Manufacturing Violence: The Rise of the American Mass Market Press And the Dehumanization of Native Peoples

A Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of

Department of Modern Languages and Literature

At

California Baptist University

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

In

English

Craig S. Smartis

December 2004

Approved by:

_________________________ _________________________ DawnEllen Jacobs, Ph.D. Date Committee Chairperson

__________________________ __________________________ James Lu, Ph.D. Date Committee Member

___________________________ ___________________________ Jennifer Newton, Ph.D. Date Committee Member

Copyright © 2004 by Craig S. Smartis.

All rights reserved.

This work is dedicated with love to my wife,

Kylene.

Smartis 1

CONTENTS

I. Introduction: The Loss of the American Conscience……………..…………2

II. Public Discourse and the Indian Removal Act……..……………………….21

III. The Rhetoric of Violence………………………………………………….….55

IV. The Dime Novel Western and the Dehumanization of Native Peoples……66

V. Epilogue……………………………………………………………………...102

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….…105

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“For a mighty nation like us to be carrying on a war with a few straggling nomads, under such circumstances,

is a spectacle most humiliating, an injustice unparalleled, a national crime most revolting, that must

sooner or later, bring down upon us or our posterity the judgment of Heaven.” John Sanborn to the

Secretary of the Interior, 1867.

I: Introduction The Loss of the American Conscience

The character of a nation is indelibly marked by the ethical choices embodied

in its social actions. For Americans, this character has often been shaped by the

decisions dictated by cultural imperatives involving national identity and fortune.

One of the most celebrated and infamous of these convictions is that of Manifest

Destiny. The ideology that led to the settlement of the West bequeathed to posterity a

legacy of horror and dishonor. Subsequent generations have been continuously

engaged in a collective act of forgetting, a cultural intrigue in which history is either

rewritten or erased. A people engaged in the enterprise of nation building will always

be tempted to secret those parts of their history that diminish or tarnish the legitimacy

of the beliefs that endow a people with their moral justification for being. In the

settlement of the American frontier, the fate of Indigenous peoples at the hands of the

agents of westward expansion will always confound the chronicle that constitutes the

narrative of America’s ideological life. Along with the status and fate of African

Americans following the Civil War, the plight of First Nations peoples today remains

an unresolved blight upon the moral character of America. The American enterprise

is mired in the issue of race: we are all living in the long shadow of the era in which

the boundaries of the nation were set. Whether we choose to denote the tragedy of

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the decimation of Native peoples as ethnic genocide or a Holocaust, the narrative of

their gradual annihilation still lurks in the background of America’s historical

discourse and poisons it with dishonor. This is unavoidable. A communal conspiracy

to conceal, rewrite, or erase portions of one’s history indicates not just a rigid

conservatism, but an unwillingness to learn from past mistakes. Future catastrophes

loom in such a project: a failure to own up to the sins of Manifest Destiny has the

potential to sear the American conscience—it may, in fact, already have done so. The

loss of an ethical center in the national dialogue about destiny and action can leave us

unable to engage in the discriminatory deliberations that are essential to the project of

civilization. Much of the purpose of this study is to rediscover when and how the

ethical center in public life and discourse dropped out, and why it was lost.

The brutal killing of hundreds of surrendering Cheyenne men, women, and

children by Colonel John Chivington’s forces at Sand Creek on November 29, 1864

proved to be an incendiary event in the course of the war with Native peoples over the

western territories. The atrocities committed against the Cheyenne and the Arapaho

who were encamped with them, which included the sexual mutilation and

dismemberment of women, children, and the elderly by the soldiers of the Colorado

First and Third Regiments (143), turned many peaceful chiefs against whites and

precipitated a tidal wave of rage that spread throughout the Native peoples of the

Great Plains and Southern Deserts. The terrifying nature of the horrors committed by

Chivington’s men has been described in detail by William Osborn:

An old woman wandered around blinded because her entire scalp had

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been taken and the skin of her forehead had fallen over her eyes. […]

One soldier carried a heart impaled on a stick. Soldiers collected male

genitals. The breasts of Indian women were sliced off; one was worn

as a cap, another stretched over the bow of a saddle. A little boy was

buried alive in a trench (217).

These descriptions are taken from the eyewitness account of Robert Bent; Dee Brown

quotes extensively from this record in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: “I saw the

body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was

going to make a tobacco pouch out of them. […] I saw quite a number of infants in

arms killed with their mothers”(90). The massacre at Sand Creek was not an isolated

incident: the murder and dismemberment of women, children, and the elderly was

repeated with regularity in attacks such as Custer’s assault on the Cheyenne at

Washita River in 1868 and the massacre of the Aravaipas Apaches near Tucson by

forces under William Oury in 1871. To large scale, premeditated military atrocities

we must add countless individual acts of murder by soldiers and settlers encroaching

on treaty-protected tribal lands, such as the incident described by Sarah Winnemucca

in Life Among the Paiutes:

After the soldiers had killed all but some little children and

babies still tied up in their baskets, the soldiers took them also, and

set the camp on fire and threw them into the flames to see them

burn alive. (199)

Considered by itself, the slaughter at Sand Creek presents a phenomenon that is too

deeply disturbing to be dismissed as an aberration: even the Cheyenne, for whom it

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was customary to cut off parts of enemy combatants as trophies, were stupefied at

seeing the practice extended to women and children. American soldiers, however,

could not claim the excuse of custom, nor could they claim to have learned sexual

mutilation from the Indians. John Coward notes that “[T]he Cheyennes and Arapahos

of Colorado “were peaceful during most of the decade leading up to the Sand Creek

massacre”(102) in keeping with the Laramie Treaty of 1851. Very few whites

inhabited the remote area covered by the treaty. What could have prompted

Chivington’s men to initiate such unspeakable acts?

Coward has traced the complex route by which information about Sand Creek

reached the public. The incident was first reported by the Daily Rocky Mountain

News shortly after it happened, and Coward states that the newspaper used the

telegraph “to control the eastward flow of information”(99). The newspaper report

described the attack in glowing terms as a triumphant act of vengeance against

barbaric Indians who had been butchering whites on the frontier, but another story

quickly began to surface:

Weeks later, however, the “unofficial story” began to emerge through

private letters, leaked by political enemies of Governor Evans [and]

Chivington […]. These reports told a very different and disturbing

tale […]. In Denver, the News counter-attacked, singling out the

“humanitarian” eastern papers as anti-western and far too sympathetic

to the Indians at Sand Creek. (99)

Coward attributes the idea for the attack to William Newton Byers, the publisher of

the Daily Rocky Mountain News and a close associate of Chivington. Byers was an

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influential businessman and booster of Colorado statehood. Coward also suggests

that Chivington’s attacks on the Cheyenne were motivated by his ambition to be

appointed to the post of territorial representative to Congress in September, 1864.

These motivations, however, do nothing to explain the brutal mutilations described by

eyewitnesses.

Another argument attempts to explain the incident by citing white rage. The

contention that white depredations and their psychotic components were merely

retaliatory and acted out in imitation of Indians is a skillful exercise in obfuscation.

There is no logical progression from the example of evil set by another and one’s own

evil: each one of us is the author of our own iniquities. Those who would dispute

this are seeking to deflect shame by rewriting Native character. Both Native people

and whites carried out senseless acts of violence on the frontier, and to suggest that

one or the other group should bear the shame of this fact alone is to deny to one side

the equal share of humanity to which both sides are entitled. The point is that an

equal share of humanity was denied to Native Americans, along with equal portions

of land, liberty, and simple human dignity. Most attacks on whites by Native

Americans on the frontier were carried out either as defensive maneuvers designed to

eliminate whites from hunting grounds and the proximity of villages. Attacks were

made with the understanding that treaties mandated punitive actions against invaders

in the absence of the American troops that had been promised to defend First Nations’

rights. In such cases, tribes were merely taking matters into their own hands. When

left alone to dwell in peace according to Federal agreements, most Native people had

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little interest in venturing near whites, whom they had good reason to fear because of

disease.

The only way to account for the virulence of white atrocities is to locate their

energy in the ideology of racism and its assumption of the subhuman nature of the

Indian. The widespread nature of white atrocities reveals them to be a cultural

symptom, a behavioral phenomenon infused with ideas and attitudes that were

manufactured in and enabled by their culture of origin. The emergence of atrocities

and the increasing frequency of their occurrence can be correlated in time with two

over-arching historical developments: the settlement of the west and the rise of the

mass market media that began in the 1820s with the invention of the steam-driven

roller press. A survey of periodical literature from the decade preceding the

presidency of Andrew Jackson and his policy of Indian removal to the advent of the

Dime Novel in 1860 reinforces the thesis that the mass-market press played a role in

the shaping of public opinion about Native peoples and policies regarding their

future. A close inspection of mass media texts reveals a clear progression in public

discourse that parallels the political objectives of Federal and state authorities and

their commercial cohorts in the project of western settlement. This investigation

extends the work of John Coward in The Newspaper Indian to mass media texts such

as magazines, story papers, and cheap novels in an effort to explain nineteenth

century discourse about Native peoples in terms of a collusion between the mass

market press and powerful societal forces. American mass media has always been

inherently political, functioning as a bully pulpit in the promotion of ideologies and

acts; this is an inevitable result of fostering freedom of the press. The written word

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must share responsibility for the suffering and extermination of Native peoples. This

study will trace this narrative to show that the nature of the discussion continuously

reflected the evolution of political thinking about Native people during the final era of

Indian Removal. It was also intended to infuse the American body politic with the

ideological posture towards the Indians that was desired by those in power. Very

little dissent was allowed to enter mass media publications. Our analysis exposes a

moral deterioration in public discourse in which roughly three stages can be

distinguished.

The first of these stages develops during the decade prior to the Indian

Removal Act passed by Congress in 1830; its language is marked by a cacophony of

conflict and debate between the different ideological factions engaged in the dispute

over the future of Native peoples. During this period, textual voices antagonistic to

the presence of indigenous people are countered by voices advocating other more

moderate positions, including some that actually argue for Native rights. Texts from

this era are explored in chapter two, showing how the panoply of opposing

perspectives fails to delineate a range of shared cultural values. This stage ends with

the presidency of Andrew Jackson, whose extraordinary popularity was instrumental

in pushing forward the tragic policies that effectively eradicated the Five Tribes as a

political presence in the southeastern states. The Jacksonian era is articulated as a

crucial moment in American history in which the ideological heritage of American

life and politics begins to disappear as the nation moves towards two defining

historical junctures: Indian Removal and the conflict over slavery. The discourse of

this era is constituted by the combined voices of the federal government, including

Smartis 9

legislative debates, the decisions and pronouncements of the Executive branch, and

the decisions of the Supreme Court in landmark cases involving Cherokee

sovereignty. It is during this stage that the ethical center of reference in public

discourse is abandoned, opening the door to military intervention in Georgia and the

Cherokee’s Trail of Tears. These events signal a new approach to the “Indian

problem” in which the frontier becomes a realm where the law is disregarded by both

civil and military authorities, and Native lands are regarded as open to unlimited

settlement.

The second stage in mass media discourse, presented in chapter three,

parallels the historical and technological developments that coincide with the era of

Manifest Destiny, such as the discovery of gold in Colorado and California and the

extension of the Union Pacific railroad. Discourse during this stage is marked by

increasingly vehement defamations of Native character and the portrayal of the

Indians as a homogeneous group of beings prone to unspeakably violent and

subhuman behavior. A subtext emerges in the mass media that is carefully crafted to

educate the body politic in the attitudes deemed necessary to the project of

eradicating Native peoples. Newspaper reports and fictional texts begin to converge

in a harmony of content and expression that betrays a common agenda to vilify

Native peoples.

The final chapter exposes the literary culmination of this agenda as the

emergence and popularization of the Dime Novel Western in the 1860s. Adamantly

racist in its ideology, the Dime Novel Western reconstitutes a center in public

discourse. This center is the unspoken thesis that had been lurking in the ideological

Smartis 10

void of public discourse since the 1820s, the contention that the Indians must either

be forcibly removed or exterminated. The Dime Novel Western transformed an

unacknowledged cultural imperative into a masculine recreational adventure.

The close correlation between the government position on Native peoples

following the commencement of Indian removal and the ideology embodied in mass

media texts can be easily detected by juxtaposing two pieces written before and after

the Jackson administration and its removal of the Cherokees from Georgia in 1839.

The first text, an anonymous letter published in the Boston periodical The Christian

Register in 1821, typifies the evangelical response to the plight of the Five Tribes,

who were beset by conflicts with white settlers calling for the removal of all Indians

from the southern states.

There is something very saddening in the reflection that the original

possessors of this magnificent country, who[m] we acknowledged for

the lords of the soil, when we bought their birthright for a mess of

pottage, should be inevitably destined to destruction. It seems cruel

that we should not give them the benefits of civilization, and share

with them, at least, the land that was once exclusively their own. (12)

Implicit in the language of this passage is a recognition of First Nations’ originary

rights to the land, a recognition that is made not by reference to state or federal laws,

but by reference to a transcendent ethical code with which the law is assumed to be

aligned. There is no discussion of white entitlement as conquerors or through

treaties, and there is even a moral criticism leveled at those in the past who made a

show of purchasing Native people’s lands “… for a mess of pottage ….”(12)

Smartis 11

The second text, another anonymous piece published in 1844 in the New York

monthly magazine The Ladies’ Companion and Literary Expositor, is an historical

retrospective on the Creek people and their participation in the War of 1812 on the

side of the British. Written five years after the Trail of Tears, the language of “The

Broken Arrow” takes a decidedly different tone:

Stimulated by the emissaries of the British, and bribed with their

treasure, the bloody atrocities which they committed will long be

remembered along the frontiers of the South and West. Scourged and

humbled by the conduct and valor of that great man, Andrew

Jackson,—the Indians sued for peace and obtained it; but only, among

other conditions, by a large cession of their lands, the possession of

which, by the whites along the borders, was justly esteemed necessary

to their security and peace (110).

The taking of Native people’s lands is now “justly esteemed necessary,” and there is

no quibbling over the right of whites to settle on ceded land for which no money has

been offered. The Indian has been firmly established as the enemy, the prime

obstacle standing in the way of white settlement and fortune, and Andrew Jackson is

enshrined as “that great man” in an effort to rewrite the controversial President, who

is recorded as saying of the Cherokee, “Build a fire under them. When it gets hot

enough, they’ll move”(220). The writer of this passage displays a confidence that is

untroubled by empathy for Native peoples or the legality of living on “ceded” lands:

the “bloody atrocities” perpetrated by the Indians and their cooperation with the

British are provided as justifications for government policy as well as white

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aggrandizement. There is no mention of the reasons for Creek opposition to

American rule—such as the legality of capturing Creek women and children and

selling them into slavery—nor is there any mention of General Jackson’s relentless

slaughter of the Creeks and burning of their villages. Those portions of history that

are inconvenient to the writer’s argument are disregarded or concealed. The

discourse that remains is devoid of controversy, bereft of any ethical center except the

one indicated by the term “atrocities.”

Following the presidency of Jackson and his acceleration of military

involvement in the “Indian problem,” mass media discourse about indigenous people

promotes the federal mindset with increasing regularity. A conceptual tool already

exists that is designed to analyze and penetrate the dynamic operating in public

discourse when the mass media and government consistently share similar positions

on issues. In the 1980s, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman formulated a

propaganda model that was intended to explain the ideological correlation they

identified between the government and the press during the era following the Viet

Nam War. In their book, Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman contend

that when the press reflects and reinforces the policy positions advocated by

government, a collusion exists between the media and those in power. When such

collusion can be detected, agents of the mass media are promoting the policies of

government. In a society in which freedom of the press is protected by law, this

collusion is not the product of overt government coercion; it is a dynamic relationship

of reciprocity that operates within a matrix of social institutions. Both the

government and the press, as well as other commercial entities, benefit from the

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mutual exchanges of power that are conducted within this matrix. Chomsky and

Herman articulate the system in this way:

It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and

propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control

and finance them. The representatives of these interests have

important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they

are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. (xi)

As we shall see, many mass media outlets during the nineteenth century, such as

newspapers and magazines, were controlled by individuals or groups with compelling

commercial interests in western settlement. These commercial interests endeavored

to influence the decisions and policies of both state and federal government, and they

used the publications they owned in an effort to shape public opinion according to

their objectives. In Chomsky and Herman’s model, some of the press’s cooperation

and collaboration with government or industry is voluntary, but it is also a response to

societal or institutional pressures to align with popular views in expectation of

increased sales revenues or government favors. Such moves can be seen as the

strategic positioning of a publication’s discourse for the purpose of self-

aggrandizement or survival, a subordination of content to the will or expectations of

powerful societal forces:

Most biased choices in the media arise from the preselection of

right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the

adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization,

market, and political power (lx).

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Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model examines the interplay between the

media’s quest for profit and the government and market forces which take advantage

of that quest in an effort to influence the nature of the information that ultimately

reaches the public. They identify four “filters” that can influence mass media

content:

(1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit

orientation of the […] firms; (2) advertising as the primary income

source […]; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided

by the government, business, and “experts” funded and approved

by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) “flak” as a means

of disciplining the media (2).

Chomsky and Herman’s model describes a system in which symbiotic relationships

exist between government, business, and the press. These relationships often dictate

the content of the news, documentaries, and fiction writings that are offered for public

consumption.

