Dahcotah | Page 2

excuse for withholding, from the original proprietor of
the soil, the compensation or atonement which is demanded at once by
justice, honor, and humanity.
Authentic pictures of Indian life have another and a different value, in a
literary point of view. In the history and character of the aborigines is
enveloped all the distinct and characteristic poetic material to which we,
as Americans, have an unquestioned right. Here is a peculiar race, of
most unfathomable origin, possessed of the qualities which have
always prompted poetry, and living lives which are to us as shadowy as
those of the Ossianic heroes; our own, and passing away--while we
take no pains to arrest their fleeting traits or to record their picturesque
traditions. Yet we love poetry; are ambitious of a literature of our own,

and sink back dejected when we are convicted of imitation. Why is it
that we lack interest in things at home? Sismondi has a passage to this
effect:--
"The literature of other countries has been frequently adopted by a
young nation with a sort of fanatical admiration. The genius of those
countries having been so often placed before it as the perfect model of
all greatness and all beauty, every spontaneous movement has been
repressed, in order to make room for the most servile imitation; and
every national attempt to develop an original character has been
sacrificed to the reproduction of something conformable to the model
which has been always before its eyes."
This is certainly true of us, since we not only adopt the English view of
everything, but confine ourselves to the very subjects and imagery
which have become consecrated to us by love and habit. Not to enter
into the general subject of our disposition to parrotism, our neglect of
Indian material in particular may be in part accounted for, by our
having become acquainted with the aborigines after the most unpoetical
fashion, in trying to cheat them out of their lands, or shooting them
when they declined being cheated; they, in their turn, driven to the
resource of the weak and the ignorant, counterplotting us, and taking,
by means of blood and fire, what we would not give them in fair
compensation. This has made our business relations very unpleasant;
and everybody knows that when this becomes the case, it is hard for
parties to do justice to each other's good or available qualities. If we
had only read about the Indians, as a people living in the
mountain-fastnesses of Greece, or the, broad plains of Transylvania, we
should without difficulty have discovered the romantic elements of
their character. But as the effect of remoteness is produced by time as
well as distance, it is surely worth while to treasure up their legends for
our posterity, who will justly consider us very selfish, if we throw away
what will be a treasure to them, merely because we cannot or will not
use it ourselves.
A prominent ground of the slight regard in which the English hold
American literature, or at least one of the most plausible reasons given
for it, is our want of originality, particularly in point of subject matter.
It is said that our imitativeness is so servile, that for the sake of
following English models, at an immeasurable distance, we neglect the

new and grand material which lies all around us, in the sublime features
of our country, in our new and striking circumstances, in our peculiar
history and splendid prospects, and, above all, in the character,
superstitions, and legends of our aborigines, who, to eyes across the
water, look like poetical beings. We are continually reproached by
British writers for the obtuse carelessness with which we are allowing
these people, with so much of the heroic element in their lives, and so
much of the mysterious in their origin, to go into the annihilation which
seems their inevitable fate as civilization advances, without an effort to
secure and record all that they are able to communicate respecting
themselves.
And the reproach is just. In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have
either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a
business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless,
treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome,
and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for
the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him
gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to
teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor. To
look upon the Indian with much regard, even in the light of literary
material, would be inconvenient; for the moment we recognize in him a
mind, a heart, a soul,--the recollection of the position in which