Fire-Water in the Frontier Romance: James Fenimore Cooper and "Indian Nature"
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Notes
1. Congressional Globe Appendix, 25th Cong. 2nd sess. (April 18, 1838), p. 269.
2. For a discussion of the terms "savagism" and "civilization," see Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (1953; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988).
3. See Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.'s The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978) and Brian W. Dippie's The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1982) on correlations between prevalent Euro-American images of Native Americans and Euro-American policy.
4. See Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), p. 24.
5. Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1987), p. 66.
6. For surveys of recent research concerning Native American drinking behaviors, see Laurence French and Jim Hornbuckle, "Alcoholism among Native Americans: An Analysis," Social Work, 25 (1980), 275-80; Dwight B. Heath, "Alcohol Use among North American Indians: A Cross-Cultural Survey of Patterns and Problems," in Research Advances in Alcohol and Drug Problems, Vol. 7, ed. Reginald G. Smart, et al. (New York: Plenum Press, 1983), pp. 343-96; and Joan Weibel-Orlando, "Indians, Ethnicity, and Alcohol: Contrasting Perceptions of the Ethnic Self and Alcohol Use," in The American Experience with Alcohol: Contrasting Cultural Perspectives, ed. Linda A. Bennett and Genevieve M. Ames (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), pp. 201-26.
7. For examples, see Laws of the Colonial and State Governments, Relating to the Indians and Indian Affairs, from 1633 to 1831 Inclusive (Stanfordville: Earl M. Coleman, 1979), and James F. Mosher, "Liquor Legislation and Native Americans: History and Perspective" (unpublished paper, Univ. of California, Berkeley, Boalt School of Law, 1975).
8. Quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts 1790-1834 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 127. See Prucha, Chapter 4 ("The Crusade against Whiskey") for an extensive discussion of the challenges in enforcing the "Indian Prohibition," including a detailed discussion of the inventive ways in which traders often circumvented the laws.
9. Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform, Embracing Their Colonization, 2nd ed. (New York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), p. 13. For similar examples of this reasoning, see Lewis Cass, "Documents and Proceedings Relating to the Formation and Progress of a Board in the City of New York, for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of America," North American Review, 30 (1830), 62-121, and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, "Our Indian Policy," Democratic Review, 14 (1844), 169-84.
10. See W. H. Gardiner, review of The Last of the Mohicans, North American Review, 23 (1826), 150-97, for a contemporary evaluation of Cooper's work as advocacy. Cooper was in Europe from 1826-33, during much of the most heated debate concerning "Indian Removal," but his 1828 Notions of the Americans indicates that he was well aware of (indeed, perhaps sympathetic to) many of the pro-removal arguments. See Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor, ed. Gary Williams (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1991), pp. 483-91.
11. Kay Seymour House, Cooper's Americans (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), p. 251.
12. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, ed. James F. Beard, Lance Schachterle and Kenneth M. Anderson, Jr. (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1980), p. 85. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
13. See, for example, Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824), Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827), and Cooper's own The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829).
14. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, ed. James A. Sappenfield and E. N. Feltskog (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1983), p. 33; hereafter cited parenthetically. See John Heckewelder's History, Manner, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the...