That associations existed between the press, business interests, and

government in the nineteenth century is not a new idea. In 1873, Frederic Hudson

already recognized that the press in America had been political since the Revolution;

he outlines the close association between colonial newspapers and the cause of nation

building in Journalism in the United States: 1690-1872. Magazines often served as

oracles of government. The New York Magazine of April, 1793 features a

presidential proclamation on smuggling at the beginning of an issue devoted to poetry

and essays. The influence of government and business on the information published

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by frontier newspapers has been examined extensively by John Coward in The

Newspaper Indian and Barbara Cloud in The Business of Newspapers on the Western

Frontier. Menahem Blondheim describes the gradual monopolization of the

telegraph industry during the second half of the nineteenth century in News Over the

Wires. What has not been examined is the effect of periodicals and other mass media

publications on the ideological life of the body politic during the era of western

expansion. The goal of this study is to show how the project of Indian removal

changed the moral tenor of public discourse, transforming the character of the

American people. This transformation facilitated the perpetration of a national crime.

The dominant political objective operating in nineteenth century policy and

public discourse was the settlement of the West and the extension of the boundaries

of the nation to the Pacific Ocean. A lust for natural resources and land ownership, as

well as a sense of national destiny wrought of a pseudo-religious blend of divine

revelation and racism, combined to create the federal project of Indian Removal.

Following the ejection of the eastern tribes to lands west of the Mississippi during the

presidency of Andrew Jackson, the project was gradually accelerated in response to

the historical and commercial developments engendered by the hysteria of Manifest

Destiny. The discovery of gold in Colorado and California, the lure of free land, and

the unification of East and West through railroads and telegraph lines produced a

mass migration and settlement of Native lands. A new era of conflict and violence

between whites and remaining enclaves of Native people erupted on the frontier as

tribes beyond the Mississippi struggled in desperation to hold on to ancestral lands or

elude outright annihilation. With the onset of the Civil War, Federal authorities took

Smartis 16

advantage of the public’s preoccupation with events in the East in order to conduct a

clandestine war in the West, a war that was intended to remove Native peoples from

their lands forever.

Many debates have centered on how historians should characterize the ordeal

of Native peoples from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the close of the western

frontier in 1890. Discourse has run aground in a terminological dispute over whether

history should consider the fate of indigenous people at the hands of European

conquest as genocide or a Holocaust. The arguments of both sides in the debate have

been aptly described by Guenter Lewy:

It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans

were still alive […] at the end of the nineteenth century. Still in

scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the

time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject

speak of an inflated “numbers game”; others charge that the size of the

aboriginal population has been deliberately minimized in order to

make the decline seem less sever than it was. (56)

Scholars have fixated on the number of deaths in response to the generally accepted

view that the Nazi Holocaust represents the standard reference point for the definition

of genocide. The history of First Nations’ removal and extermination is usually

compared to the extermination of the Jews because of this paradigm, but the

comparison has little to commend it. The bloody drama of displacement and

elimination that was legislated during the Jackson administration was not a sudden

anomaly in the life of the nation. It was the continuation and fulfillment of a long-

Smartis 17

term historical movement to displace the indigenous peoples and take possession of

their lands. This objective was accomplished over several centuries through diverse

means. Military actions, civilian violence, and the distribution of smallpox infected

blankets were the principal ways in which the “Indian problem” was solved. The

chronology of First Nations extermination, if it is described in terms of the rate of

killing, bears no similarity to the Nazi Holocaust. Even massacres perpetrated in a

single day cannot begin to approach the single day numbers of deaths in camps such

as Ausschwitz or Dachau. The ordeal of killing involved in the removal of Native

peoples from the west was vastly different from the systematic nature of the Nazi’s

industry of death. Hitler’s “final solution” is not the right analogy to use for an

understanding of the interminable nightmare suffered by the original inhabitants of

North America.

At the same time, the efforts of some scholars to reinscribe the deeds of the

invaders in a light that is less damaging to their historical reputation constitute a

continuation of the program of imperialism. Their aim is to reestablish the premise

that the white man has a right to the land because his nature is just. The agenda to

diminish the horrors of American expansion is a revisionist scheme, an attempt to

release the descendents of the perpetrators from a sense of responsibility to the

generations of Native peoples that have survived. Scholars on both sides of the fight

over terms are preoccupied with a discussion that is irrelevant to the restoration of an

ethical center in the national discourse. The truth of this becomes evident when we

confront the reality of what happened. A short selection of facts taken from every

period of European settlement will suffice to show that we do not require terms such

Smartis 18

as “genocide” and “Holocaust” to convey the moral darkness whites brought to the

continent.

The earliest example we have of a large scale military assault on Native

women and children is the Battle of Fort Mystic in May of 1637. In this incident,

British forces under John Mason surrounded a fortified village of the Pequots near

Mystic River in Connecticut and set fire to it. Soldiers shot anyone trying to escape

the flames. Lewy gives the number of fatalities as being over 300 (58), but Osborn

places the number at nearly 600 (112). A large percentage of the Pequots who burned

to death in the fort were women and children.

In another little known incident in 1643, the Dutch governor Willem Kieft

sent soldiers to defend the Wappinger against the Mohawks near Jersey city. Instead

of fighting the Mohawks, the soldiers turned on the Wappingers. Osborn recounts the

grisly result:

They returned bearing the severed heads of 80 Indians. The soldiers

and settlers used them as footballs on the street. Thirty prisoners were

tortured to death […] (113).

Such torture often involved unspeakable atrocities. Osborn further recounts how at

New Amsterdam “a Hackensack man was publicly tortured by Dutch soldiers,

skinned in strips, fed his own flesh, flayed from his fingers to his knees, castrated,

dragged through the streets alive, and put on a millstone, where his head was beaten

off”(113).

Two more historical excerpts complete this survey. The first concerns the

famous letter from 1763 of Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief of the British

Smartis 19

forces west of the Allegheny mountains, to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt.

Ordering one of the earliest known attacks of biological warfare, Amherst writes:

You will do well to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of

blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to

extirpate this execrable race (57).

This strategy was repeated a century later. According to Lewy, the 1837 distribution

of smallpox infected blankets to the Mandan at Fort Clark on the Missouri River

resulted in the smallpox pandemic in which as many as 100,000 of the Mandan may

have died (57).

We have chosen only four instances of white cruelty from thousands to

illustrate our point. The sustained violence of the European enterprise among the

Native peoples was a multi-generational project of extermination, a relentless process

of mass murder handed down from father to son over centuries. It is plainly

unimportant whether we call that enterprise genocide or a Holocaust—we could as

accurately describe it as a protracted series of mass murders. The terminological

dispute itself is an imperialistic act, a reduction of the suffering of untold numbers of

Native people to a Eurocentric exercise in epistemology, a pointless investigation into

the signification of terms that, even in the seriousness of their charges, can never do

justice to the humanity of those who perished.

The descendents of those who survived are still with us, hidden out of sight in

many cases on remote reservations. We are still fighting them over land, burial sites,

and other sacred places. We are fighting them over locations where minerals have

been discovered. We are beginning to fight them over the money generated by

Smartis 20

Native owned casinos. Winona LaDuke tells us of the virulence of white racism

which is still vibrant in the places that were once the frontier:

There is a peculiar kind of hatred in the northwoods, a hatred born of

the guilt of privilege, a hatred born of living with three generations of

complicity in the theft of lives and lands. What is worse is that each

day, those who hold the position of privilege must come face to face

with those whom they have dispossessed. To others who should

rightfully share in the complicity and the guilt, Indians are far away

and long ago. But in reservation border towns, Indians are ever

present […] The poverty of dispossession is almost overwhelming. So

is the poverty of complicity and guilt (127).

We have incurred a cost from the deeds committed by the agents of western

expansion. The identity and the conscience of a nation are inextricably bound up in

one another. In the same way, the identity and the history of a people are linked. A

national conscience plagued by a history that it will not acknowledge can only

actualize a part of its identity. The American conscience can only realize that part of

its identity which is not troubled by memories it is struggling to disown. A history of

evil cannot be redeemed: it is precisely this object which enticed the agents of

western expansion to attempt the reinscription of history that is the topic of this study.

Such a history can only be reclaimed in the present through an act of conscience, a

belated act of contrition in which national identity is reconstituted in a spirit of

humility and reparation. We who have inherited the land and its treasure will have to

shoulder the burden of shame that was denied by generations of perpetrators; in like

Smartis 21

spirit, we will have to confront the plight of the remnants of the peoples they tried to

exterminate. To the best of our ability, we will have to expiate the crimes of our

ancestors, and restore these remnants to a life of dignity, autonomy, and

empowerment. Much that was done in the decades before and after Wounded Knee

will have to be undone if we are to reassert any claim of morality in our national

identity and purpose. It is in an effort to expose and redress the wrongs embodied in

our written narrative of Native peoples that this study is offered.

Smartis 22

II

Public Discourse and the Indian Removal Act

The history of America’s westward expansion is beset with ghosts, lost voices

that dimly speak of terrifying and inhuman acts committed on the plains and in the

forests of the lands that are now claimed by the descendents of those who were the

agents of those acts. The descendents of the victims listen to these voices and their

legacy of suffering; the white man, by and large, does not.

If we reclaim the whole story of the settlement of the western territories, we

must face once and for all the subjugation and mass murder of untold numbers of

Native people. We are then immediately confronted with a haunting mystery that

challenges the deepest notions of identity that Americans possess: what lies behind

the breakdown of moral order on the frontier demonstrated by men such as Colonel

John Chivington and the soldiers under his command at Sand Creek?

Despite the continual conflict and violence between whites and Native people

that marks European settlement of the North American continent, there is no scarcity

of white voices countering the ideological tradition of racism that Europeans brought

to the New World. From the beginning, men of conscience manifest a readiness to

explore the possibilities of living amongst indigenous peoples in a generous spirit of

exchange and cooperation. Some, such as William Wood in 1634, even write of their

admiration for Native people:

These Indians are of affable, courteous and well disposed natures,

ready to communicate the best of their wealth to the mutual good of

one another; …so.. perspicuous is their love…that they are as willing

Smartis 23

to part with a mite in poverty as treasure in plenty…If it were possible

to recount the courtesies they have showed the English, since their first

arrival in those parts, it would not only steady belief, that they are a

loving people, but also win the love of those that never saw

them…(88-89).

These sentiments are echoed by Thomas Jefferson more than a century later:

Their only controls are their manners, and that moral sense of right and

wrong, which, like the sense of tasting and feeling in every man,

makes a part of his nature. An offense against these is punished by

contempt, by exclusion from society…Imperfect as this species of

coercion may seem, crimes are very rare among them; insomuch as

were it made a question, whether no law, as among the savage

Americans, or too much law, as among the civilized Europeans,

submits man to the greatest evil, one who has seen both conditions of

existence would pronounce it to the last; and that the sheep are happier

of themselves, than under care of the wolves. (Padover 109)

Jefferson here intimates that he is willing to consider the possibility that the scheme

of some tribes for maintaining social order might be superior to the European

approach, and he would not be the last to propose that Native ways were worthy of

emulation. The artist George Catlin, who traveled extensively among the tribes west

of the Mississippi during the 1830s, powerfully laments the decimation of Native

peoples in his diary:

Of the two millions remaining alive at this time, about 1,400,000, are

Smartis 24

already the miserable living victims and dupes of white man’s

cupidity, degraded, discouraged and lost in the bewildering maze that

is produced by the use of whiskey and its concomitant vices….(4).

By the time of Catlin’s writings in 1832, the passage of the Indian Removal Act had

already assured that the potential benefits of cultural exchange with Native peoples

would never be realized. Voices such as Catlin’s would be marginalized as the

adventure of conquering the West increasingly dominated public discourse.

The killing of surrendering Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children

by Chivington’s forces at Sand Creek marked a turning point in the fight for the West.

The atrocities committed by American soldiers turned many peaceful chiefs against

the whites, and news of the raid reported in the East sparked a Federal inquest. The

investigation revealed that Chivington had acted without orders against a mostly

defenseless village. The atrocities committed by his men were carried out on their

own initiative (Hoig 177-78). The frontier motif of the soldier in the wilderness

acting without orders and out of reach of any power of restraint was often repeated

during the Indian Wars. It is a motif with which contemporary audiences are familiar

from western films: authority out of control, the town sheriff, renegade Federal

marshal, or violent drifter who takes the law into his own hands for personal gain or

revenge and becomes a law unto himself. This motif is almost an American

archetype, the dominant thematic undercurrent in the fable of the white man in the

American wilderness. It involves the liberation of the individual from the constraints

of authority or civilization and the substitution of personal authority, a private code

that is wielded by the individual through force of will or weapons. It is a masculine

Smartis 25

code, an abandonment of the ethical center by those most responsible for defending

the center, and we find the basis for this code articulated early in the narrative of the

American frontier by Cooper’s hero Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans:

“[…] Book! What have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness,

though a man without a cross, to do with books! I never read but in

one, and the words that are written there are too simple and too plain

to need much schooling; though I may boast that of forty long and

hard working years”(604).

The “book” of which Hawkeye speaks is not the Bible, but the wilderness. This

religion of the wilderness, of absolute personal freedom and a code of ethics apart

from the law of the city, has its apotheosis in the masculine adventure code of conflict

and territoriality that is the fundamental ethos of the Dime Novel Western, the literary

phenomenon from which the genre of the twentieth century Western developed. It is

not a fixed “code” as such, for it is fluid and can be adapted to different situations as

conditions or opportunities dictate. Cooper’s mountainman is first and foremost “a

warrior of the wilderness,” and his purpose and actions do not center on any moral

code, for he is “a man without a cross.” His ethics are situational. Hawkeye gets

along with Indians who get along with him, and he kills Indians who do not. His

simultaneous friendship and enmity with Indians alienates him from the world of both

the white man and the red man. He is a conflicted character who lives beyond white

civilization without completely shirking loyalty to his European origins. He diverges

from the white world without “going native,” for he is adverse to any system that

does not serve his purposes. Hawkeye is a progenitor of the type that would come to

Smartis 26

be known as the frontier hero. By the advent of the Dime Novel Western, the

mountainman has become enshrined in legend; John S.C. Abbot defines the character

in his 1874 Dime Novel, David Crockett: His Life and Adventures:

Providence seems to have raised up a peculiar class of men, among the

descendents of the emigrants from the Old World, who, weary of the

restraints of civilization, were ever ready to plunge into the wildest

depths of the wilderness, and to rear their lonely huts in the midst of

all its perils, privations, and hardships (8).

Part adventurer and part entrepreneur, the frontiersman represents the vanguard of

western settlement, and many of them, such as Kit Carson, became avid Indian

fighters as the fur trade began to diminish, changing their professions often not

because of racial hatred, but because of money. The code of conflict and

territoriality inherent in the American frontier narrative only leads to conflict with

Indians if they stand in the way of personal aggrandizement. In such cases, failure to

remove Indians means that the frontiersman or settler can only exchange one form of

civilization and authority for another. Although an exchange of authority had been at

the center of the Revolutionary War, this new fight was not over ethics or law or

“civilization”(a favorite term of western expansion), but for the freedom to act

without reference to any center except personal self-aggrandizement.

This notion of the genre of the frontier story as a narrative about “throwing

away the book,” or the disengagement from an ethical or ideological center that

accompanied the agenda of Manifest Destiny, is consistent with the narrative of

Native peoples that developed in the press following the Jacksonian era. The very

Smartis 27

notion of a “frontier” comes to signify a location that lies on the periphery of any

geographical or intellectual frame of reference, a locus that is removed from any

center to the outermost edge of a field. This is embodied historically by the continual

movement of Native peoples west to the “frontier,” and this movement is paralleled

by a concurrent movement away from any center of law or morality in public

discourse—as if in the abandonment of Native peoples, the national conscience was

also lost. With the breakdown and abandonment of an ethical center in public

discourse during the Jackson administration’s debate over Indian Removal, an

ideological void emerged with reference both to the subject of western settlement and

the fate of Native peoples. As shall be shown, forces without allegiance to any

ideological or moral system emerged to fill that void.

The rise of the mass media made possible both the documentation and the

achievement of this process. The proliferation of magazines, cheap books, and

newspapers that occurred in the 1820s with the invention of the steam driven roller

press produced a dramatically extended record of American thought about Native

peoples compared to previous generations. With the number of publications steadily

increasing throughout the 1820s and 30s, the role of the written word in the

management of the “Indian problem” could be expanded. These mass media texts are

vital because they provide an extensive cross-section of opinions, a repository of the

thoughts and feelings of ordinary people as they interact with the intellectual life of

their culture. By assembling a wide sample of these texts from the decade prior to the

Indian Removal Act, a panoramic view can be created of the ideological perspectives

that were debated in the public arena during this decisive period. Considered

Smartis 28

chronologically, these texts constitute a communal narrative, a broad cultural

dialogue that arises out of a social matrix composed of narrators, commentators,

critics, and historians. This dialogue is the social discussion out of which enduring

cultural imperatives can emerge, imperatives that may captivate the attention of vast

numbers of people in a society.

This attempt to compose a communal narrative is essayed using an extensive

selection of mass market texts taken from the widest possible latitude of ideological

perspectives. It is made in the belief that written texts embody the discourse of a

people. Mass media texts represent the lost oral conversation that cannot be heard by

posterity. This notion derives its impetus from Derrida’s conception of “history as

writing”(8), the understanding of history as not having an existence apart from

writing. Derrida’s collapse of the distance between the spoken and the written word

exposes the almost symbiotic relationship between written texts and the cultural life

of the people who write them:

Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phone, has

never been broken…As has been more or less implicitly determined,

the essence of the phone would be immediately proximate to that

which within “thought” as logos relates to “meaning,” produces it,

receives it, speaks it, “composes” it (11).

The logos, or the pure, Platonic ideality of a thing, is mediated by the phone, the

spoken sound of language which establishes presence, the condition of being in

cognitive reality. The close relationship between the phone and the written sign

(between signified and signifier) is collapsed by Derrida, eliminating the privilege

Smartis 29

traditionally given to oral communication. The spoken word is thereby relegated to a

position after writing, for all language, according to Derrida, is writing, the

articulation of reality according to a system that is “always already” in place.

In this way, a collection of texts with the same cultural origins can be viewed

as equivalent to the spoken word of that culture. Written texts are more than

representative of the cultural vitality that engenders them. The material with which

culture is wrought, including the communal beliefs that inhabit the “knowledge” of a

culture, is both negotiated and finalized in writing.

During the 1820s, the communal narrative that can be synthesized from mass

media texts about Native peoples tells a story of progressive cultural disjunction, a

condition of discourse in which multiple perspectives fail to negotiate any

commonality and disagreements persist to a point at which opponents become so

entrenched that resolution and compromise are no longer perceived as possible.

Discourse then disintegrates into a plurality of positions. These ideological rifts

finally polarize participants in the discussion, weakening the vigor of all of the

arguments as a sense of futility grows. Cultural disjunction leaves an ideological

vacuum in its wake; a discourse emerges in which the signification of terms is defined

opportunistically rather than through negotiation by the linguistic community. The

rhetorical contest is transformed, transferred onto an empty field of play where rules

can be continuously rewritten or avoided altogether.

We can identify four socio-political forces operating in the discourse about

Native peoples which developed with the advent of mass media publishing in the

1820s. The first of these is the voice of the Christian missionary project. Funded by

Smartis 30

both government and philanthropic resources, Evangelical missions advocated

establishing a system of schools to educate the “heathens” in the “arts of civilization.”

The various denominations promoted their causes and trumpeted their successes

through a wide variety of publications, such as The Christian Register, Christian

Philanthropist, and the Christian Secretary. Missionaries and their allies divided into

two camps: those who believed that religious conversion would facilitate the

acculturation and settlement of the Indians in white society, and those who insisted

that conversion to Christianity could only take place after an Indian had been

converted to the ways of white civilization. Although missionaries found themselves

increasingly at odds with state and federal governments during the 1830s over policy

decisions which inhibited or halted their work, the evangelical movement among the

Indians did not promote a position that was antithetical to white hegemony, as is

evident in these remarks by missionary Reverend Roberts in 1821 praising the

intelligence of the mountain Cherokees: “Though their skin is red or dark, I assure

you, their mental powers are white—few white children can keep pace with them in

learning.”(192-93) Even though missionaries practiced a degree of racial tolerance

that was extreme compared to the behavior of other whites on the frontier, the

evangelical worldview was still fixated on the notion of white superiority. The

presence of their voice in public discourse begins to wane as the Jacksonian

administration’s scheme of Indian Removal gradually marginalizes the evangelical

point of view.

The second perspective found in mass media discourse about Native peoples

during the 1820s is formulated by the themes and images found in wilderness poetry

Smartis 31

and fiction. In works that display qualities associated with the American Romantic

movement, poems and stories in literary magazines appropriate indigenous cultures

for mass entertainment, evoking images of the Indian as exotic, dangerous, or noble

in character. Ostensibly sympathetic to the Native predicament (which is seldom

articulated clearly), wilderness literature about Native peoples is mostly absorbed in

marketing the Indian for commercial value; Native people are portrayed as colorful,

courageous warriors who haunt the forests and plains of the frontier, places far

enough removed from urban frames of reference that the Native people who inhabit

them can be contemplated without any real sense of responsibility or fear. Literature

introduces the artificial Indian into public discourse, a composite image that is

stripped of tribal identity, language, and individuality.

The narrative techniques of poetry and fiction are adopted by popular

historians in another group of mass media texts about Native peoples. These writings

attempt a dramatic reinscription of history for general entertainment, and their

synthesis of fictional aesthetics and historical narrative becomes the hallmark of later

writing about Native people in the 1860s and 1870s.

The final force to emerge is embodied by the complex narrative of the federal

government as it debates and decides the fate of the southern tribes during the

presidency of Andrew Jackson. This narrative includes statutes, treaties, legislative

debates, and judicial opinions as well as the mass media sources that cover these

voices as they contend in the public arena. Virtually every branch and department of

the government becomes involved at one time or another in the “Indian problem,” and

the dialogic chronicle that emerges from an analysis of these texts tells the story of an

Smartis 32

abandonment of ethical principles in public discourse and policy. The ideological

void that resulted led to the Cherokee’s Trail of Tears and a commonly held view of

First Nations lands as a place of limitless opportunity with no order, a free-for-all

unencumbered by the restraints of law.

In reading the vast array of texts assembled for this study, one epistemological

denominator appears that is common to all of them regardless of where they are

located in the historical chronicle. The strident vigor of their rhetoric and the

declarative quality of its tone consistently suggest an emphatic posture that is out of

proportion to the information being conveyed. Even the terms “savage” and

“heathen,” which are employed to exhaustion in reference to Native people,

communicate a vehemence that borders on emotional histrionics. Terms that are

sensational or hyperbolic abound in nineteenth century Anglo-American texts about

Native people: white victims are “butchered” or “roasted alive” (implying

cannibalism) and Indians are accused of “impudent idleness” and “revolting

barbarities.” Clearly, the European confrontation with Native America was

profoundly destabilizing to the structure of the European weltansicht, and much of the

rhetoric employed by writers in their discourse about this encounter is over-

protective, an insecure attempt to reconstitute a notion of what it means to be human

when faced with a people whose radical differences shattered that notion. The

startling novelty of Native American modes of living presented alternative constructs

that challenged many of the basic cultural assumptions of Enlightenment Rationalism,

such as the hierarchy of thought that equates human progress with technological

sophistication. From the point of encounter to the point of inscription, the European

Smartis 33

mind adopted a defensive position, a posture that also manifests itself in the chief

form of architecture constructed in the wilderness: the fort. The confusion of a

disintegrating system of thought clamored for relief from the disorientation produced

by encounters with Native people. Many nineteenth century texts about indigenous

peoples bear the scars of this culture shock.

The most successful arbiters of culture shock were the missionaries who lived

for protracted periods among tribes beyond the edges of white settlements. The

evangelical perspective of Native peoples could be remarkably fair and non-partisan;

its discourse at times sounds almost modern, as in this passage from the anonymous

letter already quoted to the Christian Register from August of 1821:

There are few things connected with our history that here occasioned

more declamation or more opposite statements…some have described

the Indians as possessed of every virtue, while others degrace them

below the rank of humanity, as destitute of every good quality, and

practicing all the vices that can come under the heads of dishonesty,

perfidy, and ferocity. One swears that the object before him is black;

the other maintains that it is white…In the meantime, the unfortunate

race…is mouldering away, and at no remote period will have no

existence but in history (12).

The letter criticizes the “religious fanaticism” of “[o]ur forefathers” and “the

exterminating injunctions of the Old Testament,” but ultimately turns upon itself to

sound a strangely discordant note, the author unconsciously lapsing into the trancelike

state of white hegemony from which not even the missionary mind was immune: “I

Smartis 34

am strongly inclined to believe that the negro is much more susceptible of

civilization, and the improvements that follow it, than the Indian”(12). In this act of

cultural distancing, the Christian sensibility to inaccuracies in white discourse about

Native people is subtended by a compulsion to racially objectify the “other” and

group them with the other race that was not deemed fit for white society, the "negro.”

The reason for this alienation is given as the Indian’s lack of “civilization,” and this

contention sounds one of the principal themes informing nineteenth century mass

media discourse about Native identity. The term operates most often in opposition to

the term “barbarity,” creating a cultural rift that is insurmountable because it is

adversarial. That which is “civilized” is threatened with extinction by the

“barbarous” or the “savage,” and cannot surrender an inch of the ground of its

signification or it succumbs to the dilution of being merely relative. The

establishment of these terms as conventions in public discourse about Native “others”

framed the encounter with indigenous peoples as an adversarial struggle from which

only one combatant could emerge victorious.

The author’s final conclusion that the gradual diminution of “[t]he Indian

race” is “owing to some inherent and immutable principles” negates the concern he

expresses for Indians at the outset of the piece, and the reader is left with a

contradictory mixture of empathy and racial disdain. The discourse of the letter is

curiously incoherent; it states that 1) white views of Indians are polarized in extremes,

2) the first colonists killed Indians in obedience to the Old Testament, and 3) Indians

are disappearing because of some inherent quality possibly connected to their

indisposition towards “civilization.” The letter raises issues without resolving them,

Smartis 35

and the result is an inconclusive thesis that strikes an almost apathetic chord of

resignation.

Concealed in the inconclusive rhetoric of the letter is the unresolved tension of

cultural difference. Racial tolerance could not bridge the gulf between Native

peoples and evangelical whites. The author’s concern for the diminishing numbers of

indigenous people represents only a partial mitigation of this tension, and no real

attempt is made to address white complicity in their plight. The language of the letter

embodies only a salutary movement towards real empathy for the “other”; the motion

stops at a recognition of the opposing perspectives in the discussion, the “white” and

“black” views of Native character. It is a frank observation, but it delineates only the

initiation of a connection that is not completed. White culture shock could have been

alleviated to some extent by honest cultural exchange; but for missionaries working in

the field, such an exchange proved to be impossible: racial tolerance could not entail

religious tolerance. Instead, an attempt was made to articulate some basis for a

superficial ideological affinity, as in this 1822 essay by Samuel Jarvis published in

the Christian Philanthropist:

The prevailing opinion of all these [Indian] nations is, that there

is one God, or, as they call him, one great and good Spirit…Our

Missionaries have not found rank polytheism, or gross idolatry,

to exist among them.—After this view, it is impossible not to

remark, that there is a smaller departure from the original religion

among the Indians of America, than among the more civilized

nations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome (August 20).

Smartis 36

The comparison is made presumably as an encouragement to the missionary project

and those who might contribute to its campaign of conversion, but behind this facile

attempt to bridge the gap between the white man and the Indian is the dark side of the

evangelical agenda, which is a vigorous program of acculturation in which Native

customs and languages are regarded as inferior and even morally corrupt. The writer

of this passage dwells in a field of fixed cultural frames of reference (Christian,

Greco-Roman, and Indian), a system of thought that enforces a rigid protocol of

comparison. In the identification of similarities and differences that this system

entails, the full scheme of possibilities for cultural exchange is set according to an

ideological hierarchy that places monotheism in the preeminent position and “rank

polytheism” at the bottom. The evangelical perspective tries to minimize the cultural

gap between white Christians and Native people, but the burden of closing this gap is

always understood as finally resting on the Indian.

The product of this rigid orientation is an ideological doublebind, a confused

approach that both extols and derogates Native people. The racial tolerance that

enabled missionaries and their supporters to view their students as fully human could

not completely cleanse the Christian perspective of the taint of white hegemony. The

power of Enlightenment hierarchies of knowledge to generate cultural prejudices

twists the narratives of Christian writers into contradictory positions, causing their

discourse to trespass into domains of expression that subvert the generosity of spirit

to which they aspired. Just as Christian racial tolerance did not engender religious

tolerance, it could not foster cultural tolerance. Culture shock and epistemological

hardheadedness led to what Edward Said has called cultural imperialism.

Smartis 37

Missionaries believed that the Indians were eligible for salvation, but not unless they

changed almost every aspect of their way of life. Converting the Indian to

“civilization” so that he could live among whites was an integral part of the

missionary project, and this reveals the complicity between the project and the

enterprise of land grabbing. The deception is subtle. Spreading the Gospel often

meant beguiling the Indian, as the anonymous writer to the Christian Register

illustrates:

It has been found much more successful in the end to give the Indian a

love of fixed residences and domestic comforts; to induce them to

exchange hunting for cultivation, and with a change of habits, to give

them that religious instruction that will harmonize with it (12).

The Moravian mission among the Cherokees believed that education would enable

the Indians to be accepted into white society, but implicit in this project of

acculturation is the imperative that Native peoples must either change their way of

life or be removed from their lands. There is no question of compromise even among

those evangelical writers who are the most adamant in their concern for Native

suffering. Lurking in the compassion of the evangelical position is the logic of an

ultimatum.

The ostensibly benevolent agenda of evangelical Christianity in the 1820s

disguises an inflexible racism that is not much different from the overt attitudes of

those who coveted Native lands. Their unyielding belief in white superiority

sometimes duped evangelicals into collusion with state and Federal governments

whose policies increasingly aligned with the interests of land speculators and

Smartis 38

entrepreneurs. This collusion, which could be ideological as well as practical, is

amply demonstrated by Elias Cornelius’s 1822 booklet, The Little Osage Captive.

Valuable to us as a historical record of the interplay between the missionary project

and the Federal government during the decade before the removal of the Cherokees,

Cornelius’s narrative demonstrates the ideological impotency of the evangelical

movement among the Five Tribes.

Cornelius’ book recounts his efforts to rescue a female Osage child who had

been taken captive by the Arkansas Cherokees in 1817. Although Cornelius’

declared motive for this enterprise is the girl’s “deliverance from captivity”(18), his

secondary motive, which is not directly stated, is the rescue of the child from territory

that is “…far removed from the light of civilization and Christianity”(42). Implicit in

this unstated objective is the “education”(19) of the child, the process of acculturation

that was designed to cleanse the student of the “taint” of Native culture with its

“heathenism” and violence. The notion of the Indian as the inherently violent and

“savage other” is as much a product of the Christian perspective as a symptom of

Enlightenment rationalism. Racial tolerance mitigates the intensity with which the

view is expressed, as in this passage in which Cornelius comes upon a Cherokee

camp in the wilderness: “…several bunches of bows and arrows—which, together

with their guns and tomahawks, were lying about promiscuously upon the ground,

and presented a truly savage appearance”(14). The sense of the Indian as inherently

violent is here obliquely articulated. Because it conflicts with the missionary

commitment to racial tolerance, it can be described only indirectly. The horror and

disgust inspired by this scene is unmentionable, although Cornelius comes very close

Smartis 39

to venting his true emotions when he discovers what has happened to the little girl’s

parents:

I asked, what had become of her parents? When one of them went to

his sack, and took from it TWO SCALPS! “Here,” said he, “they are;”

holding them up in his hand before me. The poor child gazed at them

with astonishment, as though she knew not what to make of it (15-16).

Cornelius’s object in this passage is clear. Even if the child cannot make anything of

the scalps, the adult reader can, and Cornelius is willing to provide assistance in the

realization of this horror: “Her parents were dead; and such were the horrid

memorials, by which the thought was to be kept alive in her memory”(16).

Cornelius contrives to ransom the girl from the Cherokees for one hundred

dollars, but the plan is obstructed by rumors among the tribes of a decision by

President Madison directing the tribes to return all prisoners taken during the war

with the Osages. Thinking that the government is working to effect a truce between

the Cherokees and the Osages, Cornelius readily aligns with the government’s

position: “It was very creditable to the Government, and agreed with their general

conduct towards the Indians, to suppose, that they had thus interposed their influence

in the cause of humanity”(27). This statement echoes across history with a sad irony.

In his book Trail of Tears, John Ehle records 1817 as the year in which Andrew

Jackson induced several chiefs of the Eastern Cherokees to cede lands in Tennessee

and Georgia in exchange for “a rifle gun, ammunition, a blanket, and a brass kettle or

in lieu of the latter a Beaver trap”(131), which were to be distributed to each adult

who agreed to leave. Cornelius, who must not have known of the Federal

Smartis 40

government’s sanction of Jackson’s machinations, travels to Washington and learns

from Secretary of War John C. Calhoun that the rumor of a truce is false, and

permission is granted to Cornelius to place the girl in a missionary school in Brainerd.

Cornelius and Calhoun thus save the day: “Thus, through the humanity of the

Government, whose conduct towards the Indians has, in many other instances, been

such as to do them the highest honor, we had a prospect of soon gaining our

object”(32). This is the same John Calhoun who tells a Cherokee delegation to

Washington:

You are now becoming like the white people; you can no longer live

by hunting but must work for your subsistence….Without this, you

will find you have to emigrate, or become extinct as a people. You see

that the Great Spirit has made our form of society stronger than yours,

and you must submit to adopt ours (Ehle 156).

The use of the term “extinct” is chilling in its communication of a hidden threat, and

many missionaries in the field seem not to have grasped the precariousness of their

situation. The missionary project among the Cherokees would have to wait until after

the Indian Removal Act to discover the true disposition of the government towards

their objectives. Their conflicted discourse did little to marshal public opposition to

the plans that were brewing in Washington for Native peoples.

Whereas the missionary perspective is preoccupied with the practical question

of the most expedient means of integrating the Indian into white society (and thereby

saving him from “heathenism”), literary portrayals of Native people from the 1820s

are essentially out of touch with real people living on the frontier. Usually bereft of

Smartis 41

tribal or individual identity, the standard Indian of fiction and poetry is more an

inhabitant of the imagination than of any social reality where everyday problems are

played out. This is the meaning of the critical classification of Native portrayals from

this period as “Romantic.” Before the Indian Removal Act, fictional portrayals of

Native people are noble or violent according to the narrative objectives of particular

narratives. Even when a narrative is set in a specific historical context, as in

Reverend James Eastburn’s long poem Yamoyden, which is set during King Philip’s

War, history is used mainly to evoke the romance of a remote past:

Oft, in the valley’s bosom green,

The hamlet’s mouldering ruins showed

Where war with demon brand had strode (9-10).

These lines would not be out of place in a British lyric, for they contain no indication

that their context is North American. A review of the poem from The New York

Literary Journal of 1821 provides an insight into the aesthetics driving popular

portrayals of the Native people during this period:

The events of Indian story naturally present themselves as subjects for

the American writer of imagination, and are, indeed, well adapted to

poetical embellishment…his [the Indian’s] habits, his pursuits, and his

whole life, are so far removed from usual observation, as to be clothed

in the garb of romance, and thus seem to flow spontaneously into the

language of poetry (100).

