[In the following essay, Hamilton presents an overview of fictional representations of Native Americans by Anglo writers.]

The problem in this research is to identify the changing attitudes of American fictional authors toward the American Indian and the roles they attributed to the natives from early America to the Civil War, and to explore the relationship of these attitudes and prescribed roles to changing societal views about the native Americans.

From Captain John Smith's dramatic rescue by Pocahontas in the early seventeenth century down to N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1969), the American Indian has furnished inspiration to a multitude of writers. Specifically, the westward movement of an aggressive Anglo-Saxon culture left its imprint in the records of those who by force or superior cunning succeeded in taking the country from its original inhabitants. This tragic, yet colorful, drama imbues a large part of the literature that reveals the way American Indians have been portrayed to the reading public. Thus it is with the Indian portraits painted by some of the major writers in American fictional literature, and more specifically as they reflect the attitudes of society toward these original natives, that this paper is chiefly concerned. The first American writers compared the background and the mode of living of the Indians with the European ways of life in the seventeenth century and consequently felt the Indians were an inferior race. This notion of race superiority has been one of the most persistent themes throughout the history of American literature.

Although the American Indian has formed a dramatic nucleus from which a sizable part of American literature has come, few writers have evaluated this nucleus in a comprehensive way. Albert Keiser has written the broadest examination of this material in The Indian in American Literature, and, while he examines both factual and fictional works related to Indians, he fails to correlate any attitudinal factors with the various character depictions of the Indian. Elsewhere, Roy Harvey Pearce, in The Savages of America: A Study of the Idea of Civilization, looks at all literature that he feels has dealt with the Indian as a savage and concludes that the so-called “civilized” Americans measured their progress against the “savagism” of the Indians. There have also been a few scholarly studies made on a smaller scale, but no study has dealt significantly with underlying social attitudes and none has attempted to show a correlation between these attitudes and those advanced by writers of fiction. Generally speaking, two attitudinal patterns have emerged from this survey, and it will be seen that they correlate significantly with events and attitudes expressed in factual accounts. The literature of colonial America depicts the Indian as somewhat of a Satanic savage, a view held by most Anglo-Saxons, and that notion was replaced by the nineteenth century version of the noble savage.

The following authors of fiction were selected for this study: Philip Freneau and Charles Brockden Brown comprise one school of thought and the content of their works suggests the label, “The Ethnocentric Conquerors.” The other group, “The Ethnocentric Romantics,” includes writers like James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Nonfiction works were used to validate the attitudes expressed by the writers of fiction during a given period of time and include such names as John Smith, Mary Roylandson, Jonathan Dickinson, John Tanner, Francis Parkman, and George Bancroft. A qualitative analysis was used to analyze the underlying connotations and implications found in the various fictional works and to correlate them to historical events and societal attitudes.

THE ETHNOCENTRIC CONQUERORS

The social and literary significance of attitudes toward roles assigned to Indians in American literature should not be overlooked. Indeed, these attitudes began to appear as early as the Jamestown settlement when John Smith was reportedly rescued by Pocahontas. And they were unwittingly given further emphasis by Smith's account of his own travels and relationships with the Indians in his book titled New England Trials. He wrote that “God made Pocahontas the Kings Daughter the meanes to deliuer me.”¹ In 1624 the details appeared in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles, where the following passage appeared:

At his [Smith's] entrance before the King … two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beat out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death; whereat the Emperour was contented he should live.²

The credibility of this dramatic rescue has interested historians and writers for generations and will no doubt continue to do so for some time. This romantic incident, whether fabricated from fantasy or from an actual episode, had a remarkable influence on the writing of American literature. In fact, the theme reappeared for the next three hundred years in drama, prose, poetry, and fiction whenever writers were dealing with the subject of Indians.

Albert Keiser suggests in The Indian in American Literature that Smith's work is “true to Indian character,”³ and, whether Smith exaggerated or not, he helped to lay the groundwork for the stereotyping of native roles in the minds of those unacquainted with the American Indian. Smith wrote that the Queen of Appamatuck was appointed to “bring him water to wash his hands,” while another maiden “brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them.” The maidens also “feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could,”⁴ and upon another occasion, “Pocahontas with her attendants, brought him so much provisions, that saved many of their lives.”⁵ Thus the belief that all female Indians play a subservient role to the men, despite their station in life, was given currency. In his Map of Virginia, 1612, Smith appraised the women as strong, nimble, and able to endure exposure to the heat. Of their general characteristics, he said: “Some are of disposition fearefull, some bold, most cautelous, all Savage. … They are soon moved to anger and so malitious, that they seldome forget an injury.”⁶ He depicted the Indian male role somewhat differently when he wrote: “The men bestowe their times in fishing, hunting, wars and such man-like exercises, scorning to be seene in any woman like exercise; which is that the women be verie paineful and the men often idle.”⁷ Of the Indians in general, he expressed the opinion that they were “so many divels.”⁸

This early portrait of the American Indian helped to establish a tradition for the wealth of literature that was to follow. It stereotyped male and female characteristics and established an attitude recognizable throughout the history of American literature.

Whereas the American Indians provided adventure and flattery for John Smith, the early settlers, particularly the Puritans, saw them as the nemesis of God's chosen people. Indeed, as Keiser has written, “the Indians became enemies in the eyes of the Pilgrim fathers, who believed that the New World was the promised land which was theirs to possess even if every one of the Canaanites perished at the point of the sword.”⁹ Smith further perpetuated this attitude when he wrote his justification for taking land, which belonged to “none but the poor savages,”¹⁰ on the basis of God's creation of the earth for civilized man's inhabitation and cultivation. Thus the New England conscience was not troubled by any contrary scruples, for public opinion was practically unanimous in its approval of so-called Christian rights.

