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Does landscape enter the blood with the milk?
—Ronald Blythe,
Characters and Their Landscapes (1982)
Made by the same Great Spirit and living in the same land with our brothers, the red men, we consider ourselves as the same family; we wish to live with them as one people, and to cherish their interests as our own.
—Thomas Jefferson,
“To the Miamis, Powtewatamies, and Weeauks” (1802)
[The Indians] will vanish like a vapour from the face of the earth; their very history will be lost in forgetfulness; and “the places that now know them will know them no more forever.” Or if, perchance, some dubious memorial of them should survive, it may be in the romantic dreams of the poet to people in imagination his glades and groves, like the fauns and satyrs and sylvan deities of antiquity. But should he venture upon the dark story of their wrongs and wretchedness, should he tell how they were invaded, corrupted, despoiled, driven from their native abodes and the sepulchres of their fathers, hunted like wild beasts about the earth, and sent down with violence and butchery to the grave, posterity will either turn with horror and incredulity from the tale or blush with indignation at the inhumanity of their forefathers
What the influence of [Indian] contact and intercourse with the European has been, we all know. Where he found them poor, he left them poorer; where one scene of violence and vengeance has been seen, there many have been enacted; where he had found one evil passion, he planted many; where one fell disease had thinned their ranks, he brought those of his blood and land to reap a more abundant harvest. His very gifts were poison: selfish and inconsiderate in his kindness, he was ever bitter in his revenge and anger: he excited the passions of the savage for his own purposes, and when it raged against him, he commenced the work of extermination. He then read that the day of the aboriginal inhabitant of the soil had come and that the white man was destined to take the place of the red, and perhaps he divined well and truly; but he had no right to presume upon it or that he was to be the active instrument in forwarding that mysterious dispensation of God.
The settlement of the various portions of America, with but few exceptions, is equally in the north and the south a foul blot upon Christendom.
—Charles Joseph Latrobe,
The Rambler in North America (1836)
When the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. . . . At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love the beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.
—Chief Seattle,
“Address to Governor Isaac Stevens” (1855)
The [Indian-Caucasian] half-breeds, wherever they exist in America, almost universally exhibit a union of the vices of the two races whence they are derived, whilst their corresponding virtues are lost.
As I have looked at the white men with whom the aboriginal tribes have to deal, I have often wondered how any very happy influence upon the Indian character could be anticipated from their companionship and example.
It would be very unfair, however, to charge the United States government with wholesale injustice, or even with neglect, in relation to the native tribes. Equally unfair would it be to bring its agents under a universal censure, as forgetful of the claims of humanity, and grasping only at self-advantage.
—T. H. Gladstone,
The Englishman in Kansas (1857)
An Indian is a more watchful and a more wary animal than a deer. He must be hunted with skill.
—Colonel James Carleton,
U.S. Senate report, “Condition of the Indian Tribes” (1867)
It seems as though the D—l had changed his residence, gone to Kansas, for certainly no such atrocities [as the dispossession] could be committed without his leadership.
—John Farwell,
Letter to Board of Indian Commissioners (1871)
The [Kaw] tribe is now nearly extinct. All authorities will tell you that it is as impossible to civilize them as to tame a wolf. These men will not work: when you shake hands with them their long fingers feel just like the paw of an animal with a softness like hair.
—Cornelia Adair,
My Diary (1874)
Staple food sold to Indians—such as sugar, coffee, tea, and flour—are the worst that can begot, of course.
—Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg,
“Across Kansas by Train” (1877)
[c. 1878] let me give you my opinon off the indians as some off the amairkans call them. My opion is that iff the amaricans was drove from one coast too the other that we would be worse than the indians have bin.
stop & think, when america was Discovered, the indians was hear. How did they come heart i belive that our maker put them hear, you se that there was sevelr difernt tribes a) there was some diference in the tribes, the same as an ingles man a) an irsh man. my openion that theour maker gave them this country, but we was enlighten enough had the pour too keep Driving them back, and i know by experience that the indians woudent bin hallf so bad iff it hadent off bin for the white men that wood get with them and they could plot for them, that would give these white men a chance to plunder, i know this too bee the fact in severl cases, gest look at the indians. they was ignorent too our ways, but yet they undr stode one another, & some one must off gave them this [knowledge], for they all had a way of worshiping the master, i belive that god gave them that enteligant, for God says i will right my law up on your harts & in your minds, i will place them so all sail no Me, from the least to the greatest, and i blave that is where the red man got his knolej from, they all have a way off worshiping the lord, but you wil say that they are saveges, for they fight amoung them selves; and this is true, but dont all of the americans do the same, and not only that, they have gred arsnells manurfactoring guns And amunition all the while. now iff you can see the difference i should like too kno.
—Matthew Flint Clarkson, Jr.,
“The Matthew Clarkson Manuscripts”
(transcribed 1927)
The common saying that the island of Manhattan was “purchased from the Indian inhabitants for the value of twenty-four dollars in traders’ goods” is not true. It is not true for the reason that the Indians did not and could not think of the possibility of conveying property in land. What the Indians of Manhattan did conceive was the idea of admitting the Dutch settlers to live in the land with themselves as neighbors, to share its benefits. But they had no idea of selling the land for any price. No Indians of Manhattan or elsewhere entertained at any time any such idea. Indians always said in opposition to such proposals, “We cannot sell the land, for it belongs not to us in this generation only, but to all our people for all time. . . .” [The Indians] thought of the goods given by the Dutch as being merely presents given as a pledge and token of good will and neighborly relations. The idea of alienation of the land was never in their minds.