The movement from ignorance (“so far from usual observation”) to invention

(“clothing in the garb of romance”) is made effortlessly and without any regard to the

Smartis 42

truth. Native culture and history provided the literary artist with material, including

characters more colorful and exotic than any in European literature. The fact that

readers know almost nothing of real Native people only facilitates the process of

manipulation. Writing to a colonial audience for whom the Indian was already lost in

history, Eastburn exploits his readers’ ignorance, creating a romantic warrior that is

devoid of individual identity.

Know ye the Indian warrior race?

How their light form springs in strength and grace,

Like the pine on their native mountain side,

That will not bow in its deathless pride;

Whose rugged limbs of stubborn tone

No flexuous power of art will own,

But bend to Heaven’s red bolt alone!

How their hue is deep as the western die

That fades in Autumn’s evening sky (24-25).

Eastburn’s warrior has no identity except that afforded by the landscape. He merges

with the landscape, becoming an element in its romance. There is also the inevitable

concern with the warrior’s color. Many of the conventional stereotypes of Native

people, such as the muscular “red man,” first make their appearance in literary

depictions of this period. A rigid cultural iconography is established for Native

people in which all tribal distinctions are removed, as in this anonymous poem from

the 1825 periodical The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal:

We look’d for the youth of the sunny glance,

Smartis 43

Whose step was the fleetest in chase or dance!

The light of his eye was a joy to see,

The path of his arrows a storm to flee;

But there came a voice from a distant shore—

He was call’d—he is found ‘midst his tribe no more!

He is not in his place when the night fires burn…(496).

The life of the warrior is confined to the “chase,” the attack (“the path of his arrows”),

or the “dance.” These images have persisted in popular narratives down to the

present day: the 1990 film Dances With Wolves, acclaimed for its humanizing portrait

of the Lakota Sioux, still features a one-dimensional portrayal of the Pawnee as

compulsively violent as well as two scenes in which Sioux warriors dance by the light

of nocturnal fires. Through this iconography, a plethora of cultures is subsumed in a

modest number of standardized images that reduce Native identity to a mass market

commodity. Tomahawks, arrows, peace pipes, scalps, and horses become the

semiotic shorthand that displaces the rich diversity of cultures and stories that

constituted the Native world of the nineteenth century. Literary artists in the 1820s

had little interest in depicting the real struggles of actual Native people; consequently,

the literature that they produced represents a closed circle of knowledge. Without

much first-hand knowledge, discourse about Native peoples was truncated by a

circular epistemology, confined to the information provided by eastern texts that were

far removed from the realities they claimed to describe. White discourse was

informed by the same field of writings that had given it life.

Smartis 44

The enduring product of literary discourse before the acceleration of Native

American Removal was the creation of an artificial image for Native peoples, a

plastic entity that could be shaped according to the ideological needs of the author.

During the 1820s, the objective was to explore the power of the new and exotic

material to fascinate white readers:

…the contrast between the manners and pursuits of civilized and

savage life—the warm and bigotted fanaticism of the white people,

and the wild incoherent and enthusiastic superstitions of the red men—

the concerted and unintermitting attacks of the settlers…and the

beautiful scenery of the country, present occasions for the most

interesting and ingenious development of incident…(101).

In this passage, an acute awareness of interracial violence on the frontier is obliterated

by a concern for developing plots and landscape descriptions. The reader who is

looking for a firm political position in literary works of this period will be

disappointed. Sympathy for Native people is ephemeral and often insubstantial,

quickly dissolving into language that poses a contradictory position. Like the

evangelical perspective, literary discourse about Native people most often retreats

into a posture that obliquely communicates a devaluation of its subject, an

unconsciously negative assessment that hides itself among sentimental or romantic

rhetoric. Statements that evince a positive regard for Native people are canceled out

by negative statements: a statement about Native religions in which they are

described as “a system of poetical mythology as beautiful…as ever assisted the

inspiration of the muse”(10) is negated by a denunciation of Native beliefs as “the

Smartis 45

wild, incoherent and enthusiastic superstitions of the red men.” Native people are

both “noble” and “savage” as well as “generous” and “barbaric” in a discourse that

cancels out so many terms that its net meaning is unclear. The significance of a

contradictory discussion in public discourse lies in its power to neutralize the force of

arguments and effectively silence debate. Vehemence and acrimony have a better

chance of maintaining public interest and eliciting strong responses. Literary and

evangelical writings did little to define public opinion about Native people during the

decade leading up to the Indian Removal Act.

White chroniclers of Native history who published in the popular press exhibit

the same attention to the entertainment value of a narrative as do practitioners of

poetry and fiction. Often this value was defined in terms of scenes of violence or

other sensational qualities, as in this passage from an 1822 account of the expedition

of Major Long to the Rocky Mountains published in the Ladies’ Literary Cabinet:

The savage practice of torturing and burning to death their prisoners

existed in this nation. An unfortunate female taken in war of the

Padnease nation, was destined to this horrid death. The fatal hour

arrived …the trembling victim, far from her home and friends, was

fastened to the stake…Just when the funeral pile was to be

kindled…this young warrior…sprang from his seat, rushed through the

crowd, liberated the victim, seized her in his arms…and made the

utmost speed toward the nation and friends of the captive (110).

This formula of the last moment rescue of a helpless female from burning at the stake

was a popular device for creating suspense; a variation of it can be found in the 1823

Smartis 46

story of “Oneyo and Marano” from The New York Mirror and Ladies’ Literary

Gazette. The victim in the New York Mirror story is a white woman, but a female

child or a wife could as easily be substituted. The object of this narrative device is

always to contrive a situation in which the male hero can make the rescue that

relieves reader anxiety (and horror) at an Indian atrocity.

There is, however, an even darker agenda operating in some popular historical

writings from the 1820s. This agenda is a conscious attempt to recast the story of the

white man’s war with the Indian as the inevitable struggle of a morally superior race

against an inferior and morally defective people. An example of this kind of

reinscription of history can be found in William Darby’s History of Pennsylvania

from 1824:

On his return to Pennsylvania from Maryland, he [William Penn]

formed at Coaquannock, now Philadelphia, that bond of union with the

natives, which ought alone to immortalize William Penn—not more

for the humanity and equity, than for the profound political skill

shown in its provisions. The Indians were treated as they were in

reality, an inferior and conquered people, whilst their rights were

scrupulously regarded (91).

Darby, who was a member of the Historical Society of New York, accepts as a given

the fundamental assumptions of white hegemony. His vision of the history of

Pennsylvania is identical to the vision of the west heralded by the ideology of

Manifest Destiny two decades later: “Within the first year after the arrival of the

proprietary, settlers literally poured into the country; and from the falls of Delaware,

Smartis 47

where Trenton now stands, to Chester, the banks of the river rapidly became

populated, fields were open, houses built, and plenty began to smile”(91). This

benign inscription of history is the product of a cultural imperative that is cleansed of

generations of guilt from the subjugation and killing of indigenous peoples. This

cleansing is accomplished through a process of selective remembrance in which

events are edited and rewritten according to the dictates of nationalistic fervor. We

find this emotion embodied by the anonymous writer of a historical account of the

war with King Philip that was published in the Christian Register in 1821:

Thus ended this bloody conflict with the natives…It is full of

instruction—Our children should learn it, that they in turn may tell it

to their’s. Let them know, and let us know, the price of our

inheritance: the soil we cultivate has drunk the best blood of our

ancestry (40).

Writers like William Darby and the anonymous historian of King Philip’s War are

engaged in formulating the national character in print, but their endeavor is founded

on deception and driven by denial. They fail to offer an answer to the pressing

question of their day, which was the problem of the Native peoples who remained.

Few would dispute that one purpose of discourse is to stabilize meaning.

Disagreement without debate in public discourse is unproductive. An oppositional

discourse has no center; it merely presents opposing arguments. A conflicted

discourse also has no center. Such discourse merely makes statements that are

contradictory; no thesis is established because counter-theses cancel out one another.

An unconsciously conflicted discourse has the added problem of being unaware of its

Smartis 48

unconscious objectives. Participants in such discourse remain unaware of the

incoherence produced by their unconscious arguments because they are

unconsciously afraid to examine them. The oppositional and conflicted discourse that

we find embodied in the mass media dialogue about Native peoples during the 1820s

is inconclusive. Antithetical philosophies strive against one another in a dialectical

contest that is never resolved. The idea of an ideological center is abandoned,

preparing the way for absolute freedom of thought and action. This contest for

ideological supremacy leaves a void in public discourse that is uninhabited by

principles of any kind.

The effect of public discourse before the Indian Removal Act can be described

as a destabilization of meaning. As the era of the Jackson presidency approaches, the

public voices contending over the fate of Native peoples tire and diminish. As the

volume of the debate subsides, an ideological void is left in its wake. This void is

ultimately claimed by the agents of Indian Removal and extermination.

Andrew Jackson spent most of his adult life fighting Native peoples. He took

up arms against them in the wilderness and he fought them in the halls of

government. His final strategy against them was political: the project of Indian

Removal defines his presidency and places the personal stamp of his life upon

history. A case could be made that his political career culminates in the elimination

of the Five Tribes from the southern states. Many of his early experiences prepared

him for the role he was to play in the instigation of the national campaign against

Indians. Growing up on the frontier in Tennessee, he learned early that the survival

Smartis 49

of white settlements in Indian country depended upon a determination to kill Indians.

Robert Remini describes Jackson’s attitude towards Native people as a young man:

In addition to his hatred, mistrust, and fear, Andrew developed some

fixed prejudices about Native Americans by the time he became a

teenager: their undeviating enmity toward white society for squatting

on their land;…the belief that “savages,” as he invariably called them,

were barbaric and could not be trusted and regularly violated promises

and treaty agreements. Those like Andrew who lived on the frontier

accepted as indisputable fact that Indians had to be shunted to one side

or removed to make the land safe for white people to settle and

cultivate (15).

When the British enlisted the help of the Indians during the Revolutionary War,

Jackson’s Indian fighting was transformed into a patriotic duty: “It [the war] gave

him firsthand knowledge of how an enemy of his country always engaged Indians in

their warfare against the Americans. In his mind, and the minds of most

frontiersmen, the Indians were pawns to be used by any foreign power seeking to gain

dominance in North America”(17).

As president, Jackson’s first important legislation was his bill for Indian

Removal, which was submitted to Congress on December 7, 1829 (Remini 231-32).

The following day, Jackson addressed Congress in support of his bill.

Their [the Cherokees] present condition, contrasted with what they

once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies… By

persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river

Smartis 50

and from mountain to mountain, until some the tribes have become

extinct…(1).

In this language, Jackson moderates the vehemence of his position in order to

accommodate those who sympathized with Native people, casting himself in the role

of savior and protector of the Five Tribes even though one of his most cherished

objectives had always been a solution to the “Indian problem.” Such linguistic

maneuvers are representative of the tactic of political smoke and mirrors that Jackson

employs to conciliate opposing factions. His benevolent tone, however, merely

disguises a confirmed racism:

Surrounded by whites with their arts of civilization, which by

destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and

decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is

fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this

fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the states

does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that

every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity (1).

Jackson’s choice of terminology is an exercise in deception and concealment.

“Humanity” and “national honor” “demand” that the “extinction” of the Cherokees be

“averted” even though Jackson betrays his knowledge that it is contact with whites

that is causing their demise (“if they remain within the limits of the states”). Through

a semantic ruse, Jackson transforms his plan to seize Native lands into a philanthropic

project. How far this speech strays from Jackson’s real posture towards Native

Smartis 51

peoples is revealed by a comparison of its language with his proclamation to his

“Brave Tennesseans” published in the Nashville Whig in 1813:

Your frontier is threatened with invasion by a savage foe! Already do

they advance towards your frontier, with their scalping knives

unsheathed, to butcher your wives, your children, and your helpless

babes. Time is not to be lost! We must hasten to the frontier, or we

will find it drenched in the blood of our fellow citizens (Remini 7).

The histrionic drama of this rhetoric is missing from Jackson’s presidential voice; in

its place is a strategy of diversion and doubletalk, a carefully constructed language

that strives to conceal government objectives even as it announces them:

Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the

red man is not only liberal, but generous. He is unwilling to submit to

the laws of the States and mingle with their population. To save him

from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General

Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the

whole expense of his removal and settlement…(3).

John Ehle records that the contract negotiated with John Ross for the removal of the

Cherokees stipulated that any balance due to Ross beyond the amount provisioned by

the agreement would be taken out of the money owed to the Cherokees by the Federal

government. The diversion of money to whites by federal Indian agents was to

become a common practice, a symptom of the government’s abandonment of events

in the field that began during the Jackson administration.

Smartis 52

Even before Jackson began his campaign to push the Indian Removal Act

through Congress, the concept generated a furious debate. Jackson was not the first

president to propose such drastic measures: James Monroe pressured Congress to

fund a scheme similar to the bill passed in 1830. Formal ownership of land, Monroe

claimed, and “the regular progress of improvement and civilization”(1575) were the

only ways by which the “degeneracy” of the Indians could be prevented. Debate in

the House of Representatives flared up in February of 1828, the year of the

presidential election that brought Jackson into power. The Cherokees had adopted a

written constitution the previous year, placing them on a collision course with the

Georgia state government, and pressure was on Federal lawmakers to enact an

overall solution that would circumvent the anticipated escalation of violence that was

believed would come if Georgia exerted its authority. The discourse embodied by the

debate shows that the participants were rigidly polarized in an inconclusive contest of

ideologies and political motives. The debate mirrors the contradictions and

disjunction of mass media discourse. The discordant logic of the debate is typified by

men such as Representative John Woods of Ohio, who records his opposition to the

act with an eloquent appeal to the moral sense of his colleagues:

We have arrived at a point from which we cannot go forward in this

course, without the most monstrous injustice—an injustice which will

appear in the most glaring light to the nation, and to the world (1554).

Despite his denunciation of the Act, Woods’ perspective is still permeated by the

attitudes that led to the imprisonment and acculturation of Native peoples:

Smartis 53

I do not wish, sir, to preserve the Indians in distinct tribes, or as a

separate people. I would as soon propose to plant in our country a

colony from the Highlands of Scotland…as to preserve the Indians

among us a distinct People (1554).

Both the political unity and tribal identity of the Cherokees are at issue in this

position. Tribes as legal entities could be considered to pose a threat to government

management if they presented a united front; they could also render themselves more

amenable to control if the legality of their existence could be conceptualized in the

right way, as in this declaration by Congressman Woods' Ohio colleague William

Mclean:

In relation to the appropriation now required to aid the Creeks in their

removal West of the Mississippi, no objections can be made. It is but

the fulfillment of a solemn obligation entered into with them, on the

part of this government, by treaty stipulations (1561).

The political legitimacy of a tribe could be sacrosanct if enforcement of a treaty was

deemed advantageous to the Federal government. Otherwise, the development by the

tribes of European style political organizations was perceived as a strategy to

consolidate power rather than as an attempt to establish “civilization.” Few things

had more power to upset Southern Congressmen than the prospect of organized

Nations, as this declaration by Georgia Representative Wilson Lumpkin illustrates:

If you succeed in the plan of civilization, the increase of population

and moral power that must necessarily result from the success of the

measure, added to their preservation as a distinct race of men…must,

Smartis 54

unavoidably, bring about the establishment of a government

independent of our own. Sir, I will not speculate upon the

consequences that would follow (1572).

The linguistic field delimited by the terms of this debate, such as “preservation” and

“removal” or “civilization” and “separation,” is confining and oppositional, a series

of either/or propositions with no possible point of intersection. The proposal to

remove the Cherokees beyond the Mississippi only postpones an inevitable

confrontation with the problem. Only a handful of Congressmen could face the

illogic of the Indian Removal Act. Despite what can be inferred from his conflicted

language, Representative John Woods saw that it would never lead to peace:

If you cannot here stay the oppressing hand of avarice, where will you

remove them to be beyond its grasp? Where you propose to plant

them, will not our soldiers be placed over them? Will not our people

surround them there? Those who now prey upon them as vultures,

will follow them to their new abode (1553).

Woods’ prophetic vision was ultimately ignored. In December of 1828, the Georgia

legislature passed a law placing Cherokee lands under the judicial authority of the

State of Georgia in a direct response to the Cherokee constitution (Ehle 217). In July

of 1829, gold was discovered in a creek near the Cherokee capitol of New Echota,

and miners joined land speculators and squatters in a mad dash to settle on Cherokee

lands. The Georgia legislature passed laws forbidding Native people to mine for

gold, bring suits in State courts, and sell land. William Wirt, who had been Attorney

General during the administration of President Monroe, offered his help to the

Smartis 55

Cherokees and filed a suit in the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the government of

Georgia from enforcing its laws against the Cherokees. In the meantime, the Indian

Removal Act was passed by Congress on May 28, 1830, inaugurating the seven year

long contest of negotiation and maneuvers that culminated in the Trail of Tears.

The last branch of the Federal government to abandon the Cherokees was the

Judicial. Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in The Cherokee Nation v. The State

of Georgia, issued on July 18, 1831, effectively ends the Federal government’s

conflicted approach to the “Indian problem.” In a single decision, Marshall places the

issue of First Nations’ sovereignty forever on shaky ground:

…it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the

acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict

accuracy, be denominated foreign nations. They may, more correctly,

perhaps, be denominated domestic dependent nations. They occupy a

territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which

must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession

ceases. Meanwhile, they are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to

the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian [30 U.S. 1,

17].

