1825 It was the territory for which Huck Finn would ‘light out’ when he got tired of being ‘sivilized’. Freedom for him, maybe, but not for the Native Americans living in the south and south-east of the continent whom the government planned to dump there. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill would force the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw and Cherokee tribes to leave their homelands for the Indian Territory, in order to make room for white settlers in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas. This brutal policy, pursued over the next eight years, displaced some 46,000 natives from their homes. Along the forced migration that came to be called the ‘Trail of Tears’ many died of cold, hunger and illness.
For Washington Irving, though, Indian removal registered very differently. In 1832 (see 7 June) he returned home from seventeen years living and writing in Europe, where he had established his reputation with books like The Sketch Book (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall (1822) and The Conquest of Granada (1829). In his preface to The Sketch Book Irving had claimed that the American scene, for all the sublimity of its landscape, nevertheless lacked the ‘storied and poetical association’ to be found in the ‘masterpieces of art’, the ‘ancient and local custom’ – even the ‘very ruins’ of Europe.
By now, though, Fenimore Cooper had begun to show that the country offered plenty of history and custom for the novelist to draw on – in the Revolutionary War (on land and at sea), and above all in the romance of the disappearing Native Americans. So when a friend of Irving’s, an Indian Commissioner called Henry Ellsworth, invited him to accompany one of the forced migrations moving west late in 1832, the novelist jumped at the chance. ‘I should have an opportunity of seeing the remnants of those great Indian tribes,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘which are now about to disappear as independent nations’ – and prove he could write about America, he might have added.
The result of his experience, A Tour on the Prairies (1835), is the most exotic account of the American West to be produced by an American writer: ‘tour’ says it all. Sunlight through trees reminded him of gothic cathedrals; the Indians, ‘stately fellows’ with ‘fine Roman countenances’, looked ‘like figures of monumental bronze’ – safely reified into classical artefacts.
‘We send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe,’ Irving comments (now rejecting his own trajectory), when a ‘tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity, and self-dependence most in union with our political institutions.’ So for all his exoticism, he didn’t cut himself off from the history going on around him, but joined the expansionist flow. As the Native Americans vanished from the scene, the West would become an arena in which to test American manhood. The theme would be taken up and magnified by Francis Parkman, Owen Wister and Theodore Roosevelt (see 15 February, 29 June and 4 August), then given the final scholarly imprimatur in Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893).