Indian Life: Transforming an American Myth

Abstract

Indian Life: Transforming an American Myth reveals the varying views and representations of Native people that whites confronted, as they made their relentless way across America's Great Plains from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. William W. Savage, Jr., emphasizes the images of American Indians that whites developed - to justify their expansion into Indian lands, salve their consciences, and romanticize the West, and to attract more whites. Indian Life reveals the political uses of these myths. At various times American Indians were characterized as bloodthirsty savages, then noble sons of nature. Indians were objects of curiosity in Wild West shows, but the real Indians failed to emerge. Conflicting images offered by travelers, missionaries, and government workers - bent on their own objectives - were later reinforced in novels, motion pictures, and television. Savage examines views of American Indians from the 1800s to the early 1900s, including those of such widely read mythmakers as Richard Irving Dodge, Richard Harding Davis, Helen Hunt Jackson, and James Willard Schultz, to identify both the things that were and the things that were thought to be. They are neither pretty nor sentimental. Indian Life: Transforming an American Myth is a book for anyone concerned with the historical and cultural dimensions of American Indians and the whites who conquered their sea of grass.