Arguing that the second section of the third article of the constitution permits the

Federal Judiciary to adjudicate cases between American states or citizens and foreign

states, Marshall throws the suit out of court on the judgement that the Cherokee

nation does not constitute a “foreign state.” Marshall describes the Cherokees as “[a]

people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the

Smartis 56

quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our

superior policy, our arts, and our arms…”[30 U.S. 1, 15]. Marshall’s decision

encodes the jurisprudence of Imperialism and its concept of war as sovereign justice,

the exercise of sovereign right. In this legitimization of violence (to borrow Richard

Slotkin’s terminology), the Marshall decision opens the door to the project of

westward expansion, the enterprise of war as a kind of amoral justice exercised by a

people because they possess “superior policy,” “arts,” and “arms.” When Marshall

adjusts the language of his position in his 1832 decision in Worcester v. Georgia to

obtain the release from prison of missionary Samuel Worcester, it is too late to alter a

course of events that is unfolding based on his earlier denial of Cherokee sovereignty.

Both Jackson and the Georgia state government ignore the decision.

The failure of all three branches of the Federal government to arrive at a moral

consensus about the fate of the Cherokees created a permanent void in public

discourse about Native peoples. This disjunction in the discourse of leadership

caused the ethical center to drop out of the law, effectively “deconstituting” the

constitution and removing its restraining power from public policy. The Supreme

Court’s failure to intervene sent a message both to State governments and the

business interests with which they were allied that the Federal government would do

little or nothing to stop measures carried out against Native people. The wholesale

seizure of Native lands and property, arrest without due process, execution without

trial, starvation, and outright murder prevailed. Decisions made at the highest level of

government set the moral tone for the coming generations that were to settle the west.

Smartis 57

III

The Rhetoric of Violence

The passage of the Indian Removal Act and the forced march of the

Cherokees seven years later usher in the final era of white expansion for the

remaining indigenous peoples of North America. Never again would the government

hesitate in the execution of its scheme to wrest the balance of the continent from

Native hands. As the 1830s progress towards the Trail of Tears, white culture

gradually turns its back on Native peoples, consigning them to the seclusion of exile

and the oblivion of history. Public discourse in the mass media begins to cultivate a

more uniform ideology concerning Native peoples, evincing a point of view that

promulgates a virulent brand of racism that dehumanizes and demonizes indigenous

peoples. Fiction and non-fiction gradually converge towards an ideological center

that remains unarticulated because it is culturally unmentionable. This center is the

conviction that the only solution to the “Indian problem” is the elimination of the

Indians.

This unspoken center in public discourse about Native peoples requires three

decades to fully emerge as an articulated thesis in the Dime Novel Western. Its

gradual evolution is due to a cultural complicity between the mass media and its

audience. As technological improvements increase the profitability of periodicals and

newspapers, more publications enter the market. Increasing competition produces

market pressures that force editors and writers to bring their views into line with those

of the majority. In the nineteenth century, this alignment almost always means

Smartis 58

discrimination against non-whites. Barbara Cloud illustrates the dynamic operating

between the press and its audience during this period:

…the Seattle Daily Call…found economic benefits in being on the

“right” side of a political dispute. After completion of the Northern

Pacific Railroad in the 1880s, Pacific Northwest unions perceived a

labor threat from the many Chinese who moved into the general job

market. The Call…crusaded to have the Chinese removed from the

Seattle area. “The Chinese Must Go!” was repeated in the advertising

and news columns of the paper….Parades and demonstrations brought

declaration of martial law before some Chinese were evicted and the

matter quieted down(167).

The general public expected the press to serve its needs and protect its interests. As

settlers moved into “ceded” lands, their interests were never in harmony with those of

Native peoples. In most cases, the press went to great lengths to create and justify an

attitude towards Native peoples that legitimized the widespread seizure of their lands.

Following the passage of the Indian Removal Act, Andrew Jackson

accelerated his efforts to evict the remaining tribes from Southern lands. War with

the Seminoles of Florida began in 1835. In 1836, the Secretary of War ordered the

removal of the Creeks from their lands in Alabama. The government compelled the

Chickasaws to pay the Choctaws for the right to establish settlements on the land to

which the Choctaws had already been removed by the military. During the winter of

1838-39, the Cherokees were removed from their lands at bayonet point; nearly 4000

of them died on the journey to their exile in eastern Oklahoma (Ehle 322-61).

Smartis 59

Attitudes embodied in public discourse towards Native peoples during the 1830s shift

from postures of inconclusive debate to declarations of confidence in the wisdom of

the program of Indian Removal. For the first time, the disappearance of the Indian

from coveted lands is articulated as an imperative:

We believe that the civilized cultivator has a right to those wastes over

which the buffalo, the panther, and savage, in turn and at intervals,

roam in search of sustenance. We believe that it is much better that

thousands should occupy, and make gardens and corn-fields, of the

widespread regions of the west…than that the fields should be the

habitations of snakes and wolves, or beaver, and deer; as the hunting-

grounds of savages, who, while employed in seeking a precarious

subsistence, can never rise to the level of the well-instructed man

(282-83).

The anonymous writer of this 1833 article for The Knickerbacker periodical accepts

as normative the assumption that there is a connection between the white mode of

living and racial superiority, and that this superiority entails inherent rights to the

land. He displays an unquestioning confidence in his convictions; from this new

unreflecting perspective, he can afford to be magnanimous toward the Indian, and he

expresses pity for “…the unfortunate children of our forest…”(283). Completely

absent from this perspective is the 1820s acknowledgment of white responsibility (or

even a pause for ethical consideration). As an inferior race, the condition of the

Indian cannot be helped, and the writer can only feel “…sorrow for their

fate…”(283). The term “fate” implies an irrevocable finality, the inevitability of

Smartis 60

Providence. The hidden ultimatum implicit in this perspective is three-fold: Indians

must either adopt white civilization and convert to Christianity, leave their lands, or

suffer an unarticulated fate at the hands of white soldiers and settlers.

Easterners had good reasons for regarding Native people as morally inferior.

Publications such as Niles’ Weekly Register fed them a steady diet of Indian atrocities

presented in the guise of news reports from the war with the Seminoles. Indian

attacks upon women receive special attention in these articles:

She fell. The Indian came up—dragged her into the hall of the

house… and then taking out her comb and tearing the string from her

hair, scalped her. He did not tear the scalp off, but cut it as butchers

take the skin from a beef. During this operation Mrs. Johns was

sensible to what [he] was doing…The Indians plundered the

house…set fire to the house, and one Indian applied the torch to her

clothes…She felt the fire of her clothes upon one leg, and as soon as

she dared to move so much, grabbed in her hand a quantity of her own

clotted blood, with which she put out her burning clothes

(Oct. 1, 1836).

The sedulous attention to minute details in this narrative, combined with the moment

by moment order in which it is told, alerts us to the agenda underlying the passage.

We are clearly meant to identify with Mrs. Johns, to feel her pain and terror and

respond with a righteous anger. Sometimes the proper response is provided by the

article itself:

The time has at length arrived when it is necessary and proper that the

Smartis 61

Tennessee brigade should march to Florida. A savage foe,

emboldened by his former success, has approached within twenty

miles of Tallahassee …burning and murdering as he went….Public

expectation demands the performance of this duty, and the character of

Tennessee requires that we should not shrink from it (Sept. 17, 1836).

The clause “[p]ublic expectation demands” demonstrates a consciousness of cultural

consensus in the matter. Debate is finished; it’s time for concerted action. The

consequences of a failure to respond are made clear in melodramatic language that is

as replete with vivid imagery as it is devoid of newsworthy specifics:

Again it becomes our melancholy duty to record the cold-blooded

butchery of men, women and children, by the sanguinary Seminoles.

Again have the treacherous savages bathed their tomahawks and

scalping knives hilt deep in human blood, burning houses and

destroying property…These scenes may, and probably will be

reiterated time and again, unless some more energetic measures are

adopted to drive them from the territory…(Aug. 29, 1840).

The call for troops is made with increasing frequency: “…the Indians made their

appearance on the morning of the 20th…and murdered a whole family…Where are

the troops?”(Brother Jonathan, Jan. 1, 1842). Passages abound in which the military

is called upon to act as a kind of frontier police: “It behooves the government then to

provide against this contingency at once. Nothing can be done with any of them until

they are thoroughly subdued”(Littell’s Living Age, Jan. 1850). The significance of

this decisive language is revealed by mass media texts that treat the subject of Native

Smartis 62

character. In one article after another, periodical texts from the decades following the

passage of the Indian Removal Act describe Indians as brutal, unemotional, and

incapable of self control, as in this passage from the Niles National Register:

It is known to every body that peace among Indian tribes must ever be

precarious upon the principles of savage life. In order to tranquilize

turbulent spirits, and to paralyze mischievous efforts, the tribes must

be united under the influence of law, so that wrongs may be redressed

without resorting to the savage custom of retaliation (Sept. 30, 1837).

“Turbulent spirits” and “mischievous efforts” as well as “the savage custom of

retaliation” are here identified as “the principles of savage life.” The “savage custom

of retaliation” puts us in mind of Colonel John Chivington’s words before Sand

Creek, where he is reputed to have said as the attack began, “Remember the murdered

women and children on the Platte”(Osborn 216). The evils of the Native custom of

retaliation are dramatized in yet another article from the Niles National Register of

1840 entitled “Indian Character.” The piece is cast as a historical report set in 1829

among “the Ottawa tribe on the eastern bank of Lake Michigan,” but its melodramatic

language and contrived plot suggest otherwise. According to the narrative, a young

Native named Mickenock imbibes too much “fire drink” and kills the son of the chief

of the Ottawas. The chief decides to avail himself of the custom that allows him to be

revenged on a relative of the wife of the murderer. His determination results in the

production of the murderer himself at a council meeting, and the culprit is summarily

killed by the eldest brother of the murdered man:

Smartis 63

“There,” said Mickenock, “is the knife that drunk the heart’s blood of

your brother; take it, and like a brave man avenge your brother’s

death.”…The brother spat upon his hand, clenched his knife with a

death grasp, and drew up his arm. Mickenock, pointing to the spot

nearest his heart, gave the word “strike.” Instantly the brother plunged

the knife to the hilt into the bosom of the brave Mickenock, who fell

dead at his feet” (August 29, 1840).

Following this execution, the wife and daughter of Mickenock are immediately

adopted at the scene by the chief with a rapidity that suggests that they are regarded

as possessions. Such stories depicting Indian brutality and emotional insensitivity are

meant to shock eastern readers with their sensational violence and melodrama, but

they also portray the customs and justice of the Ottawas as abnormal and abhorrent.

Melodramatic language that is charged with vivid imagery is a stylistic

hallmark of the project of impugning Native character and Native ways of life. The

scientific rationalism operating in assessments of Native culture, which describe the

indigenous mode of living as deficient in the “arts” of “civilization,” is wholly

abandoned in descriptions of Native customs. Such descriptions often exhibit the

influence of the narrative techniques of poetry in both their excessive diction and

extended syntax, as in this 1848 account of a war dance from the magazine The

Western Journal:

The slow and solemn chant of the war-song breathes out fierce and

vindictive denunciations, and the habitations, the wives, and the little

ones of the anticipated victims are devoted to the flames and to torches

Smartis 64

unspeakably terrific, and the bloody fragments of their mangled

carcasses are promised to the carrion bird (603).

This convergence of style between the language of literature and that of strict

narration is a trend which culminates in the Dime Novel Western. History and

embellishment combine to produce a brand of reporting that borrows from the

narrative force of fiction. In the 1840 pamphlet A Narrative of the Horrid Massacre

By the Indians of the Wife and Children of the Christian Hermit, the chronological

order and attention to detail of fiction are strictly observed in a passage describing

preparations for the torture and killing of children:

A stake about 14 feet long was driven into the ground, to which my

daughter was bound; and some dry brush was next gathered and piled

around her to the height of her waist, which was set on fire, and

burned, while they danced round the post, alternately breaking forth in

songs of revelry, and uttering terrific yells! None but a parent can

imagine what were my feelings at this moment! For half an hour my

ears were pained with the shrieks and groans of my dying

daughter…(11).

This anonymous booklet is not pure journalism. It is also not pure literature. It

contains elements of both kinds of writing, combined to create a form of

entertainment that is also intended to instruct the reader in the horrors of Indian

captivity. This same narrative strategy is used in the 1857 booklet History of the

Spirit Lake Massacre! Based upon the actual captivity of Abigail Gardiner among

the Sioux band led by Ink-pa-du-ta, the story anticipates the sensationalistic style and

Smartis 65

lurid content of the Dime Novel Westerns introduced by Beadle and Adams three

years later. The book’s strange merging of violence and suffering with entertainment

is evident from its first paragraph:

It is no easy matter for us who have never seen death in his most

savage forms, never lived in scenes of bloodshed, never suffered from

privation and want, never braved the rough-and-tumble life of the

prairie, or dared the war-whoop and scalping-knife, to realize fully

the horrors described in the following pages (5).

The “war-whoop and scalping-knife” are presented as pleasures for the imagination, a

form of escape in which Native peoples become merely the purveyors of near-death

experiences that test the mettle of whites. An ephemeral attention is paid to the real

plight of Native peoples in chapter four of the narrative, but this quickly disintegrates

into a tirade denouncing the activities of “half breeds” in instigating Native violence

against whites:

The half-civilized and degraded half breeds, who move continually in

advance of the surveyed government lands, and disgrace the name of

white man, in their bestial kind of life, are the go-betweens which clear

the track for the car of human progress. The horrid mission they

perform, is to fire every beastly passion to which the Indians are

prone…(13).

The denunciation of half breeds as racially impure sounds a new chord in mass media

texts about Native people, that of overt racism. Texts from the 1850s exhibit a new

lack of concern for the reactions of Native sympathizers to invectives against Native

Smartis 66

peoples, as in this 1853 anonymous essay from Littell’s Living Age sarcastically

entitled “The Noble Savage”:

…he is a savage—cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or

less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the

questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty,

monotonous humbug (325).

Far from fearing the responses of more sensitive readers, the author directly attacks

those who would defend Native peoples from his criticisms:

It is not the miserable nature of the noble savage that is the new

thing; it is the whimpering over him with maudlin admiration, and the

affecting to regret him, and the drawing of any comparison of

advantage between the blemishes of civilization and the tenor of his

swinish life (325).

Voices speaking in admiration of and sympathy with Native peoples are not absent

from mass media texts after the Jacksonian era, but they are few and far between,

increasingly relegated to the periphery of the discussion by the hysteria of writers

intent on drowning out their opposition. These writers come very close to clarifying

their ultimate objective (for racism is always self-aggrandizing in some respect; it can

hardly be considered as an altruistic enterprise). Their objective is Indian Removal

and the possession of Native lands, only they never clarify how this object is to be

achieved.

None of the texts examined in this chapter are daring enough to articulate the

directive that is implied by the substance of what they have to communicate. During

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the decades following the enshrinement of Indian Removal as federal law, Native

peoples are portrayed as amoral and psychotically violent. Their customs are

described as weird, superstitious, and abnormal. Their modes of living are depicted

as intemperate and lacking in the restraints of white society, such as respect for

personal property (usually white property) and sentimental attachments. White

discourse expresses “sorrow for their fate” and simultaneously calls in the troops,

recognizing Native peoples’ humanity even as it consigns them to wastes where

starvation is inevitable. In such discourse, which takes place when two cultures are in

collision and one of them is bent on domination, empathy and antagonism emerge in

antithetical positions in a dialogue that is confused and conflicted.

The language of white discourse about Native peoples during western

expansion is unstable. The terms of its dialectic are continually shifting in

signification, dancing and disappearing in a continuous flow of language that avoids

ideas with which the culture is uncomfortable. The object of this perpetual motion is

to gradually desensitize the participants to the discomfort, to lessen the shock of the

real center of the discourse, which is perceived but not spoken. Through such

discourse, the audience is prompted to think the center without having to utter it out

loud, thus sparing them the shame of it.

In the security of our retrospection, we can now articulate the center of their

thinking even if they could not. It might sound something like those notorious words

from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate the brutes!”

Smartis 68

IV

The Dime Novel Western and the Dehumanization of Native Peoples

The illusion of the “Indian problem” was created by the enterprise of

American nation building and its quasi-religious imperative of westward expansion.

The logistics of the problem consisted of two components: first, what was to be done

with Native peoples? Should they be converted to Christianity and civilized to dwell

amongst whites, or should something else be done with them? Second, should the

latter course be selected, how was a peace loving, largely Christian population in the

East to be motivated to carry out the unsavory solution? Following the shift in the

ideology of public opinion that occurred with President Jackson’s acceleration of

Indian Removal, mass media discourse took an aggressive stance. Selective and

racially biased newspaper accounts of Native peoples on the frontier were crafted to

incite white invective. The project of impugning the character of Native people was

actualized through the emerging mass media voice provided by periodicals, cheap

books, pamphlets, and story papers. All of these manufactured “realities” about

Native people were intended to impel the public imagination towards the program of

exile, war, and extermination that was believed to be the best means of securing

coveted lands. The culmination of this textual campaign to dehumanize Native

peoples and condition public opinion to favor their demise can be found in the Dime

Novel Western.

The preeminent status of the Dime Novel Western as one of the largest selling

publications in America coincides exactly with the escalation and completion of the

Smartis 69

project of Indian removal between 1861 and 1890, when the Federal government

declared that the frontier was closed. Dime Novel Westerns are frontier stories.

