SOURCE: Shaner, Richard C. “Simms and the Noble Savage.” American Transcendental Quarterly 30, no. 1 (spring 1976): 18-21.

In the following essay, Shaner analyzes William Gilmore Simm's work The Yemassee, where the Native American is depicted as a creature who needed to be subject to the white man.

By the time nineteenth-century American novelists were writing of the colonization of America, the lives and cultures of the Indian tribes already were obscured not merely by change and passage of time, but by the world view of the European. The same is true of the land. Whatever the American wilderness was in its existential reality, