Pastoral Landscape with Indians: George Copway and the Political Unconscious of the American Pastoral

Abstract

After squanto taught the colonists at Plymouth in 1620 “both the manner how to set [their corn], and after how to dress and tend it,” Indians seem to have disappeared from the American pastoral scene, except as unwelcome intruders. Seventeen years later, writes William Bradford, “the Pequots fell openly on the English at Connecticut, in the lower parts of the river, and slew sundry of them as they were at work in the fields.” Mary Rowlandson opens the story of her captivity during King Philip's War similarly, describing how the Narragansetts came out of the wilderness to attack the farmsteads at Lancaster, setting fire to buildings “with flax and hemp, which they brought out of the barn,” and later celebrated by feasting on the animals they had captured: “miserable was the waste that was there made, of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, calves, lambs, roasting pigs, and fowl (which they had plundered in the town) some roasting, some lying and burning, and some boiling to feed our merciless enemies.” These accounts — in which Indians violate the pastoral scene, killing peaceful tillers of the soil and wantonly consuming the stock that had been so carefully husbanded — suggest that in the 17th Century, despite the original beneficence of Squanto, Indian “savagery” was perceived as a threat not only to the lives of individual colonists but to agriculture itself, the foundation of the colonial economy in North America. But it was the agrarian culture of the English that turned the Indians into “savages,” for the Pequot War and King Philip's War began, as Francis Jennings has demonstrated, with the colonists' hunger for land.