the Red Devil myth was dangerous, the Noble Savage myth not so dangerous. Taken together, they presented a picture of an enemy who was not only inspired by Satan, but who was also brave, strong and, perhaps, a better warrior than the whites. Surely something had to be done about such an enemy, and the concepts of Manifest Destiny and progress provided a reason for dealing with him.

At first, Manifest Destiny, like the European concept of the White Man's Burden sounds benign. What could be wrong with bringing civilization to the backward areas of the world?

The problem was that racism was often beneath the high sounding words. Manifest Destiny was largely an extension of the Puritan desire to build a Holy City in the wilderness. And to accomplish this, the Indians had to be removed. When the Big Horn Association was formed in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1879, as editorial appeared indicating how closely related the two concepts were in the minds of the people:

The rich and beautiful valleys of Wyoming are destined for the occupancy and sustenance of the Anglo-Saxon race. The wealth that for untold ages has lain hidden beneath the snow-capped summits of our mountains has been placed there by Providence to reward the brave spirits whose lot it is to compose the advance-guard of civilization. The Indians must stand aside or be overwhelmed by the ever-advancing and ever-increasing tide of Emigration. The destiny of the aborigines is written in characters not to be mistaken. The same inscrutable Arbiter that decreed the downfall of Rome has pronounced the doom of extinction upon the red men of America.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the ubiquitous “captivity narrative” was a standard source for thrilling details of frontier life. As Roy Harvey Pearce suggests in The Savages of America, the Indian of the captivity narrative was the consummate villain, a beast who smashed the skulls of infants, and carried off women. This was the price, according to the narratives, that a peace-loving farmer, a proponent of civilization, paid for attempting to live in the presence of bloody savages. These narratives were frenetic attempts to hold on to the crudest image of the triumphantly brutal Indian. The accounts of Indian atrocities excited the imagination of readers, particularly those unfamiliar with frontier life. But, in fact, readers also saw a discrepancy between what they read and what they experienced, for they knew that the Indian was not destined to gloriously triumph. When they did see Indians, they were dispossessed, degraded and diseased. The readers knew that the Indians beyond the frontier would eventually be in no better condition. Whatever excitement was stirred in the imagination of the reader, it was clear that the Indians would be destroyed; despite the intellectual inquiry into the nature of primitivism and the moral worth of an individual Indian, the way of life of the Indian and his culture were not only alien to the white man, but they appeared to impede progress and pose a threat to civilization. But, although the scenes of horror and portrayals of the Indian which were detailed in the captivity narratives usually did not fit the facts, and although readers saw a different Indian in their limited experience, the literary accounts nevertheless helped substantiate the theory that the Indian must be destroyed for the good of civilization.

While wholesale slaughter occurred in many instances, it was more convenient and virtuous to convert the Indian to white ways whenever possible. The missionaries desperately attempted to Christianize the Indian, and, by extension, to civilize him, since the two were equated in the minds of most white Americans. Usually their civilizing efforts were directed at attempting to teach the Indian how to farm the land, since agriculture was considered a mark of civilization which would raise the Indian out of his savage past and bring him into the mainstream of American civilization. Their efforts were virtual failures. A few missionaries continued to feel that such a conversion could be effected, but most had little understanding of Indian culture, and their failures were largely a result of this misunderstanding. One missionary, James Knowles, concluded in 1834 that it was a divine plan that the Indians be destroyed because they could not obey the “great law of God which obliged them to be civilized, and to adopt those modes of life which would enable their territory to support the greatest number of inhabitants.” Americans, he went on, can fulfill their destiny “by saving from ruin the helpless descendants of the savage.”

The ambivalence toward the Indian would continue throughout most of the literature of the nineteenth century, but his fate was nevertheless assured. Between 1860 and 1890 the Indian was virtually dispossessed; his culture and civilization as he had known it was almost completely destroyed. The Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 signaled the symbolic end of Indian freedom, for by 1890 the frontier had officially been declared closed; Geronimo, the last of the great Apache chiefs, had surrendered; Sitting Bull, a great Sioux leader, was killed; and the Ghost Dance, a ritual performed to bring back the lost Indian past, failed. The removal of the Indian was merely the beginning of his loss of freedom which was inevitable given the context of the Puritan myth and the nineteenth century belief in Manifest Destiny.

Luckily, many American Indians survived the stereotyping of the nineteenth century as well as the gentler but invidious stereotype of incompetency which became more dominant in the early twentieth century. The last few censuses have shown an increase in the population of American Indians, possibly for the first time since 1620. Some reservations even report problems of over populations.

Many mainstream literary writers are attempting to treat Indians as human beings rather than as stereotypes, and many of those writers have had popular success. Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy was, perhaps, the first popular novel that tried to treat an American Indian as a human being. Since Laughing Boy, the trend has been more and more in the direction of humanizing the stereotypes. Frank Waters, A. B. Guthrie, John Neihardt, Ken Kesey, William Eastlake, Thomas Berger and others have achieved success trying to create human characters who happened to be Indians.

But today's Indians have not been content to let white men portray them. While some Indians have been busy organizing movements and fighting (often successfully) for recognition of treaty rights, others have developed into excellent writers. Essayist Vine Deloria, Jr., novelist N. Scott Momaday and poet James Welsh are among the best known, but Indian writers are springing up across the country, as are organs for their publication, such as Akwesasne Notes and The Indian Historian. Perhaps the best way to counter ethnic stereotyping—in spite of Chief Red Fox—is for members of minority groups to make their own literature available to others.