By 1637, the desire for expansion on the part of the Anglo-Americans was so intense that legislation was enacted by the General Court of Connecticut and subsequently caused a war with the Pequot tribe. The court levied and provisioned a force of ninety men and placed them under the command of John Mason. Soon other colonies joined in these extreme measures aimed at the annihilation of the Pequots. In the subsequent battles, between six and seven hundred Indians perished, whereas the English loss was only two. It took the Indians forty years to regain any sort of order, and under the leadership of King Philip, a sachem of the Wampanoag, they attempted to overthrow white supremacy. The war continued for two years and ended with Philip's defeat, but not until he had succeeded in killing from six to eight hundred white settlers. These conflicts, the first known as the Pequot War and the latter known as King Philip's War, furnished the writers of the era and a multitude to follow with graphic descriptions of atrocities committed by Indians. These descriptions accordingly laid the foundation for the savage image ascribed to the Indian.

The early settlers and writers felt that God was helping them to destroy the Indians regardless of methods employed, which in turn caused them to rationalize that the actions of the Indians were brutal. By contrast, their own inhumane actions performed in quest of civilization and Christianity seemed justified. This anti-Indian attitude is depicted in practically all of the literature produced during the formative years of the colonies, and it is particularly evident in the works of Philip Freneau and Charles Brockden Brown.

The name of King Philip remained for many years on the tip of writers' pens and became the subject of numerous stories, poems, and dramas, some of which attained wide popularity. Examples are “Yamoyden” and the play Matamora. Philip also appeared a hundred and fifty years later in Cooper's Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish as one of the three main characters of the novel. The Puritans naturally looked upon him as the incarnation of the devil. His character, however, has been variously estimated by different historians, depending upon the role ascribed to him and the social significance attached to it.

By the end of the seventeenth century, narratives of captivities began to appear which perpetuated the brutal and savage image of the Indians. The first widely read account, for example, was The Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which appeared in 1682. Mary Rowlandson, the wife of a minister, gave her first-hand account of ordeals that were to become indelible reinforcements of the notion of Indian savagism. She stated that “none can imagine what it is to be captivated, and enslaved to such atheisticall, proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, bruitish (in one word) diabolicall creatures as these, the worst of the heathen.”¹¹ She further described their violence in the following manner:

There were five persons taken in one house, the Father, and the Mother, and a sucking Child, they knockt on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive. There were two others, who being out of their Garison upon some occasion were set upon; one was knockt on the head, the other escaped: Another there was who running along was shot and wounded, and fell down; he begged of them his life, promising them Money (as they told me) but they would not hearken to him, but knockt him in head, and stript him naked, and split open his Bowels … Thus these murtherous wretches went on, burning, and destroying before them.¹²

This notion of Satanic savagery was perpetuated to the twentieth century when, in 1903, the editors of a facsimile of Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative praised her work as “an authentic and graphic contemporary delineation of the manners and customs of the primitive children of the soil.”¹³

Among the subsequent captivity narratives, two meticulously delineate Indian characteristics and savage roles. Jonathan Dickinson wrote Narrative of a Shipwreck in the Gulph of Florida in 1699, and portrayed the Indians as hostile and ruthless as they snatched clothing from shipwreck victims in a “most barbarous manner.”¹⁴ Dickinson's account also described the cold, hunger, and thirst suffered by the whites while captive of Indians. In 1830, The Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner continued to reinforce the notion of a “hostile savage running rampant upon the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the continent.”¹⁵ Tanner's work also furnished Longfellow with the basic theme of his Song of Hiawatha in 1855.

Meanwhile, the Puritan writers on the subject of Indians were less interested in their culture than in the fallen spiritual condition so manifest in that culture. They saw heathen Indians beyond rescue in a low level of civilization, and reasoned that God was helping them to destroy these savages in their Satanic plot against “God's Chosen People.”¹⁶ This attitude also remained a continuing theme in the works of writers during the colonial period in America. After the danger of attack diminished, some authors felt that the Indians might be absorbed into the Anglo-American civilization, but the notion of Indian Satanic savagery was well written by this time and would not soon change.

The clash between white and red cultures during the colonial period was the subject of a number of poems which dramatized the red man's unhappy fate. In fact, by the eighteenth century a real change in the beliefs and attitudes of the leading scholars in American literature had begun to take shape. Dogmatic religion was infiltrated by the restraints of reason, which enabled writers to see Indian culture in a new perspective and not simply as a threat to Christianity. Roy Harvey Pearce points out that “this matter of the essential integrity of savage life … became increasingly the main concern of eighteenth-century Americans writing on the Indian.”¹⁷ Furthermore, these new philosophical attitudes gave further impetus to the romantic characterizations of the natives in the nineteenth century.

At the time of the American Revolution, some Anglos had begun to view the Indian with more sympathy, which in turn eased the long and damaging stigma of savagery. Philip Freneau, who has been called the “Father of American Poetry,”¹⁸ was a pioneer figure in the use of Indian material for poetical purpose, and his favorable characterization of native Americans created lasting impressions. Reinforcing the romantic notion of the noble savage, Freneau fashioned an appropriate corollary to the belief in the natural goodness of man. He saw the Indians as a doomed race, doomed because they were simple lovers of nature and were therefore unable to compete with the stronger, more aggressive, and technically more advanced white race. Their stoicism and spiritual orientation would be of no avail. Freneau also formulated an early concept of Indian character. He described it in terms of honesty, a belief in immortality, and faithfulness. This emerging positive attitude toward Indians had its roots in the naturalism of the period and a poetic imagination truly romantic.

A similarly favorable light was cast upon the native Americans in Freneau's first published work, titled The American Village:

And rav'nous nations with industrious toil,
Conspir'd to rob them of their native soil;
Then bloody wars, and death and rage arose,
And ev'ry tribe resolv'd to be our foes.(19)

He offered another paean with the following praise:

Full many a feat of them I could rehearse,
And actions worthy of immortal verse:
Deeds ever glorious to the indian name,
And fit to rival greek or roman fame.(20)

Freneau felt that the Indians were innately honorable, and that they were driven to a warlike spirit by the Europeans who inflicted sorrow and suffering upon them while taking their homeland.

