The Ingham Indian Collection

Abstract

Since the discovery of America the western world has responded enthusiastically to the lore of the natives of the New World. Early Spanish accounts of the Indians of Mexico and South America were translated and widely read in Europe. With the English plantations a new series of reports dealing with the coastal North American tribes appeared. Works on all American natives continued to be written dur­ ing later colonial times when Spaniards moved into northern Mexico and California and when the English temporarily took Florida and filled in the region east of the Appalachians. Indian literature in English received a new stimulus in the nineteenth century with the crossing of the mountains and the rapid extension of white influence into the Midwest and far West. We are perhaps most familiar with the romanticized natives of fiction: the rhythmic Hiawatha, or the unreal but curiously convinc­ ing Indian of James Fenimore Cooper. Pocahontas is the prototype of innumerable Indian maidens who were romantic companions of white men. Writers of history played upon appealing Indian themes, as in the conquest narratives of Prescott and in Parkman’s treatment of imperial clashes in the wilderness. These works, as many readers recognized, successfully combined the popular attractions of fiction with the solid dignity of historical fact. As a larger number of Ameri­ can settlers came into contact with Indians still other genres arose. Explorers, trappers, Indian fighters, and frontier settlers wrote “Per­ sonal Recollections” of their contacts with the Sioux or the Kiowas or the Blackfeet. A common type was the “captivity”, a record of the days, months, or years spent as a prisoner in Indian hands. Another was the military narrative, a description of a particular battle or series of battles against the red men. Increasingly the scientific value of Indian description came to be recognized, and accounts of all kinds took on a sober anthropological tone. Yet much that was purely ex­ otic appeared under the guise of ethnographic legitimacy.