Often written by men such as Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, who had directly

experienced frontier life, they are fictional narratives based upon tales and legends

that were spreading East from very real places and events. The Santee Sioux attack

on the white settlement of New Ulm on August 23, 1862 was transformed by Edward

Ellis into the Dime Novel Indian Jim in 1864. Kit Carson, who led forces in pursuit

of the Navahos in Canyon de Chelly, was written up by Ellis as a Dime Novel

Biography in 1861. The historiographical realignment and retelling of facts by the

Dime Novel Western, and the reciprocal infusion of facts and narrative into the Dime

Novel Western, demonstrate the convergence of history and fiction that characterizes

propaganda designed for an audience that is accustomed to freedom of the press. A

reading public which believes that it can get both sides of a story has good reasons to

think that it cannot be deceived; the fusing of fact with racially skewed fictions can

only be accomplished through a stealthy shuffling of the epistemological deck. This

shuffling is the principal achievement of the Dime Novel Western. Because the Dime

Novel Western claimed to present real stories of masculine adventure on the frontier,

the reader had to be seduced by an infusion of history into more than a willing

suspension of disbelief: he (and readers were mostly male) had to believe that the

stories were something close to newspaper accounts. For the genre to work, the

fictions had to be skillfully transposed into truths. In the Dime Novel Western, this is

accomplished through the use of culturally tolerated codes of racism, through the

Smartis 70

solicitation of white moral outrage, and through appeals to emotion, the non-logical

component of thought.

Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation has noted the unprecedented size of the

audience to which the Dime Novel had access by virtue of its inexpensive price (126).

This audience was attracted by stories of adventure and violence on the frontier, but

Slotkin views the sensationalism of Dime Novel plots as indicative of more than mere

commercial wisdom:

Although sensationalism was the key to their commercial success, the

publishers of popular books also continued the tradition which saw

popular literature as an occasional instrument of propaganda for moral

and patriotic causes (126-27).

The popularity of Dime Novels extended even to children, especially adolescent boys,

as Charles M. Harvey pointed out in the Atlantic Monthly in 1907:

What boy of the sixties [1860’s] can ever forget Beadle’s novels! […]

How the boys swarmed into and through stores and news-stands to buy

copies as they came hot from the press! And the fortunate ones that

got there before the supply gave out—how triumphantly they carried

them off to the rendevouz, where eager groups awaited their arrival!

What silver- tongued orator of any age or land ever had such

sympathetic and enthusiastic audiences as did the happy youths at

those trysting-places, who were detailed to read those wild deeds of

forest, prairie, and mountain!(37).

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This account is echoed by Edmund Pearson’s anecdote published in 1929, long after

the twilight of the Dime Novel had passed:

A young financial genius in our neighborhood who had no real love of

Western life conceived the idea of a lending library, so having secured

the financial backing of his father, he purchased a dozen copies of our

favorite series and allowed us addicts to pay him threepence a week

for the privilege of reading as many books as we could devour. Think

of a kid of twelve thinking up a scheme like that!(236)

Harvey’s article reveals, however, that the popularity of the Dime Novel transcended

age and socio-economic boundaries; it was one of America’s first mass culture fads:

No age limit was set up among Beadle’s readers. Lincoln was one of

them. So was Seward, and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. […] “The

man,” said Zachariah Chandler, “who does not enjoy Onomoo, the

Huron, has no right to live.”

Chandler’s declaration, in its appeal to a sense of masculine community, evokes a

glimmer of the cultural influence exerted by the genre, an influence with the potential

to create a kind of ideological miasma when substantiated by the images of Native

people portrayed in newspapers and periodicals. The Dime Novel was the publishing

phenomenon of the century; only newspaper sales could challenge its numbers. As a

genre, it reigned supreme in American populist fiction for a generation, providing a

voice of unprecedented power to shape popular conceptions of Native peoples. The

potential of the Dime Novel to serve as a primer for Eastern perceptions of the

frontier raises questions concerning a possible collusion between the mass market

Smartis 72

press and those forces in the public and private sectors whose interests depended on

the management of public opinion. Railroad and mining companies and their allies in

Congress, for example, would have had strong motivations for fostering a “moral

justification” for the Indian Wars.

The staple plot of the Dime Novel Western from its inception involves drama

that arises from the “Indian problem.” The predicament described in the second

Dime Novel published by Beadle and Adams, Seth Jones, articulates the ideological

center that prevailed in the genre for over three decades:

Dark, sanguinary and bloody tragedies were constantly enacted upon

the frontier for a generation afterward. The mother country failing in

her work of subjugation, continued to incite the Indians to revolting

barbarities upon the unoffending inhabitants (6).

Dime Novels became notorious for their gratuitous Indian violence, and they were

publicly denounced by both civil and religious authorities even as their popularity

soared. They provided their audience with an imaginative elixir of escape from

Eastern values: as a cultural phenomenon, they presented a counter-narrative that

opposed Eastern ideas of culture and order with a frontier ethos of masculine

freedom, adventure, and bravado, as Bill Brown has pointed out:

[…] it was the means of carrying a sensational, violent West with you

while you rode on an elevated train in Manhattan or waited for the

fighting to begin at Shiloh. While the frontier had offered actual

escape from Eastern civilization (the Homestead Act of 1862 ceded

160 acres of government land to anyone who would cultivate it for five

Smartis 73

years), the dime novel offered imaginative escape from an increasingly

urbanized East (5).

However, the Dime Novel’s derogation and vilification of the Native as a homicidal

menace on the frontier created an ideological contest between Christian missionary

ideals of racial tolerance and white hegemony.

This unresolved, internal narrative conflict can be found operating in the first

Dime Novel mass produced by Beadle and Adams, Ann Stephens’ Malaeska; or, the

Indian Wife of the White Hunter. Originally published in serial form in the magazine

The Ladies’ Companion in 1839 (8) and republished as a Dime Novel in 1860, the

popularity of the story spans the critical period of interaction between Native people

and whites during the era from The Trail of Tears to the final, fatal phase of the

Indian Wars. Although the book features a Native heroine in a characterization that is

designed to elicit reader empathy, the novel’s sympathetic portrait of the Native

woman Malaeska is subverted by descriptive language that demonstrates an early

example of the negative objectification of Native people as the uncivilized and

inhuman “other.”

Malaeska synthesizes the tone and enplotment of a sentimental novel with the

outdoor action sequences of a wilderness adventure narrative and the allure of the

theme of miscegenation. This shrewd combination ensured an even greater

popularity for the story when it was reissued for ten cents by Beadle and Adams’ in

the summer of 1860. It is not surprising that a work that appealed to such a large

segment of the population should prove to be a conflicted text. On its surface,

Malaeska operates as a counter-narrative to sensational Dime Novel stories which

Smartis 74

depict Native men as amoral agents, the perpetrators of kidnappings or the violation

of women. Ostensibly, the plight of Malaeska dramatizes the social predicament of

Native women married to whites during an era of intense racial conflict on the

frontier. Ostracized by her own race and unwelcome in the white world of her

husband’s family, Malaeska is an alienated woman whose half-breed son is taken

from her by her husband’s parents and educated to hate his mother’s people. The

final suicide of William Danforth reads as an enactment of the tragedy of racial

intolerance, and the sorrow of Malaeska places the story in the domain of the

sentimental novel in its invocation of sympathy for a wronged mother. This reading

is subverted, however, by a master narrative that betrays itself through descriptive

language imbedded in the portrayal of Native people. The cumulative effect of this

language unravels the humanized portrait of Malaeska and places it curiously at odds

with itself.

From the outset of the novel, the characterization of the Indians is marked by

animal imagery. An Native woman encountered by whites in the forest is delineated

entirely by animal similes: “Her laugh was musical as a bird song … her long hair

glowed like the wing of a raven, and her motion was as graceful as an untamed

gazelle” (chpt.1, 3). Attacking Indians are feared “… like a pack of wolves”(4) and

an injured Native warrior is described as “…springing up with the bound of a wild

animal …”(3). The warriors who surround Danforth in chapter one are “… like

vipers eager for their prey”(10) and are roused from their campfire “… as if a

company of fiends had been disturbed in their orgies”(9-10). Demonic imagery is

sometimes paired with animal imagery. Native warriors ambushing a group of whites

Smartis 75

break out in a “fiendish” yell “like the howl of a thousand wild beasts…”(chpt. 2, 1)

and they emerge from their concealment “… as if the very earth had yawned to emit

them”(1). Descriptive passages are sometimes overwhelmed by animal imagery:

Above all burst out the war-whoop of the savages, sometimes rising

hoarse, and like the growling of a thousand bears; then, as the barking

of as many wolves, and again, sharpening to the shrill, unearthly cry

of a tribe of wild cats. (chpt. 2, 1)

When Native peoples are not dehumanized through animal imagery, they are often

completely bereft of any identity and become mere “dark” or “dusky forms”(chpt. 2,

4).

The characterization of Malaeska is likewise focused by animal imagery.

Similes using deer and birds abound, and this imagery is augmented by the frequent

use of the adjective “wild.” Reference is made by the narrator to “… the wild

religion of her race …” (chpt. 2, 3) and “… her wild, free imagination …” (chpt. 3,

3), to cite two of many examples. This re-essentializing of the character is completed

by a striking image in which her anger is described as “the forest blood”(chpt. 4, 3)

speaking from within her. In this powerful evocation, the internal substance of the

character is merged with the wilderness: in effect, character becomes setting. One

might detect in these figures the Transcendentalist’s identification of Native peoples

with the wildness of nature as the liberating antithesis of white civilization, but this

view is contradicted by Stephens’ portrait of the “savage” and his “… demonic thirst

for blood …” (chpt. 1, 10). The Indians of Malaeska are not a purifying influence but

a threat.

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Stephens’ characterization of Native people descends into the domain of the

stereotype through its dialogue, which is one of the earliest examples of the “mystic-

speak” with which American audiences are familiar through mass media portrayals of

Native people in twentieth century film and television:

Again the Indian spoke. “The daughter of the Black Eagle forsook her

tribe when the deathsong of her father was loud in the woods. She

comes back when the corn is ripe, but there is no wigwam open to her.

When a woman of the tribe goes off to the enemy, she returns only to

die. Have I said well?” (chpt. 7, 3)

Malaeska uses a similar form of this pseudopoetic Indian-English, and speaks of

herself always in the third person: “He is yonder, in the great hunting-ground, waiting

for Malaeska to come. Could she go blushing from another chief’s wigwam?”(chpt.

7, 4) This language disappears after Malaeska’s encounter with the missionary in

chapter seven. She is apparently converted and educated by this missionary

according to the process of acculturation with which we are familiar from the

Moravian mission among the Cherokees during the era before Indian Removal; when

the reader discovers her again in chapter eight after an unspecified lapse of time,

Malaeska’s wilderness ways have been replaced by the white man’s religion, and she

has settled down in her wigwam to more “civilized” occupations than foraging in the

forest: ‘“[…] there sat an Indian woman reading—reading, mother! did you know that

Indians could read?”’(chpt. 8, 2). The use of animal similes to describe her

disappears, and her speech is transformed by white diction and syntax: “Father of

Heaven, I thank thee! My eyes shall behold him once more. O God, make me

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grateful!”(chpt. 13, 3) The notion that a converted Indian is a “good” Indian, fit for

inclusion in white civilization, was the solution to the “Indian problem” advocated by

Christian evangelism. The zeal for Indian conversion is evident in this report from

the 1853 Christian periodical for young people, The Youth’s Companion:

The Morning Prayer Meeting at the Old South Chapel has been very

much interested in the statements of a full blooded Indian of the

Ojibway tribe […] Twenty-eight years ago he was a heathen

worshipper of the moon. A missionary told him of the true God and

Jesus Christ the Saviour.[…] he renounced his idolatry[…] Jacob, the

converted worshipper of the moon, has been sixteen years a Methodist

missionary among them (the Ojibway) (April 21, 1853).

Racial tolerance and the project to evangelize Native people, however, did not entail

any conviction of racial equality. The perspective articulated in 1822 by Reverend

Jeremiah Evarts of the Moravian mission among the Cherokee is representative of the

overall Christian derogation of Native culture:

[…] many things still remaining among the Cherokees are greatly to

be deplored. Much poverty and wretchedness, ignorance of God, his

law, and the plan of salvation, need to be chased away, before the

people generally can reach the proper standard of rational and

immortal beings (177-78).

Malaeska also appears to be safely in the fold until the return of her half-breed son,

whose climactic suicide precipitates Malaeska’s slow deterioration and death, as

though her religious convictions are insufficient to prevent her slide into a final,

Smartis 78

heathen faithlessness. General Sheridan’s declaration in 1868 that “The only good

Indians I ever saw were dead”(170) was preceded by the maxim that the only good

Indian was a converted Indian.

Beadle and Adams published Malaeska in June of 1860, and the novel sold

65,000 copies in just a few months (6). Although written in 1839, Ann Stephens’

portrait of Native peoples on the frontier as uncivilized and violent “others” would

not have been unfamiliar to eastern readers two decades later, and the language of

Malaeska regains its full historical resonance when contextualized by the tone of

other cultural sources from the period. A survey of newspaper reports published in

The New York Times from the summer of 1860 demonstrates the language of

invective that was current in the mass media of the period. A report from the

Nebraska territory recounting efforts to protect the Pawnee on their reservation from

attacks by the Sioux exhibits a tone of self-satisfied white superiority:

The condition of the Pawnees is very much improved since their

removal to this reservation. A good and competent Indian agent, with

a practical farmer, assistants, a good physician, mechanics, blacksmiths, machinists,

&c., are located near the village, and every exertion is being used to make them

(what I doubt they were ever intended for)

respectable Indians. (July 9, 1860)

In this passage, a “respectable” Indian means a “civilized” Indian: an Indian removed

from the “wild” and equipped with the tools that only “mechanics, blacksmiths and

machinists” can provide. The correspondent for the Times betrays in his aside that

the enterprise of “civilizing” the Indian is a doubtful one, and the tone of this passage

brings to mind Danforth’s lament over his son: “It’s a pity the little fellow is not quite

Smartis 79

white”(chpt. 1, 9). Another excerpt from the same report, describing the Pawnee

listening to a Mormon preacher, emphasizes the immoral character of the Indians:

On the outside of the congregation were gathered groups of Pawnees,

whose village appeared in the background, and who appeared to enjoy

the teachings about as well as Pawnees usually do, who are simply

watching an opportunity, when unobserved, to steal. (July 9, 1860)

News of clashes between Native people and whites circulated daily in The New York

Times during the summer in which Malaeska was released. These accounts featured

stories of brutality reported in language that would not have been out of place in a

later Dime Novel, as in this article about the Washoe war in California printed three

days after the piece from the Nebraska territory:

The tracks of the Indians radiated from the valley like the spokes of

a wheel from its hub […] Of thirty-nine bodies found, only two were

scalped, but almost all had their throats cut; many had their skulls

broken by being hammered with stones; some had the long tendons

of the dorsal muscles stripped off, probably to be used as bow strings.

The whites did more scalping than the Indians, in spite of the efforts

of the officers to prevent it. (July 13, 1860)

Those whites who take part in scalping are summarily forgiven, as if the officers’

attempts to stop them somehow reveal the phenomenon to be merely a curious

anomaly. To an audience treated to constant reports vilifying Native peoples on the

frontier as perpetrators of unspeakable atrocities, Ann Stephens’ Indians and their

“demonic thirst for blood” would have struck a familiar and expected chord of truth.

Smartis 80

Readers of Malaeska would also have been prepared to accept the novel’s portrayals

of clashes between whites and Native people by newspaper descriptions, which are

told only from the white point of view and in a tone that accentuates white valor amid

Indian ferocity:

The whites returned their fire, and the sounds of murderous strife were

indeed horrible. Sternly arose the white man’s shout amid the blazing

of guns and whizzing of tomahawks, as they flashed through the air

on their message of blood (chpt. 2, 1).

A principal element of the Dime Novel is here demonstrated to be already in place in

the first example of the formula: the violent struggle of the white settlers for territorial

dominance against an evil and often faceless foe in the wilderness.

A strong argument could be made that Malaeska subverts much of the spirit

and substance of the Dime Novels that were to follow it in its candid portrayal of

white racism and the tragedy of young Danforth’s suicide, but this subversion is itself

strangely subverted by the unconscious invective of its language (which was

apparently meant to be poetic) and by its one-sided portrayal of the conflict between

white settlers and Native people on the frontier. The final blow to a reading of

Malaeska as an early example of a narrative intended to explore and dismantle the

boundary drawn between the races by western expansion is dealt by the narrator in

the final chapter: “Malaeska lay dead among the graves of her household, the heart-

broken victim of an unnatural marriage”(chpt. 14,6). In the end, we are left with what

amounts almost to an admonitory warning about the consequences of interracial

unions. There is, however, another agenda inherent in the novel’s plot. In

Smartis 81

Malaeska’s conversion to Christianity and her ultimate fate as a character doomed by

her suspension between two cultural worlds, the conflicting ideological demands of

racial tolerance and white hegemony are both met. These demands are satisfied

without venturing to articulate a solution, for this would be impossible in polite

literature: the solution is the mandate to convert or be removed.

The reader of Malaeska whose construct of Native character had been

conditioned by a consistent diet of negative mass media images would not detect the

derogatory rhetoric imbedded in the larger, over-arching narrative. Seduced by the

novel’s engaging portrait of a Native mother, such a reader might well be seduced

into believing that the story is well balanced and lacks racial bias. The psychological

effect of a discourse which unconsciously participates in a language that is culturally

skewed is to confirm and reinforce the convictions embodied by that language. Such

a discourse functions as a vehicle for the enforcement of communal consensus even if

that is not the intent of its language. In Malaeska, the vitality of the narrative’s

discourse is derived from the cultural perspective with which it is infused and

constituted: it is doubtful that the novel would have been as popular if it did not

simultaneously indict as well as reinforce racism towards Native peoples. A pre-Civil

War audience treated daily to a dispute not unconnected with race would have wanted

escape, not more controversy; hence, Malaeska satisfies both the abolitionist

sensibility as well as the secessionist preconception of racial superiority. In

synthesizing opposing perspectives in a single narrative, the novel seeks the amity of

its audience. Reading such a work with enjoyment—and several generations did in

Smartis 82

succession—is a profoundly social act, an affirmation of and engagement in a

perspective that fortifies the shared cultural identity of its audience.

Conflicted strategies of accommodation that cater to the needs of the

expansionist agenda and race essentialism while not offending feminine sensibilities

are typical of the stories and documentary pieces about indigenous people that

appeared in The Ladies’ Companion in the 1840s. Malaeska represents a more

sophisticated approach to the maintenance of the illusion of white morality in relation

to the Indians: the novel skirts making a direct thesis statement about white-Native

relations by immersing itself in narrative while it serves as a lesson in the dangers of

associating and sympathizing with the “other.” Ann Stephens’ conflicted narrative

makes no attempt to arbitrate the philosophical enmity between Christian acceptance

of Natives and the Expansionist agenda of derogating Native character: Malaeska is

an admirable mother, but her portrayal stands in contrast to a characterization of

Indians in the novel as unspeakably violent. She is an exceptional Indian, a model for

those who would submit to acculturation. Implicit in the binary opposition which this

contrast sets up is the problem of dealing with those Native people who would not

submit.

Malaeska presented its readers in 1861 with what amounted to an

anachronistic text, the last gasp of a cultural attitude that dwelled in contradictions

while it dared not utter the unspeakable solution to the “Indian problem.” The

contradictions themselves helped to conceal the contemplated solution and fostered a

kind of denial, but with the removal of the Cherokees beyond the Mississippi and the

extension of the frontier, the drive to settle the newly cleared lands brought the

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solution a little nearer to the surface of public discourse. We can see this movement

in “The Broken Arrow,” an anonymous historical piece published in The Ladies’

Companion in 1844, just five years after Malaeska and near the start of the migration

west that reached its climax in the California Gold Rush of 1849. Ostensibly about

the betrayal of the Muscoghee by the half-breed chief William Mackintosh, who

acted as an intermediary between the tribe and the government in negotiations over

tribal lands in Georgia following the War of 1812, the message of the piece is

essentially the same as in Malaeska: consorting with Indians will ultimately end in

death:

[…] there was yet, and must be always, a tacit social warfare going on

continually between any two races […] differing so very materially in

all moral and physical respects as the red men and the white.[…] The

white man, conscious of intellectual and numerical superiority, will

necessarily assert it; and the rugged and savage sense of independence

to which the Indian is accustomed—not to speak of his anti-social

modes of thinking and feeling on almost all subjects connected with

morals and property—would render him at all times a jealous,

resentful, and unsafe neighbor (Volume 20, 111).

Mackintosh was discovered by the Muscoghee to be engaged in double-dealings with

the government over the sale of ancestral lands; in the end he is burned to death by

his tribe in his home on the Chatahoochie. The lesson of the piece is clear: like

Danforth in Malaeska, Mackintosh is depicted as the victim of his dual loyalties, and

the only way to avert such tragedies is to keep the races separate. The author of the

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piece is not even dimly aware of the real predicament of the half-breed: as a product

of the intermixing of the two cultures, he is a victim of the confused ideology of

Christian tolerance and white racism on the one hand and Native anger on the other.

The half-breeds of Malaeska and “The Broken Arrow” lead a centerless existence,

and they exemplify the deeper meaning of living “on the frontier.” They represent

the possibility of reconciliation between the races, the reestablishment of the center in

contested space; but as whites and Native peoples vie for territorial control, half-

breeds find themselves ironically “in the middle” of an ideological system with no

center.

The political perspective embodied by “The Broken Arrow” is an early

example of the internal conflict hidden in the discourse of the American conquest of

the West. The ideological system of Manifest Destiny was loose and arbitrary; like

the concept of social jurisprudence, its principles were situational, and as the context

changed, the ideas informing its logic changed accordingly. If it was advantageous

for Indians to be removed to the reservation, then their stubborn refusal to give up

ancestral lands was evidence of their resistance to progress. If it was desirable for

Indians to remain on the reservation, then their inability to stay put was evidence of

their inherent lack of “civilization.” The terms of the discourse of Western conquest

and settlement are everywhere adapted to the agenda at hand, and the result is a

discourse that is conflicted, unconsciously at odds with itself:

But the grand step that the Cherokees had made […] towards

civilization, consisted in their having become stationary—in

contracting their limits, the individual as the nation—and this step was

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most probably forced upon them by the pressure, on all sides, of the

accumulating whites (112).

For Native peoples, civilization is equivalent to the willingness to “contract one’s

limits”; for whites in the throes of Manifest Destiny, “civilization” means overcoming

one’s limits.

The dictates of conflicted ideology are an inherent element of the history of

the conquest of the American frontier, and they are nowhere more apparent than in

the conduct of the men who fought the Indian Wars. Dee Brown points out that, even

at Sand Creek, there was far from unanimous support for Chivington’s zeal for

violence:

Captain Silas Soule, Lietenant Joseph Cramer, and Lietenant James

Connor protested that an attack on Black Kettle’s peaceful camp

would violate the pledge of safety given the Indians […] “that it would

be murder in every sense of the word,” and any officer participating

would dishonor the uniform of the army (85).

Contact with Native peoples on the frontier frequently surprised and confused the

soldiers, who had been indoctrinated with news and stories vilifying Native people: “I

felt myself in the presence of superior beings; and these were the representatives of a

race that I heretofore looked upon without exception as being cruel, treacherous and

bloodthirsty without feeling or affection for friend or kindred”(77). Confronted with

the ideological contingency of having to kill members of a race that could display

many noble qualities, participants in the war for the West must have experienced an

urgent need for resolution to the conflict between Christian morality and racist

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hegemony. It is just as the Indian Wars are heating up in 1860 that the second Dime

Novel appears.

The conflicted discourse of Malaeska leaves an ideological void in its wake, a

vacuous center space that competing ideologies cannot fill. Malaeska advances

arguments against racism even as it embodies reasons for its preservation, deflating

the story’s signification and confounding its power as metaphor. Only in the violence

of its action scenes is the focus of the narrative resolved into anything like a dominant

theme, and even this theme—the contest for the wilderness—is finally conflicted by

Malaeska’s conversion, which defuses the adversarial energy of the plot. Malaeska’s

divided ideology is the product of the 1830s dialectic of Indian Removal in which

Christian ethics and political expediency were in collision. Edward Ellis’ Seth Jones;

or, The Captives of the Frontier, written two decades later but published by Beadle

and Adams only months after Malaeska, initiates the program of reconciliation by

which this ideological disjunction was dispelled. It both dramatizes the “Indian

problem” and articulates an ideology designed to effect its solution. This new

ideological posture abandons the racial tolerance advocated by Christian evangelism

and grounds its discourse in the portrayal of Native peoples as morally unfit to live

amongst whites. In this shift towards the Jacksonian mindset (a movement which had

been lurking silently beneath the surface noise of mass culture texts all along), an

ideological center begins to appear in the American cultural narrative about Native

peoples. This center, like the dehumanization of the Jews by the Nazi propaganda

machine in the 1930s, signals the endgame for the remaining Native peoples.

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Seth Jones inaugurates the final stage in the textual movement to malign the

character of Native people in public discourse. In Malaeska, language of invective is

subsumed in narrative and veiled by its role as metaphor. Seth Jones marks a

transition from this strategy of characterization (which is not so much an overt

maneuver as it is a symptom of unconscious racism) to a strategy in which white

characters consistently refer to Native people using derogatory epithets. This

reinscription of Native peoples as “Indians” is extended to a fictional reinscription of

the historical chronicle. Seth Jones also displays a shift in perspective that abandons

the Native point of view entirely to focus exclusively on whites as either victims or

avengers. This movement achieves two effects: it eliminates the possibility that the

reader will sympathize with Native characters, and it confines the Indian to the

category of “others.” This simple movement establishes the template for the narrative

focus of the Dime Novel Western; from Seth Jones on, the genre depicts Native

peoples as the inhuman scourge of the frontier, the principal obstacle to white

settlement and the establishment of “civilization” in the West.

The strategy of rhetorical invective deployed in Seth Jones is far more

vigorous than that of Malaeska; it is easily detected, involving as it does a more

blatantly derogatory series of signs which stand out from the narrative because of

their function. This function is not aesthetic as in Ann Stephens 1839 work; instead,

its aim is to define the Native point of view as adversarial. The central voice of this

language is the mountainman Seth Jones, who emerges as the first clearly racist

western hero: “Howsumever, that don’t make no difference, whether it’s the

Mohawks, Oneidas, or any of them blasted Five Nation niggers. They are all a set of

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skunks, and one would just as lief run off with a man’s gal as not. There ain’t any

difference atwixt ‘em”(19). In this passage of dialogue, a racial epithet is combined

with the metaphorical representation of Native peoples as “skunks”; the line is

finished with the implication that all Indians are potential abductors, depicting all

Native men as inhuman and inherently violent. The term “niggers” is especially

conspicuous: Seth Jones was published by Beadle and Adams in 1860 during the

period of escalating political tensions that culminated in secession and Fort Sumter in

April of 1861. At issue in part during the presidential campaign that elected Abraham

Lincoln was the future of the western territories and whether new states in the west

would be incorporated into the Union as slave states or free states. Regardless of the

political sympathies of readers of Seth Jones, the term would have been effective as a

means of classifying the Indians as problematic foreign “others.”

Animal images and animal epithets are also used to denote Native people: in

addition to “skunks,” Native people are also renamed as “dogs”(36), “critters”(34),

“pesky varmints”(11), and a “copper-headed monkey”(84). If there could be any

doubt about the thematic intent of this terminology, it is dispelled by passages such as

this one: “The shot of the hunter had been fatal, for that yell which the North

American Indian, like the animal, gives when he receives his death-wound, was

heard….”(71). To legitimize the comparison in this passage, the narrator imitates the

language of scientific objectivity by clarifying that the description applies to the

“North American Indians” only. It is the strategy of a narrator caught in the act of

editorializing who must reestablish his role as the honest reporter who is merely

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recounting what he knows to be true. The reader of Seth Jones with no frontier

experience must accept the information provided as true: Indians are like animals.

The inscription of Native peoples as less than human is augmented by

language demonizing their identity. Seth frequently calls the warriors he is pursuing

“infarnal (infernal) redskins”(11) or “infarnal Mohawks”(17); at one point in the

narrative, Seth jokingly identifies another white disguised as a Native as “… you old

painted heathen”(60). As in Malaeska, Native characterizations sometimes

disintegrate into descriptions of formless entities devoid of detail, “dusky beings”(15)

that are neither humans nor animals. The almost supernatural insubstantiality of the

forest Indian bends the genre, evoking the tone and imagery of gothic horror: “He

saw the house of Haverland … but one mass of flame. And around it were a score of

dark forms, leaping and dancing, and appearing, in the ghastly light, like fiends in a

ghostly revel” (15). The characterization of the Indian as a demonic “fiend” has a

long linneage: this passage echoes language from Eastburn’s 1820 narrative poem

Yamoyden:

While uproar, flame and deafening yell

Made the scene seem the vault of hell,

Where, writhing wild in penance dire,

Fiends danced mid pyramids of fire (15).

Whether they are portrayed as animals, devils, or ghostly shapes in the wilderness, the

warrior of Seth Jones is a menacing, inhuman force that is antithetical to the energy of

white civilization. The shifting signs used to signify Native peoples have the

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cumulative effect of destabilizing their signification and preparing the way for the

reification of Native people according to the two dimensional fictional image.

Integral to the plot of Seth Jones is the moral outrage of child abduction by

Indians, and Ellis is careful to highlight the grief and horror of Ina’s parents at regular

intervals throughout the narrative. The fear invoked is much the same as the terror

parents feel today when confronted by the unthinkable murder of a child at the hands

of an amoral agent. We have seen how the kidnapping of women and children by

Natives became a part of Easterner’s conceptualization of Native warriors through

documentary captivity narratives such as The Little Osage Captive and History of the

Spirit Lake Massacre. In Seth Jones, this formula is used both to instigate the drama

as well as characterize Native people as predatory entities. Ellis also uses the

prerogatives of fiction to intensify the reader’s experience with child abduction,

creating scenes that are crafted to appeal to white anger:

“Oh father! mother! The Indians have got me!” came in agonized

accents from the shore.

“Merciful God! must I see my child perish without heeding her cry?

groaned Haverland, in spirit (13).

Scenes such as this employ a subtle narrative tactic involving a kind of

epistemological stealth: the portrayal of the white response elicits a similar

empathetic response from the reader; this is quickly followed by an answer by the

hero to this response that embodies a model of what the white response should be:

"Don’t be scart, young’un,” called out Seth; “keep up a good heart. I’ll git you again

ef you behave yourself. I will as sure as I am Seth Jones .…”(13). Seth’s declaration

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is an invitation to white anger, the fictional representation of the right attitude for

settlers to cultivate in the face of Indian evils. The reader is to make the imaginative

connection between the artificial and the real through a mimetic exercise that is

prompted by emotion—a response that blurs the distinction between fictional and

documentary captivity narratives. Fiction becomes reality in a textual convergence

not unrelated to that which we observed in Malaeska between newspaper and Dime

Novel discourses. Both narrative strategies play upon potentially histrionic emotions

such as righteous anger in order to bridge the gap between real and fabricated Native

portrayals.

Seth Jones is replete with appeals to white rage. Like Haverland, another

white settler named Haldidge is also the victim of Indian atrocities:

Being disappointed of their principal prey, they cowardly vented their

hatred upon his defenseless wife and child. When the father returned,

he found them both tomahawked, side by side, and weltering in each

other’s blood (38-39).

The tomahawk also waits for Ina (60), as well as less lethal physical abuse (21); far

more calculated to elicit white outrage than these is the fate we are told may await her

because of her sex: “Not death alone, but a fate from the sensuous captors far worse

than death itself, was to be apprehended”(45). Not only sex crimes against children

but acts of unspeakable violence and torture are consistently attributed to Native

people, as in this graphic passage that also illustrates why Dime Novels came to be

reviled for their sensationalism:

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Some wretched human being was bound to a tree and had been

burned to death. He was painted black as death, his scalped head

drooped forward […] Every vestige of the flesh was burned off to the

knees, and the bones, white and glistening, dangled to the crisp and

blackened members above! (65).

The significance of this horrific scene accidentally discovered in the forest by Seth is

revealed by the question he immediately asks himself: "Can it be a white man?”

When he determines that it is not, the reader is left to make the implied reflection that

it easily could have been. Horror is replaced by outrage at Indian sadism as the

narrative appeals to the moral sensibility of the reader. For the Easterner conditioned

by mass media texts to believe in accounts of Native brutality, participation in this

dark fictional incarnation of the Indian becomes an imperative: we know Indians are

like this because we find the same descriptions in newspaper and magazine reports.

Seth Jones marks a dramatic departure in both rhetoric and agenda from the

dialectic of invective that flourished during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The agenda of the novel moves beyond the exercise in consciousness raising that

drives texts before the Dime Novel, brandishing an overt racism that is not mitigated

by any religious or political constraints. The fictional and documentary writings

produced during the Jacksonian era are largely non-thetic: they skirt any clear

delineation of position or posture towards the fate of the Native peoples who were

still occupying the frontier. Texts from the decades leading up to the Civil War are

more emblematic of the political and cultural energies informing public discourse

than prescriptive in nature; they leave unspoken the conclusions that inhere in their

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arguments, creating a discourse that is conflicted and disturbed by subterranean

forces. Seth Jones clearly articulates the center of the American discourse about the

Indians for the first time:

[…] but Haverland saw that the tide of emigration was rolling rapidly

and surely to the west, and, ere many years, that villages and cities

would take the place of the wild forest, while the Indians would be

driven further on toward the setting sun (3).

The term “driven” implies force, even violence; the passage accepts as an historical

contingency the inevitability of white domination and possession of the land. It

invites the reader to affirm the truth of Chief Justice Marshall’s declaration written

thirty years before that the “superior policy, arts, and arms” of the conquerors were

destined to sweep the indigenous population from their lands. Ellis’ language

carefully encodes the solution to the “Indian problem,” and the will and determination

essential to this solution are embodied in the novel’s title character, the first of a

series of larger than life folk heroes that were to make the Dime Novel both famous

and notorious. Characters like Seth Jones created a myth of the national character

that was wrought of legends and the reinscription of history. They also served as the

first voice of the national mission of imprisonment and genocide that completed the

project of Indian Removal.

Seth Jones is clearly intended to model those qualities deemed necessary to

the successful execution of the mission of Native subjugation and elimination. The

Dime Novel after Malaeska creates a virulently racist breed of Western hero: instead

of being a mediator between Natives and whites like James Fennimore Cooper’s

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Natty Bumpo, who Richard Slotkin calls “the man who knows Indians,” this new

hero is a man who doesn’t want to know Indians and who is more than a match for

any Native regardless of the situation. As a mountainman, he is a superior hunter and

tracker who is at home in the wilderness: ‘“[…] I can foller any red-skin as far as he

can go, and I don’t care how much pains he takes to cover up his tracks”’(21). His

survival skills are matched by his mental agility: “His captors sat about him a

moment, conversing in their own tongue (every word of which, we may remark, was

perfectly understood by Seth)[…]”(31). His courage is unsurpassed, and he displays

a carefree insouciance in the face of death:

“You sizzle nice—nice meat—good for burn!” added another

savage, grasping and feeling his arm.

“Just please do not pinch, my friend”(30).

If there are situations in which Seth is bested by a Native in a predicament requiring

physical prowess, the narrator assures the reader that this is merely an accident, for

the overall superiority of the white race in the things that really matter cannot be

disputed: “When the Anglo-Saxon’s body is pitted against that of the North American

Indian, it sometimes yields; but when his mind takes the place of contestant, it never

loses”(27). All of these traits which Seth represents are the qualities that the novel

portrays as essential to the accomplishment of the ultimate objective of Western

settlement: the removal of Native peoples. The dire execution of this objective is

here finally articulated as entailing the readiness and resolve for killing:

The Indian raised his head, and was gradually coming to his feet, when

the hunter bounded like a dark ball forward, clutched him by the

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throat, and bearing him like a giant to the earth, drove his hunting

knife again and again to the hilt in his heart. It was a fearful act, yet

there was no hesitation upon the hunter’s part. He felt that it must be

done (59).

In the words “[h]e felt that it must be done” is an imperative. The character of Seth is

a kind of exhortation, a combination of courage and humility that embodies a

justification for an unsavory necessity. Seth is the apotheosis of the white hunter in

the wilderness, the model for the generation of American soldiers that played out this

dark fantasy at the massacres of Fort Wingate, Sand Creek, and the Washita River.

Seth Jones is a historical novel, an ideal narrative in which to effect the fusion

of history and fiction. It is not surprising that Ellis’ next volume for Beadle and

Adams is an 1861 biography of the already famous Kit Carson. The story of the

mountainman made famous by his work as a scout for John Fremont and by his

reputation as a civilian Indian fighter provides Ellis with an opportunity to extend his

characterization of the ideal type he popularized in Seth Jones to a real person. A

comparison of modern biographies of Kit Carson with Ellis’ narrative, which fails to

enumerate even a single source, exposes the project of reinscription in which Ellis is

engaged. Although Ellis is often accurate when it comes to the dates and places of

events, the biographical details he offers are a rhapsody on the truth, a stealthy blend

of fact and fabrication that is skillfully designed to achieve a sensational affect. A

case in point is Carson’s marriage in 1842 to a Cheyenne woman named Making-Out-

Road. Ellis is correct about the chronology of the event, but the rest of his account is

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a fictional bending that is designed to pander to the popular fascination with

miscegenation:

During those eight years, Kit Carson, the man who alone had

vanquished whole parties of bloodthirsty Indians, was himself

conquered by a single person […] The results, we may state, were an

affectionate Indian wife, and, in due course of time, a little

responsibility whom the father fairly idolized (36).

Not only does Ellis not know the woman’s name, but he also describes her as dying in

childbirth. Tom Dunlay’s biography of Carson reveals that we actually know next to

nothing about Making-Out-Road other than that her union with Carson was “… a

brief and unsuccessful venture”(78). There is no record of her dying in childbirth or

of the daughter Ellis claims she bore Carson; Ellis fuses this fiction with his

biography both to elicit the sympathy of the reader and to portray Carson as a doting

father, a strategy designed to satisfy readers accustomed to sentimental depictions of

family life. This strategy also has an insidious aim. It allows Ellis to portray Carson

as a family man. Ellis’ Carson is not just an Indian fighter on the frontier—he is a

man of normal affections with whom one can identify. The implication for the family

man living in the East (or for the family man’s son) is clear: you are not that different

from Kit Carson. You, too, can kill Indians.

Ellis’ account of the beginning of Carson’s tenure as an Indian Agent in New

Mexico is also marked by glaring omissions and fabrications. Dunlay describes the

situation in 1853 in detail. As Carson assumed his post at Taos, the governor of New

Mexico (William Carr Lane) had just struck an agreement with the Jicarilla Apaches

Smartis 97

to settle them on farmland near Abiquiu. The agreement called for the federal

government to supply food to the Apaches for five years. When Congress failed to

ratify the agreement, the food supplies were cut off. Faced with encroaching

starvation, the Apaches began to rob nearby white settlements in order to obtain food

(160-61). Ellis expends only one sentence to describe the situation: “He had barely

entered upon the duties of this office before the Jiccarilla Apaches, one of the tribes

under his jurisdiction, committed numerous outrages upon the citizens”(87). Ellis’s

use of the term “outrages” stands out conspicuously in this passage. When the

Apaches retreat into the mountains above Taos after being attacked by forces under

Lieutenant Bell, who was acting under Carson’s orders, Ellis reports that Carson

bravely visited the chiefs to negotiate peace. The account provides Ellis with an

opportunity to portray Carson as a patriotic tough guy: “He made a forcible and

sensible speech, impressing them with the folly of contending against the United

States, which was abundantly able to annihilate a thousand such tribes (87). In Ellis’s

use of hyperbole, we see again an invocation of the historical inevitability of white

domination and complete possession of the land by virtue of “the superior policy,

arts, and arms” of the conquering race. Such exaggerated language conveys more

than just bravado: it communicates a veiled threat of total war, of the possibility of

complete extermination. The threat is out of place coming from Carson, whom even

Ellis admits was liked and respected by many tribal chiefs. Dee Brown records how

Carson had lived with Native peoples “… for months at a time without seeing another

white man”(23). Carson had also fathered a child with an Arapaho woman and was

well known by many tribes as “Rope-Thrower Carson.” Ellis’ narrative quickly

Smartis 98

deteriorates when it is subjected to the pressures of historical veracity. His narrative

powerfully illustrates how truth can become a casualty of the project of nation

building.

Taken as a whole, Ellis’ biography is not much more than a framework for a

series of dramatic Indian fights, one of which pits a group of forty trappers against a

thousand Blackfeet warriors (32). The trappers win, of course: not by force of arms,

but by superior tactics, proving once again that the Indian is no match for the white

man in contests of the mind. This is Ellis’ over-arching theme: the behavior of the

Indian is the product of his vastly inferior intellect. This theme ultimately leads to the

portrayal of Native people as barbarian others:

This tribe, led on by their notorious chief, Chico Velasques, was

committing all manner of barbarities […]. It is related that his dress

was profusely ornamented with the finger-bones of the victims of his

cruelty; white scalps literally covered his wigwam walls (79).

The Indian must be exterminated because he is lacking in sense to the point of

insanity, and this makes him a barbarian unfit for white society. There is no mention

of the brutalities learned from the Spanish invaders—such as scalping and other

mutilations—because Ellis is intent upon a reinscription of history, a realignment and

retelling of facts and fiction according to the agenda of Indian Removal.

The narrative sleight-of-hand with which the Dime Novel Western transforms

fiction into legend and truth is powerfully illustrated by Edward Ellis’ progression in

1860-61 from frontier story through romanticized biography to history. Ellis’ last

publication for Beadle and Adams in 1861 was The Life of Pontiac, The Conspirator,

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Chief of the Ottawas. The book is based on the History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac

by Francis Parkman, and Ellis’own acknowledgment of his primary source shows that

he had little fear that his audience would tackle Parkman. If they had, they would

have discovered Ellis to be little more than a literary hack. A comparison between

corresponding passages in Ellis and Parkman reveals the extent of Ellis’ plagiarism.

First, here is Ellis’ description of Indian atrocities following Pontiac’s attempted

attack on the fort and settlement of Detroit in 1763:

The Indians were seen running toward a house where an English

woman and her two sons lived. They beat down the door and swarmed

in like a swarm of bees. A moment after, the dismal scalp-yell

announced the fate of the inmates (30).

Parkman’s language shows that Ellis lifted his account almost word for word from the

earlier book:

Looking out from the loopholes, the garrison could see them running

in a body towards the house of an old English woman, who lived, with

her family, on a distant part of the common. They beat down the

doors, and rushed tumultuously in. A moment more, and the mournful

scalp-yell told the fate of the wretched inmates (519).

Modern scholarship reveals that both Parkman and Ellis are wrong. Gregory Dowd’s

War Under Heaven reports that the incident which follows in both Parkman’s and

Ellis’ narratives, the scalping and murder of Sergeant Fisher, actually belongs with

the previous event, for it is the entire Fisher household that is murdered. Ellis’ close

following of Parkman’s text shows that he is not troubled by possible inaccuracies in

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the earlier book. Ellis is merely ransacking Parkman for material, and even this act

has a hidden agenda. A lengthy account by Parkman (412-13) of English relations

with the Iroquois is reduced by Ellis to a brief passage featuring several epithets not

used by Parkman:

No such mingling of races occurred upon the part of the English.

Their traders and voyageurs became savages enough in disposition;

but an uncontrollable disgust prevented them from uniting their blood

with the dusky denizens of the forest. They looked upon them much

as we would look upon a race of monkeys—a sort of necessary evil

which we ever desire to keep at a respectable distance (10).

The use of the pronoun “we” demonstrates that Ellis is conscious of speaking to an

audience that is already sympathetic to his ideology. Keeping Native people “at a

respectable distance” was central to the project of Indian Removal, and it was

complicit with the cultural imperative not to mix with “inferior” races.

Historical and biographical subjects predominate in the Dime Novel Western,

and this fact alone is suggestive of the ideological thrust of the genre. Following the

initial successes of the books of Ann Stephens and Edward Ellis, the Dime Novel

Western is dominated by stories that work towards the fusion of fiction and dubious

history. The literary maneuver that blends history and fiction can produce legend,

which is crucial to the formation of the national identity of a people faced with

reconciling conflicting self-images. The intellectual activity involved in the creation

of legend in America has been described by historian James Oliver Robertson as a

strategic maneuver:

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The logic is, of course, not rational at all. It is a function of myths,

in any society, that they can—and do—by their juxtaposition of

images and metaphors and ideals make logic out of the rationally

illogical. They provide, thereby, a tension which seems necessary to

human thought and necessary, too, to maintain dynamic human

societies. Myths carry with them the implication that they have

resolved the paradoxes and contradictions they contain (14).

In the story of westward expansion, the American psyche was confronted by two

contradictory notions. The ideology of Manifest Destiny was founded upon the belief

that God had destined the entire continent to be the possession of the American

people. This destiny, however, entailed the removal of the Indians, and because the

Indians were fighting this removal, Indians had to be killed. The creation of heroes

such as Daniel Boone and Seth Jones, who are portrayed as “reluctant” killers

defending themselves and their people against an incurably bloodthirsty foe, is an

ideological attempt to mitigate the illogic in the idea of God bestowing a blessing that

necessitates murder. It also helps to portray Native peoples as ferocious killers and

merge all of these notions with an entertaining construct of history. In the Dime

Novel Western, the convergence of historical data and fictional narrative is easily

engineered through the use of chronological references and authentic historical

settings, as in the anonymous 1872 Dime Novel, Daniel Boone; or, The Hero of

Kentucky:

On a beautiful afternoon in the summer of 1769, a party of six men

stood on an eminence nearly in the heart of what is now the State of

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Kentucky, but which was, at that time, like the greater part of our vast

country, an almost unexplored wilderness (7).

The story of Daniel Boone can be found in a long line of works such as Samuel

Metcalfe’s 1821 book A Collection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives of

Indian Warfare in the West. The Dime Novel Western popularizes figures such as

Boone by transmitting history as entertainment. Many of these legendary characters

also serve as the voice of expansionist ideologies, articulating sentiments that

function as recommendations of policy. Daniel Boone’s seemingly offhand

comments about Native people are carefully crafted soundbytes of propaganda: “Isn’t

it a shame that such a land should be left for savages and wild beasts to prowl

over?”(8) The authors of Dime Novel Westerns communicate their agenda of

territorial dominance through a blurring of the boundary between the artificial and the

real, creating texts in which the fictional words of an actual figure from the past are

substantiated by the illusion of the historical. In its project to melt the boundary

between fiction and history, the genre is an example of the radical metaphoricity of

language, the ability of language to alter or bend constructs of reality. The wilderness

of Daniel Boone represents the still unconquered wilderness of the real West, and

Daniel Boone’s Shawnee Indians stand for all Natives: “One thing is pretty

certain…if ever we effect a settlement in this country, we must muster up force

enough to set such old devils as that at defiance”(10).

The vilification of Native peoples as essentially evil and subhuman completes

the ideological agenda of the genre. The Dime Novel resolves its image of the Indian

into the devil of the plains, the scourge of white settlers. This blatant demonization of

Smartis 103

Native character is summed up by “General” Nix in Deadwood Dick: “Every one o’

‘em’s a danged descendant o’ ther old Satan hisself”(3). In essence, the Dime Novel

Western as a genre comes to signify a drama arising from the evils of the “Indian

problem.” To the menace of the Indian “other” on the frontier, the Dime Novel poses

a counter narrative celebrating heroic characters such as Buffalo Bill and California

Joe, who are up to the challenge of subjugating the savages. To Edward Ellis’ images

of Native people as “dusky beings”(15) and “fiends in a ghostly revel”(15), Colonel

Prentiss Ingraham opposes characters such as California Joe, a spectral figure on a

horse who guides and protects settlers traveling west. The Dime Novel after

Malaeska evolves a new breed of Western hero who is capable of almost anything.

A disturbing prototype of this new kind of hero is exemplified in Prentiss Ingraham’s

Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood. In a scene in which the young

Buffalo Bill and his friends are surrounded by Indians who are trying to starve them

out, Ingraham adds a new dimension to the Western hero:

“They can’t starve me as long as your mule holds out, Lew, for I

won’t eat poor Sable; it would choke me,” replied Billy.

“Well, mule meat’s good,” said Woods.

“Yes, when there ain’t anything else to eat, but I prefer buffler

or Injun,” was Billy’s response.

“We may have to eat Injun yet,” laughed Lew Simpson.

(chpt. 11, 30)

William Osborn tells us that John Chivington is reputed on the morning of Sand

Creek to have said to his guide, half breed Robert Bent, “I haven’t had an Indian to

Smartis 104

eat in a long time. If you fool with me, and don’t lead us to that camp, I’ll have you

for breakfast”(215).

Toni Morrison, in her landmark study of race in American literature Playing

in the Dark, tells us that “…cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation’s

literature, and…what seemed to be on the “mind” of the literature of the United States

was the self-conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new

white man”(39). If we judge from the Dime Novel Western, this “new white man”

would seem to be the “hero” of Sand Creek. The Dime Novel’s ritualistic defeat of

the Indian in every encounter does not serve, however, to reconstitute any ideological

center for this new white man other than the imperative to kill Native people. The

frontier remains as much a moral “frontier” as a geographical site of contest: contest

between human wills, codes, or frames of reference for allowable action. American

culture never recovers the ethical center in its discourse. The transition of the West

from Indian country to settlement country only creates a new set of problems to be

solved through brutality or bullets or the removal of undesirable people. Fearless

Frank in Deadwood Dick embodies a transitional example of this new “hero,” the

lone gunman who once fought only Indians but is ready for a new kind of threat: “He

knew he was in parts frequented by both red and white savages, and it would do no

harm to keep on one’s guard”(25). The new American hero is caught in a cycle of

aggression that is the essence of the Western’s dramatic paradigm. The white man’s

removal of the Indian only marked a transition to a new era of violence.

Smartis 105

“It reminds me of what people come to South Dakota from all over the world to do—go on vision quests, sweat lodges, and

all this new age stuff. And it’s perfect because when you get off the plane in Rapid City, the first thing you see are the

walls covered with huge paneled photographs of the sunsets, the Badlands, the flowers, and of course dead Indians. Some

Indians that were gathered up in the 1800s and photographed and now they’re plastered all over. That’s what people come to see,

a romanticized past, they do not wish to confront the contemporary reality of Indians.” Lakota Harden

V Epilogue

Even as Native culture is studied and celebrated across America to an

unprecedented extent, the suffering of Native peoples continues. The organization

Allies of the Lakota reports that on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 80% of adults

are unemployed and the average family income is $3,700.00 per year, making the

county the poorest in the America. Nearly one half of the adult population over 40

suffers from diabetes; life expectancy for women is 52 years, while life expectancy

for men is only 48 years. Pine Ridge Reservation has the highest infant mortality rate

of any area in America.

In a 1999 study in Albuquerque, New Mexico of Native women living both on

and off the reservation, 21% of subjects were affected by mental illness, dysfunction,

or self-destructive behavior; 89% reported being dependent on marijuana or having

abused it in the past. The study diagnosed 33.3% of these women with Posttraumatic

Stress Disorder, and 62.8% were diagnosed with other anxiety disorders (Duran 73).

A study of mental illness among Native males finds several causes for psychological

disorders: “…loss of cultural identity, anomie, loss of traditional roles for males,

failure of primary socialization, and unresolved grief from historical

Smartis 106

trauma”(Rhoades 777). The study also cites “…poverty, lack of available health

services (especially in rural locations), and loss of a sense of community” as being

extremely detrimental to Native male health overall. In high schools funded by the

Bureau of Indian Affairs, which are located on 63 reservations in 23 states, 80.7% of

students report lifetime alcohol use with episodic heavy drinking rates at 38.4%

(Shaughnessy 1070). R. Bachman reports that suicide and homicide rates for Native

young people are 39% higher than for any other group surveyed in America (Waller

81).

An article on Native substance abuse in the Journal of Sociology and Social

Welfare tells us that “[c]ontemporary researchers are examining the relationship

between historical trauma related to…human rights abuses and contemporary social

problems such as substance abuse and its sequelae in Native communities” (Waller

80). It is to be anticipated that there will be more such studies, conferences, and

colloquiums on Native issues in the years to come. There are always more words

than actions in the quest to alleviate Native suffering. One of the purposes of this

study is to demonstrate that words seldom effect change, but they often instigate evil.

Our words and our acts today concerning Native peoples are as conflicted as

those of our ancestors. We have imprisoned Native peoples in open spaces; we have

granted them sovereignty over lands but denied them equity in our courts of law; we

seek out their art and confine it in museums; we study their culture in the Academy

even as we lock up their leaders in our prisons.

We cannot change the past, nor ever make reparations to the generations of

Native peoples who suffered and died at the hands of those who came before us. We

Smartis 107

can only help the living. In order to reclaim our national conscience, it is imperative

that we restore to the Native peoples of America as much as is possible of the full

measure of everything that was taken from them. If we do not, we can never claim

this place on moral grounds.

Smartis 108

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