In Freneau's later work, the Indian is placed in a less favorable light, which in turn reflects the vacillating attitudes of the settlers during this transitional period. Materialism is the theme of a poem titled “The Indian Convert,” in which Freneau portrays the native in a more domestic role. For example, it illustrates the skepticism with which an Indian male views the promise of “beautiful things in heaven”²¹ offered up by the Christian faith, but which are not as tangible as his fishing, fowling, or stealing. The following dialogue illustrates the keen, questioning character of the native American and his concern for rewards available here and now:

Said he, Master Minister, this place that you talk of,
Of things for the stomach, pray what has it got;
Has it liquors in plenty?—If so I'll soon walk off
And put myself down in the heavenly spot.
You fool (said the preacher) no liquors are there!
The place I'm describing is most like our meeting,
Good people, all singing, with preaching and prayers;
They live upon these without eating or drinking.
But the doors are all locked against folks that are wicked;
And you, I am fearful, will never get there:—
A life of repentance must purchase the ticket,
And few of you, Indians, can buy it, I fear.
Farewell (said the Indian) I'm none of your mess;
On victuals, so airy, I faintish should feel,
I cannot consent to be lodged in a place
Where there's nothing to eat and but little to steal.(22)

Freneau most likely misinterpreted the Indian's preoccupation with the immediate needs for sustenance and the naturalism of his religion as rejections of spiritual values in life.

In the poem “The Indian Student,” Freneau pens another example of the Indian's failure to accept the cultural values of the white man when he states that “He sought to gain no learned degree; / But only sense enough to find / The squirrel in the hollow tree.”²³ The Indian is not only independent and practical to Freneau, but he is also the “murderous Indian,” the “cruel Indian,” the “hostile squadrons” who is scornful of the Christian heaven. According to Harry Hayden Clark, this “bifurcated attitude toward the Indian … he [Freneau] shares with the eighteenth century viewer.”²⁴ Freneau introduces the reader to the value of the native American as nature's nobleman with individual dignity and honor, and he soon comes to realize that the Indian's hostilities toward the white man were directly correlated with Anglo societal attitudes and actions.

At the outset of the nineteenth century the Indian began to attract the attention of more writers as well as an expanded reading public. It was during this period that Charles Brockden Brown began to exploit the native American in fiction by casting him in a stereotyped fashion in order to add excitement to his tales. His book, Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1801), places the Indian in the role of a murderous savage. One should not be surprised to learn that Huntly's nearest relatives and friends suffered injury and even death at the hands of Indians and that Huntly narrowly escaped from a similar fate. Brown informs the reading public in his preface that he wants to “profit by some of the numerous and inexhaustible sources of amusement to the fancy and instruction to the heart peculiar to America, and to exhibit a series of adventures growing out of the conditions of the new country.”²⁵ The short of it is, he labels his story factual while depicting his Indians in fiction.

Brown characterizes an old Indian woman in the role of a strong-willed and strong-minded individual known as Queen Mab, who lives on public bounty, and who, because of fancied grievances, encourages her people to raid the offending white settlers. John Erskine states in Leading American Novelists that “Queen Mab represents a true Indian personality … [and] probably the most characteristic in all Brockden Brown's writing.”²⁶ Brown's portrait of her seems at times to be from observation:

Though in solitude, her tongue was never at rest but when she was asleep; but her conversation was merely addressed to her dogs. Her voice was sharp and shrill, and her gesticulations were vehement and grotesque. … She seldom left the hut but to visit the neighboring inhabitants, and demand from them food and clothing, or whatever her necessities required.²⁷

She felt that by remaining behind when her tribe left, she would become ruler of all the region and would then allow the alien English to occupy the land merely by her permission for her convenience. They were allowed to remain on the condition that they supply her wants and needs. The whole affair stems from grim reality and reflects the growing hatred of a race that was being systematically driven from its hunting grounds by the advancing Anglos. The encroachments of the English as well as the many injuries suffered by the Indians served as background for the schemes of revenge conceived by Queen Mab. For example, she incited visiting relatives to murder as a direct result of refusal on the part of the people of Chetasco to honor her royal claims. Thus her character is frequently described as a woman who demanded her just due from nature and life.

The opinions offered by Huntly, the main character, with regard to the Indians are no doubt in harmony with the attitudes entertained by the colonists. Huntly and his two sisters narrowly escaped death when Indians plundered, pillaged, and burned their home and murdered their parents and an infant. Keiser, for instance, expresses the belief that Brown “has the colonist's conception of the Indian as a murderous savage, whose every action if not closely circumscribed leads to tragedy.”²⁸ Brown creates a vivid impression of the physique and mentality of the Indian when he speaks of the “tawny and terrific visage,” their “huge limbs inured to combat and war-torn,”²⁹ and with “sanguinary and murderous dispositions.”³⁰ He further emphasizes the brutality of Indians with graphic descriptions like “… into the midst of savages, to wage an endless and hopeless war with adepts in killing; with appetites that longed to feast upon my bowels and to quaff my heart's blood.”³¹ These remarks about the Indian's bellicose behavior reflect the settler's general attitudes toward native Americans.

Thus, according to the ethnocentric conquerors of this early period, American Indians were uncivilized, unchristian, and ruthless. Since any other image of the Indian is rare for this period in history, it must be assumed that the Satanic savage symbol assigned to the native American by the writers of the era was in fact a prevailing societal attitude.

THE ETHNOCENTRIC ROMANTICS

In 1820 a literary production about miscegenation was offered to the reading public by James Wallis Eastburn and Robert C. Sands in Yamoyden, A Tale of the Wars of King Philip. It is an epic poem based upon the noble role of the Indian, but it is more than that, it is also an indictment of the shameful treatment of the native American at the hands of the Anglo. Philip is placed in the role of a hero who is wise, bold, and true, and who

Fought, because he would not yield
His birthright, and his father's field;
Would vindicate the deep disgrace,
The wrongs, the ruin of his race;—
He slew, that well avenged in death,
His kindred spirits pleased might be;—
… ‘Tis the death wail of a departed race,—(32)

Thus Eastburn and Sands depict a race sent down to destruction by the greed and acquisitiveness of the white man. The Puritan settlers are strongly condemned for their treatment of the Indian, whereas the native American is praised for his gallant battle. And by suggesting a change in societal attitude toward the Indian, the authors unwittingly helped to set the stage for the next step in the development of literature about Indians.

James Fenimore Cooper was particularly well known for his writings about the native American through his Leatherstocking tales. Obtained in part from other writers and to some extent from observation, Cooper's portrayal of the Indian probably reflected the general consensus of the time. Keiser, for example, expresses the belief that Cooper did in fact mirror contemporary attitudinal feelings of his era. He states that “it is clear that Cooper carefully gathered all available material from what he considered the most authentic sources [and] … combined with his own observations this formed a respectable body of valuable material.”³³ He further wrote that “Cooper has given the world a remarkably complete and faithful picture of the character and life of the aborigines of primitive America.”³⁴ It should be noted, however, that John Erskine and Mark Twain, among others, felt differently. In fact, Erskine cautions that Cooper's works contain “more romance than reality.”³⁵

The most notable critic of Cooper during the mid-nineteenth century was Francis Parkman, who was particularly harsh on writers given to the idealization of the native American. Indeed, Parkman believed that the Indian was an “irreclaimable son of the wilderness,” and he admonished Cooper in a review in which he accused him of “fathering … those aboriginal heroes in our literature.”³⁶ In Cooper's estimation, which is in nearly every instance antithetical to Parkman's, the evil forces in man have made civilization destructive. Thus the extermination of the Indian becomes a moral issue rather than an economic and political expedient.

Cooper might be considered a social novelist since he attempted to preserve and nourish the moral values of an emerging enlightenment, and to have America use the new humanism in her treatment of the native Americans. He said that his objective in writing the tales was “to represent society, under its ordinary faces, in the act of passing from the influence of one set of governing principles to that of another.”³⁷ His most celebrated subject was the western frontier, where American society was trading in an old set of principles, or values, for a more modern and viable one. It is sometimes difficult to understand Cooper unless one recognizes that his narratives were intended to reveal ideal modes of action. That is to say, Cooper was primarily a moralist, an expounder of a particular code of morality, not a philosopher seeking moral truth in the maze of the human condition. He strove to arouse interest, but he shrouded the interest and suspense in a veil of moral values and lessons.

Cooper's Indians generally represent uncorrupted morals indicative of the wilderness environment. David Brion Davis, in his essay titled “Deerslayer, A Democratic Knight of the Wilderness,” turns to analogy in order to show that “the Indian maiden and her betrothed enjoy the original, sinless love of Adam and Eve before the fall.”³⁸ Furthermore, when the moral principles of the Indian maiden seem to be compromised by her acceptance of war and violence, Cooper reminds us that she is an aborigine and that her environment and values make her a savage child of God.

Cooper's Indians are noble in their distaste of hypocrisy and in their fidelity to fixed natural values. And if their unique principles and spiritual values prevent them from reaching the upper limits of Christian morality, they successfully reconcile physical violence with an unshakable faith in traditional law. Indeed, Cooper's Indians were governed by custom and natural law, whereas the Anglo pioneers, isolated as they were from the refinements of civilized society, were marked by a lack of restraint, ignorance, prejudice, and a bizarre code of honor. Davis believes that the Leatherstocking tales reflect violence with a theme of “killing Indians”³⁹ and that they suggest the “abrupt intrusion of civilization and the imminent corruption of natural creation.”⁴⁰ For example, Cooper seemingly dwells upon the racial overtones of the colonial wars, where human justice was frequently suspended while the two races killed one another. Some forty years earlier, Charles Brockden Brown had referred to the killing of Indians by the whites as a “loathsome obligation”⁴¹ followed by remorse and guilt. In the frontier tales of the 1830's and 1840's, however, we find what might be called a ritualistic pattern of persecution and killing of the Indians by the whites, and this in turn was followed by retaliatory actions on the part of the native Americans. On the other hand, writers of the period might have claimed a kind of justification for having perpetuated the violence on paper since it exemplified in no small way society's attitude toward the Indians.

In a similar vein, Cooper used the Indian in order to exalt the Anglo-American. For example, the native American served as a means to understand American progress on a comparative basis, for Indian culture was depicted on the whole to be morally inferior to Anglo civilized society. Pearce contends that Cooper was “taking them [Indians] as his culture gave them to him. And he was to give them back to his culture imaged so powerfully that they could never be rejected, yet imaged so powerfully that no one could doubt that they had to be destroyed.”⁴² Thus, when approached from this point of view, the Indian ceases to be the main theme in Cooper's works, but rather he becomes a vehicle for measuring the progress of the white man's civilized life.

The Leatherstocking tales imaged more vividly than any of Cooper's other novels the notion of the native American in the idealized savage role. The tales revolve around a frontiersman who mediates between the savage and the civilized worlds. Never completely accepted in civilized society, Cooper's frontiersman takes refuge in the belief that he is far better than the lowly Indian. Moreover, the frontiersman believes that his somewhat exalted social position gives him the right to remove or exterminate the Indian.

The key to understanding the difference between white and Indian roles, according to Cooper, lies in their “gifts.” This difference, he further contends, is a result of the environment rather than innate factors, as can be seen in The Deerslayer:

A natur' is the creatur' itself; its wishes, wants, idees, and feeling's, as all are born in him. … Gifts come of sarcumstances. Thus, if you put a man in a town, he gets town gifts … [and] in a forest, gifts of the woods.⁴³

In the same Leatherstocking tale, Cooper did some rationalizing through his main character:

God made us all, white, black and red … he gave each race its gifts. A white man's gifts are christianized, while a redskin's are more for the wilderness. Thus, it would be a great offense for a white man to scalp the dead; whereas it's a signal vartue for an Indian.⁴⁴

Virtually all Indian traits found in Cooper's tales are rationalized in this fashion and in every instance they are found to be inferior to those of civilized Anglo life. Indeed, as Pearce has pointed out, “all [of] Cooper's Indian stories are civilized fictions in which the Indian is imaged as a measure of the noncivilized and is made to die as both Chingachgook and Leatherstocking have died.”⁴⁵

Characteristically, Cooper's Indians are endowed with all the qualities of savagery, nobility, bravery, cunning, courage and artfulness, yet their character is diminished, in the views of Cooper, by their constant pursuit of hunting and warfare. He offers the following description of Indian character in the Introduction to The Last of the Mohicans:

Few men exhibit greater diversity, or, if we may so express it, greater antithesis of character, than the native warrior of North America. In War, he is daring, boastful, cunning, ruthless, self-denying, and self-devoted; in peace, just, generous, hospitable, revengeful, superstitious, modest, and commonly chaste. These are qualities, it is true, which do not distinguish all alike, but they are so far the predominating traits of these remarkable people as to be characteristic.⁴⁶

These antithetical views demonstrate that Cooper was capable of painting a balanced picture of the Indian, but the predominance of the inferior-Indian syndrome throughout his works indicates that he was fully under the spell of ethnocentrism.

In The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Cooper describes the Indians as “dying heroes,”⁴⁷ and then proceeds to pen a “study of Indian morality”⁴⁸ in Wyandotté. The main character, Wyandotté, regains his savage manhood by killing his white master, and then proceeds to fulfill his manhood by returning of his own free will to serve his master's family. But, having come from the forest, Wyandotté can never attain the high standards of morality peculiar to his Anglo master.

The Last of the Mohicans is the only Leatherstocking tale that comes close to having an exclusively Indian theme. For instance, Cooper includes Indian customs, strategy, and even his faults and code of honor. Finally, he describes the qualities of the native American on the subject of romance, and concludes that this may well be the one dimension of behavior where the Indian is superior to the Anglo.

In The Deerslayer, celebrated as Cooper's finest work, white people are described as working and living in close contact with the native Americans, while the main character, Deerslayer, seeks to maintain the peace. The setting is the wilderness and the drama is provided by a young Mohican, Chingachgook, who risks his life in order to rescue his beloved Wah-ta!-Wah, a Delaware, from the Hurons and to defend his friend Deerslayer. This romantic adventure delineates key roles of individuals commonly found in the Indian culture. For example, Wah-ta!-Wah must carry her own papoose and perform the duties frequently assigned to the woman, whereas Chingachgook concentrates upon his prescribed role of warrior. Indeed, his role is played with what Cooper considers to be hereditary bravery and cunning.

According to Keiser, the attitude of Deerslayer's supposed friend, Hurry Harry, reveals the belief held by many of the colonists at that time when he states that “both considered the Mingoes as more than half devils, and to be dealt with as such.”⁴⁹ Another example of societal attitudes is revealed when Cooper mentions the use of a rich bounty offered by the colonial government for the scalps of Indians, with no distinction being made between warriors and helpless women and children. Furthermore, this notion was perpetuated by the various governmental agencies on and around the periphery of the frontier. Acts of violence, according to Clark Wissler, inevitably “dominate the history of the frontier because they are the climaxes in the adjustment of the Indian to the white.”⁵⁰ This should not suggest that the Indians and whites did not have mutual understandings and reciprocal trade agreements. In fact, records show that they exchanged goods, geographical information, and knowledge of agriculture and woodcraft.

Most American fictional literature before the time of the Civil War fails to treat the Indian as a member of a particular tribe, much less as an individual in the human sense, but rather it treats him as a red man in a dehumanized sense. It is written with the entertainment of the reader in mind and thus focuses on the spectacular and unusual. Washington Irving expressed the belief that the Indians of the early periods of colonization had been doubly wronged by the white man:

They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare; and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers. The Colonist often treated them like beast of the forest; and the author endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it easier to exterminate than to civilize; the latter to vilify than to discriminate.⁵¹

Indeed, vilification was less often the goal than an exciting narrative, but the result was the same.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the most frequent theme in literature about native Americans was how civilization, for all of its material progress and spiritual goodness, inevitably destroyed the fabric of savage nobility. The image of the Indian became meaningful, therefore, as a prime example of the tension between savagery and civilization. Pearce tries to explain this preoccupation of the popular writers by saying, “They knew their readers wanted them to; that therefore the iteration and the obsession mark a deep need in the collective American imagination of the second quarter of the century.”⁵²

Southerner William Gilmore Simms was a contemporary of Cooper and used much the same theme. He wrote two full-length novels about American Indians as well as a number of essays, short stories, and poems. Writing from his own personal observations, Simms felt that his picture of the native was authentic and unbiased; and the uncivilized native was the framework upon which Simms created his most popular work, The Yemassee, in 1835. In this novel Simms maintains that the degrading and humiliating relationship of the Indian with the white man is not a true image of the native of the wilderness, but only of the Indian-white relationship within the civilized society. Moreover, Keiser endorses this belief when he gives Simms credit for writing “one of the most faithful portraits of the American native.”⁵³

The subject of The Yemassee is the uprising in 1715 of the Yemassee Indians against the British colonists of South Carolina—an actual historical event which Simms sees as significant because it represents one of the major obstacles that his southern nation had to face. The English established settlements in South Carolina on land desired by the Spanish but which the English nevertheless acquired from the Yemassee tribe both by barter and by treaty. The Indians had an unprecedented faith in dealing honestly in trade, but this innocence was soon discovered and exploited by the Anglo's deceit in measuring land, giving the Indian poor value for goods received, or by robbing while the Indian was drunk.

The colonies as far north as Virginia and as far west as Mississippi were claimed by Spain through priority of discovery; and in this area the Yemassee Indians were, at first, friendly to the white man, that is, until he took the major portion of their lands and introduced liquor among them. The Carolinians had advanced into this fertile, primeval land, and the Indians had become more stubborn about continued encroachment upon their ancient tribal preserve despite white attempts at “bartering.” All of this led to conspiracies among the Indians against the white settlers, and ultimately to an alliance with the Spaniards against the English. It was this internecine strife that formed the framework for Simms' novel.

J. V. Ridgely says the book's major theme is “what the colonists and the Indians signify in terms of a growing civilization in the South, and he … weaves the facts of history into a wholly fictional main plot.”⁵⁴ Simms described this encounter between the old and new cultures, and the subsequent changes it brought to both peoples. For example, the altered condition of the Indian society is symbolized in the degradation of the chieftain's son, Occonestoga, whose body and will have been corrupted by the settler's liquor. John Erskine explains Simms' degradation of the son by rationalizing that “the younger nature is less fixed and more easily lured.”⁵⁵ As disaster overtook those unable to adapt themselves to the relentless march of civilization, Simms maintained again and again that much of the treachery which we attribute to the aborigine was the result of his introduction to liquor.

For Simms, the role of the female Indian in society is much the same as the one perceived by Cooper—that is, a tender-hearted but strong-willed woman. Matiwan, the mother of Occonestoga and the wife of the chief of the Yemassee, is such a woman. For example, her most sterling qualities are revealed through her unshakable love for an errant son, devotion to her dying husband, as well as the courage necessary to carry through her convictions. Authorities like Keiser acclaim her as one of the “most noble and attractive woman in American literature,”⁵⁶ and the best example of Indian womanhood. Elsewhere, Jason Almus Russell sees Matiwan as the “great, fine, and pure type of Indian woman found in fiction.”⁵⁷ Finally, Simms makes her the vehicle for saving Occonestoga from disgrace by allowing Matiwan to administer the fatal blow. This incident is felt to be both logical and true, since it is the one thing she would do. The paradox of such a deed, as the work of sublime love, lifts the episode to a plane higher than mere adventure, and simultaneously describes the character of an Indian woman.

The chieftain's death in the final battle signals the end of the Yemassee dynasty and thus is symbolic of the fate of the Indians. Although the reader is shown both sides of the struggle, Simms suggests that the Indians' territorial claims are necessarily finished despite their prior claim to the land. In a lengthy argument over the Indian question between Hugh Grayson, a young colonist, and the Reverend Mr. Matthews, the settlement's minister, Simms expressed what he considered to be the recognized point of view of his fictional settlers, and most likely of society in general, when he wrote:

It is utterly impossible that the whites and Indians should ever live together and agree. The nature of things is against it, and the very difference between the two, that of colour, perceptible to our most ready sentinel, the sight, must always constitute them an inferior caste in our minds.⁵⁸

Simms' belief in white supremacy is clearly illustrated by the advance of the colonists through Indian hunting grounds, as well as in the degradation and degeneracy of any native who refused to leave an area wanted by the white man. There was no place for the Indian in civilized society, according to Simms, and he delineated this social attitude when one of his characters spoke of Indian inferiority: “When conscious of our superiority, and unfamiliar with our language, they are necessarily taciturn; as it is the pride of an Indian to hide his deficiencies. … He conceals his ignorance in silence.”⁵⁹

Simms felt that the Indians must be driven westward to work out their own fates in their own seemingly classless society, and this attitude toward the Indian can be more easily understood when viewed against the social class structure of the colony. Simms, for instance, describes the colony's social structure as having a leader, a middle class, and lower order. The white renegade, or outcast, is representative of the third, or lowest, class, whereas the Indian is so low he is not even included in the class structure. Furthermore, since the white renegades and Indians are killed in the story, it should be clear that Simms is suggesting that such people had to be removed before society could perfect itself. Simms also demonstrates a latent sympathy for the “inferior” race, but concludes that destiny evidently had to take its course:

It is in the nature of civilization to own an appetite for dominion and extend sway, which the world that is known will always fail to satisfy. It is for her, then to seek out and to create, and … to weep for the triumph of the unknown. Conquest and sway are the great leading principles of her existence, and the savage must join in her train, or she rides over him relentlessly in her onward progress.⁶⁰

The author is thus advocating that the Indian must set aside his defiance and try to adapt for the salvation of his race.

By mid-nineteenth century many native Americans had been sent west by the infamous relocation policy of the Jacksonian era, and, as a result, writers began to reflect a change in the thinking of many people toward native Americans. Far from the Anglos, many Indians began to gain relief from the ancient stigmas as representatives of Satan. In fact, they soon began to assume an idealized image in the eastern states. Thus neither Cooper nor Simms created the noble savage of the nineteenth century; they merely reflected societal attitudes and called attention to the Indian. The earliest concept of the noble savage actually germinated in the minds of the Deist philosophers of the eighteenth century whose rationalism idealized the child of nature and assaulted the Christian doctrine of the fall of man. It held that the Indian in his state of nature was the noblest work of God. Indeed, the artificialities of civilization paled beside the artistic sense of the Indian. For further information on this topic, see Nature's Simple Plan: A Phase of Radical Thought in the Mid-Eighteenth Century by Chauncey B. Tinker (Princeton University Press, 1922).

During the pre-Civil War period, scholars also began to search for a better understanding of the native American and, in part, to preserve some of the legendary material created by and about Indians. Furthermore, the behavior of the Indian was rationalized as the result of his experiences and his way of life, all with the conviction that the Indian might be regenerated or at least helped. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Joaquin Miller were leaders among those who started this movement.

Henry Schoolcraft was one of the first to compile a collection of Indian tales and legends, which was published in 1839 under the title, Algic Researches. This research started a trend which was to acknowledge the contributions of a disappearing race and furnished a source upon which future writers could rely.

Longfellow gave Schoolcraft credit for having furnished the background material for his acclaimed poem, The Song of Hiawatha. A recent writer, Leon H. Vincent, sees the poem not so much as a commentary on the manners and customs of the Indian, but rather as “free handling of Ojibway legends drawn from Schoolcraft's Algic Researches.”⁶¹ In Longfellow's poem, the negative side of Indian character is kept in the background, whereas his noble and picturesque qualities are brought to the front. Indeed, in this saga of a legendary hero who is sent as a benefactor to the American Indians, Longfellow promotes the notion of helping native Americans. Hiawatha is to meet with the various tribes, representative of the natives on the American continent, for a great council which has been called to end the feuding and vengeance that have persisted down through the years. Furthermore, Hiawatha suggests that the implications from the internecine strife down through the years have made peace and tranquility impossible. Unity, he feels, is the key to survival. For example: “All your strength is in your union, / All your danger is in discord.”⁶² Unity is further hoped for with a wedding which would unite two enemy tribes; however, Hiawatha's efforts end on an ineffectual note with his death. This epic also delineates an imagined history of the native Americans from the stages of hunting and fishing to the beginnings of agriculture.

The paradox of the saga by Longfellow is pointed out by Keiser when he states that “it is only with advancing civilization that these conceptions fade in the light of a more rational viewpoint. Thus there is maintained a consistent attitude reflecting the prevailing state of mind.”⁶³ Finally, the validity of the conclusions in the poem is reported on by George Bancroft, a famed historian of the nineteenth century, when he says that “as a whole it represents wonderfully well the infantile character of Indian life.”⁶⁴ Elsewhere, Schoolcraft credited Longfellow with treating the Indian as he really was. For example, “He is a warrior in war, a savage in revenge, a stoic in endurance, a wolverine in suppleness and cunning. … He is as simple as a child, yet with the dignity of a man in his wigwam.”⁶⁵

The Song of Hiawatha, therefore, represents a successful poetic delineation of the American Indian in the pre-Civil War period. A free and independent native is wistfully portrayed, one who is just moving into the dawn of civilization, but still remains uncorrupted by contact with the Anglos. He is shown with a genuine concern for domestic relations, and for his social and civic life, both of which are sometimes beset with the discord that comes from war and stress that comes from an uncivilized existence. Hiawatha feels it all will end in disaster for large numbers without far-sighted leaders who can bring unity. Longfellow thus attempts to bring understanding to the reading public, and much of that understanding was the inevitability of the doom of a race whose intra-tribal strife rendered it incapable of defending itself from the Anglos.

The most significant observations found in literature about Indians before the Civil War, therefore, are that writers emphasized the ruthlessness of the white race, the doomed fate of the Indian, and the stoic bravery and poetic appeal of his seemingly helpless condition. The most persistent theme of the Indian to this point in history was doubtless his decline from a noble and conquering race. Over one hundred treaties had been made, in addition to the removal of most Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River. Finally, it is evident that a public awareness of the Indian condition began to emerge in pre-Civil War America, as reflected in the literature and legislation of the period.

The purpose of this research has been to note the different attitudes toward American Indians expressed in the fictional works of selected major American authors who were representative of the thinking of their time, and to explore the relationship between their attitudes and those of society. There exists a close correlation between these two sets of attitudes, and the method used to validate this hypotheses has been to read selected books, chosen for their popular appeal as best sellers, and to compare the attitudes found in fiction with those in nonfiction of the same era. Literature was used for this study mainly because it is the oldest discipline that has the most extensive treatment on the subject of native Americans. Thus age alone makes literature, and fiction in particular, a significant source for collecting samples of cultural norms of the people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This paper has demonstrated that Anglo-American attitudes toward the native American changed radically from colonial times to the Civil War, and that change was, in no small measure, influenced by the location and availability of land. Indeed, until recent times, the worth of a man was measured by the amount and location of land that he held, and, if we put credence in the hypothesis advanced by Professor Frederick Jackson Turner, the development of the frontier land even civilized and democratized man. The Indian by contrast had no concept of private ownership in land. He practiced communal ownership, which theoretically meant that land could not be sold for private use: a custom which the frontiersman did not understand. But the frontiersman knew what he needed in order to be somebody, and rushed forward to seize land that had been opened to settlement by false treaties; and in spite of the intrigue, the frontier-farmer carried with him the unshakable belief that God was on his side. And when the free land was gone and the last frontier was officially closed in 1890, the hostility of the Anglo-American society toward the Indian began to diminish, but still there were Anglos who wanted even the reservations opened to settlement. This is the crux of many of the problems of native Americans today. That is to say, they are trying desperately to keep their reservation land in one piece in the face of Anglo leases and mining operations.

If we keep the above motivation in mind, we can begin to see why the Anglo-Americans armed themselves with the ethnocentric belief that their culture by comparison was superior; and the colonial and nineteenth-century solutions at which they arrived seemed inevitable. The Satanic savages, whose presence and culture stood in the way of “progress,” would have to be driven out or be exterminated.

The strong surge of ethnocentrism among the “Conquerors” can be explained in part by looking at their class structure. For example, the notion of a distinctive class structure was transported to the new world by European immigrants and persisted until the time of the American Revolution. Controlled by persons of title and property, this medieval stratification of society closed its doors to native Americans. Indeed, they were not even accepted onto the lowest rungs of the social ladder where the indentured and permanent slaves rested uneasily. At least the slaves, it was felt, represented and even produced a form of wealth. Thus when viewed from the high reaches of the worlds of titles and property, the property-less Indian was seen as hardly human.

Christianity added another dimension of dehumanization to the native Americans. Puritan ministers like Cotton Mather and in subsequent years Christian missionaries in general inadvertently planted the seeds of hate among Anglo settlers by describing the polytheistic religions of the Indians as pagan and without significant moral lessons.