—Melvin R. Gilmore,
Prairie Smoke (1929)
[Black Elk said:] The Wasichus [Caucasians] came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of Wasichus; and it is dirty with lies and greed.
Drinks Water . . . dreamed what was to be, and this was long before the coming of the Wasichus . . . and he said: “You shall live in square gray houses in a barren land, and beside those square gray houses you shall starve.”
Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.
We got more lies than cattle, and we could not eat lies.
Only crazy or very foolish men would sell their Mother Earth. Sometimes I think it might have been better if we had stayed together and made them kill us all.
I looked back on the past and recalled my people’s old ways, but they were not living that way any more. They were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own.
—John G. Neihardt,
Black Elk Speaks (1932)
The Kaws are among the wildest of the American aborigines, but are an intelligent and interesting people.
—Lewis Henry Morgan,
Ancient Society: Researches in the
Lines of Human Progress from
Savagery Through Barbarism to
Civilization (1878)
The Kansa believe that when there is a death, the ghost returns to the spirit village nearest the present habitat of the living. That is to say, all Indians do not go to one spirit village or “happy hunting ground,” but to different ones, as there is a series of spirit villages for the Kansa, beginning with the one at Council Grove, where the tribe dwelt before they removed to their present reservation in the Indian Territory, and extending along both sides of the Kansas River to its mouth, thence up the Missouri River . . . (near the state line), thence down the river to the mouth of the Osage River, and so on, down to the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers.
—James Owen Dorsey,
A Study of Siouan Cults (1889)
We, the sons and daughters of the pioneers, are proud of the work of our fathers and mothers. They came to Kansas to help free it and reclaim what was known, when they came west, as a desert.
—Vice President Charles Curtis,
Unpublished autobiography (c. 1930)
Kansas, which was originally conceived as the red man’s home, was rapidly becoming his grave.
—William Frank Zornow,
Kansas: A History of the Jayhawk State (1957)
Few Americans are devotees exclusively of the aboriginal; many are fond of the merely old.
—David Lowenthal,
“Not Every Prospect Pleases” (1962)
There has to be [an] interval of neglect, there has to be discontinuity; it is religiously and artistically essential. That is what I mean when I refer to the necessity for rums: ruins provide the incentive for restoration and for a return to origins. There has to be (in our new concept of history) an interim of death or rejection before there can be a born-again landscape. Many of us know the joy and excitement not so much of creating the new as redeeming what has been neglected, and this excitement is particularly strong when the original condition is seen as holy or beautiful. The old farmhouse has to decay before we can restore it and lead an alternative life style in the country; the landscape has to be plundered and stripped before we can restore the natural ecosystem; the neighborhood has to be a slum before we can rediscover it and gentrify it. That is how we reproduce the cosmic scheme and correct history.
—J. B. Jackson,
“The Necessity for Ruins” (1980)
The sense of the historical past, the awareness of history and of histories, has always led a relatively precarious existence here. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century genteel snobberies about our American culture desert and historical vacuum had this much point: that the monuments, the detritus, the archives, the material leavings of the past—all the visibilia that dot and clot the European landscape—were simply not to be found here and were therefore not part of a world that Americans internalized. . . . Americans were and are quite capable of devouring historical romances and seeing limitless numbers of historical movies while at the same time believing with Henry Ford that history is the bunk.
—Steven Marcus,
Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (1990)
[Arrowheads] were chiefly made to be lost. They are sown, like a gram that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth. Like the dragon’s teeth which bore a crop of soldiers, these bear crops of philosophers and poets, and the same seed is just as good to plant again. It is stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones. His bones would not prove any wit that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does. It is humanity inscribed on the face of the earth, patent to my eyes as soon as the snow goes off, not hidden away in some crypt or grave under a pyramid. No disgusting mummy, but a clean stone, the best symbol or letter that could have been transmitted to me.
The Red Man, his mark
—Henry David Thoreau, The Journal (1859)
No buried nations sleep in the untainted [Kansas] soil, vexing the present with their phantoms, retarding progress with the burden of their outworn creeds, depressing enthusiasm by the silent reproof of their mighty achievements. Heirs of the greatest results of time, we are emancipated from all allegiance to the past.
—John James Ingalls,
“In Praise of Blue Grass” (1875)
I realized the chauvinism of the act of digging up [the Indian] graves as if our time, our reality, and our culture, is the real thing and what we live now is all there ever was and all there ever will be.
—John Hanson Mitchell,
Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand
Years on One Square Mile (1984)
The patterns made by the historian are never complete There is always something lacking, a residue, fragments suggestive of other patterns which might be formed if one only knew how to put them together or where to find the missing parts. The quest for the whole truth ends in the “innumerable puzzles, problems, mysteries, one is eternally stumbling against.”
It must be added of words that they are the most inevitably inaccurate of all mediums of record and communication, and that they come at many things which they alone can do by such a Rube Goldberg articulation of frauds, compromises, artful dodges, and tenth removes as would fatten any other art into apoplexy if the art were not first shamed out of existence.
—James Agee,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939)
No doubt, Sir,—there is a whole chapter wanting here—and a chasm of ten pages made in the book by it—but the book-binder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy—nor is the book a jot more imperfect (at least upon that score)—but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it.
—Laurence Sterne,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman (1761)
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