Dying Saints, Vanishing Savages: "Dying Indian Speeches" in Colonial New England Literature

To observant Puritans, the death of an Indian was always a sign from God. The first settlers noted the epidemics that had swept through coastal communities before their arrival, attributing widespread deaths to God and giving thanks for newly vacant lands. John Winthrop argued in 1629 that "God hath consumed the natives with a great plague in those parts," and Puritan settlers thus had a "warrant" to settle in New England (Winthrop 73). In Pequot War descriptions, Puritan victors exulted in the terrible deaths of their foes: "But God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven. . . . Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies" (Mason 30). Forty years later, descriptions of the death of Metacom, whom the colonists perceived as the instigator of King Philip's War, likewise asserted a providential purpose in his death and dismemberment:

And in that very place where he first contrived and began his mischief, was he taken and destroyed, and there was he (Like as Agag was hewed in pieces before the Lord) cut into four quarters, and is now hanged up as a monument of revenging Justice.

(Mather 139)

These writers depend on prior vilification as they celebrate such violence. The many who died from disease, they believed, had been occupants of the devil's territories, and therefore merited death. Philip and his men were viciously stigmatized as brutes whose desire was to spill the blood of English men and to rape English women.¹ From such a viewpoint the conclusion was obvious: New England needed to be rid of this menace, and in these accounts, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. These authors are uninterested in registering any trace of Indian subjectivity; it doesn't matter how the instruments of Satan understand their demise—only white Puritan observers are meant to cash in on the symbolic value of their deaths. By interpreting Indian deaths as providential, Puritan observers assert God's blessing on their invasion and the colonists construct themselves as the rightful (and righteous) possessors of "New England." ²

The representation of Indian deaths has, of course, been a prominent part of later American literature as well. Even those nineteenth-century writers who rejected the virulent Indian-hating rhetoric of early English colonists nevertheless accepted the "fact" of Indian destruction. The trope of the "vanishing Indian" was central to romantic constructions of national identity, as in this stanza from William Cullen Bryant's "The Disinterred Warrior":

A noble race! but they are gone,With their old forests wide and deep,And we have built our homes uponFields where their generations sleep.Their fountains slake our thirst at noon,Upon their fields our harvest waves,Our lovers woo beneath their moon—Then let us spare, at least, their graves.

(Bryant 107)

In The Vanishing American, Brian Dippie argues that in such poems and in novels by James Fenimore Cooper and others, "Indian remnants were the American past," even as the literature registered "sympathy, regret, sadness, despair" at the Indians' tragic fate (24). However much nineteenth-century authors may have lamented the disappearance of Indians, they agreed with seventeenth-century writers that Indian deaths were necessary and inevitable—whether because of divine will, "natural" inferiority to whites, or manifest destiny.

The sense of the inevitability of Indian disappearance that is shared by seventeenth- and nineteenth-century writers invites the assumption of discursive stasis: despite some differences, Anglo-American representations of Indians seem always to presume displacement and extinction. But another treatment of the dying Indian figure mediates these representational norms. Between the Pequot War (1636–1637) and King Philip's War (1675–1676), Puritan missionaries described the deaths of Christian converts. These evangelical accounts participated in contemporaneous forms of colonial rhetoric and are forerunners to later romantic constructions, yet they do not describe all Indians as simply dead, dying, or deserving death. The tenor of these representations of "hopeful" new Christian believers differs from the glee or thanksgiving with...