A dramatic change occurred during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. As the West opened up in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812, Anglo-American society developed a new interest in Indians. This new and romantic image of America's first inhabitants cast them as more noble and less hostile, and was particularly prominent in the works of Cooper, Simms, and Longfellow. The American native could still be cruel; but, through a budding sense of cultural relativism, society rationalized such behavior as idealized savagery. Still far from being accepted as an individual, the Indian, nevertheless, was aided by laws passed by Anglo legislatures. An exception to the “Romantics” could be found on the cutting edge of the frontier where the military forces were reminded by history that the Indians, by and large, had fought on the side of the British in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812.

Thus we see that from the beginning of American literature until the time of the Civil War, the Indian was shown not so much as he was in reality, but as he was in the minds of his Anglo conquerors and society in general. They read into him the character and traits they wished to find, that is, the character and traits that most suited them in their dealings with the native American. It was much easier to justify the exploitation and extermination of a “heathen” or “pagan redskin.” If the Puritan settlers and writers had been more reasonable and tolerant, it is possible that the United States might not have been so cruelly built upon the bones of the native Americans. On the other hand, the content of the literature of any period must be viewed against a background of cultural relativism; that is, the culture, or the literature that portrays it, must be measured in the context of the time that produced it.

This research has been limited to only a small portion of the issues surrounding the American Indian, but it has demonstrated the changing notions that have emerged from economic developments and philosophical growth, and has revealed the fact that people tend to see problems primarily in terms of the circumstances and values of their own times. Perhaps more significantly, it suggests that notable writers, and particularly those of fiction, are not the harbingers of attitudinal reform toward minorities that their reputations would have us believe, but rather they tend to mirror the values, cultural mores, and prejudices of their own time.

Notes

1. John Smith, New England Trials, in English Scholar's Library of Old and Modern Works, ed. Edward Arber (New York: AMS, 1967), IV, 263.

2. John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles, in English Scholar's Library of Old and Modern Works, ed. Edward Arber (New York: AMS, 1967), IV, 400.

3. Albert Keiser, The Indian in American Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933), p. 8.

4. John Smith, The Generall Historie, p. 400.

5. Ibid., p. 401.

6. John Smith, A Map of Virginia, in English Scholar's Library of Old and Modern Works, ed. Edward Arber (New York: AMS, 1967), IV, 67.

7. Ibid. p. 67.

8. Ibid. p. 112.

9. John Smith, The Generall Historie, pp. 10-11.

10. John Smith, Captain John Smith's America, p. 171.

11. Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (New York: Scribner's, 1913), p. 116.

12. Ibid., p. 118.

13. Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston: Houghton, 1930), p. i.

14. Jonathan Dickinson, Narrative of a Shipwreck in the Gulph of Florida (London: Sowle, 1700), p. 8.

15. John Tanner, The Narrative of the Captivity and Adventure of John Tanner, ed. Edwin James (New York: Carvill, 1830), p. 10.

16. Washington Irving, Selected Writings of Washington Irving, ed. Saxe Cummins (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 99.

17. Roy H. Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins, 1953), p. 45.

18. Philip M. Marsh, The Works of Philip Freneau: A Critical Study (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1968), p. 13.

19. Philip Freneau, The American Village; A Poem, ed. Harry L. Koopman and Victor H. Paltsits (New York: Franklin, 1968), p. 10.

20. Ibid., p. 10.

21. Philip Freneau, Poems of Freneau, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York: Hefner, 1929), p. 401.

22. Ibid., p. 401.

23. Ibid., p. 358.

24. Ibid., p. iii.

25. Charles B. Brown, Edgar Huntly or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. David Lee Clark (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. xxiii.

26. John Erskine, Leading American Novelists (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries, 1910), p. 36.

27. Charles B. Brown, p. 218.

28. Albert Keiser, p. 37.

29. Charles B. Brown, p. 203.

30. Ibid., p. 187

31. Ibid., p. 234.

32. James W. Eastburn and Robert C. Sands, Yamoyden, A Tale of the Wars of King Philip (New York: Eastburn, 1820), p. 20.

33. Albert Keiser, p. 103.

34. Ibid., p. 101.

35. John Erskine, p. 77.

36. Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), I, p. 151.

37. James F. Cooper, The Leatherstocking Saga, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Random, 1954), p. vi.

38. David B. Davis, “Deerslayer, A Democratic Knight of the Wilderness,” in Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1958), p. 6.

39. Ibid., p. 15.

40. Ibid., p. 12.

41. Charles B. Brown, p. 45.

42. Roy H. Pearce, p. 201.

43. James F. Cooper, The Leatherstocking Saga, p. 93.

44. Ibid., p. 64.

45. Roy H. Pearce, p. 209.

46. James F. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (New York: Globe, 1826), p. v.

47. James F. Cooper, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (New York: Munro, 1885), p. 14.

48. James F. Cooper, Wyandotté, or, The Hutted Knoll (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1843), p. i.

49. Albert Keiser, p. 119.

50. Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1940), p. 16.

51. Washington Irving, p. 90.

52. Roy H. Pearce, p. 216.

53. Albert Keiser, p. 154.

54. J. V. Ridgely, William Gilmore Simms (New York: Twayne, 1962), p. 52.

55. John Erskine, p. 144.

56. Albert Keiser, p. 169.

57. Jason A. Russell, “The Southwestern Border Indian in the Writings of William Gilmore Simms,” Education, LI (November, 1930), 152-153.

58. William G. Simms, The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina, ed. M. Lyle Spencer (Richmond: Johnson, 1911), p. 325.

59. Ibid., p. 300.

60. Ibid., p. 419.

61. Leon H. Vincent, American Literary Masters (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries, 1906), p. 81.

62. Henry W. Longfellow, The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Horace E. Scudder (Boston: Houghton, 1863), p. 166.

63. Albert Keiser, p. 204.

64. George Bancroft, Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York: Harper, 1857), p. 101.

65. Henry R. Schoolcraft, The Indian in His Wigwam, or Characteristics of the Red Race of America (New York: Graham, 1848), p. 145.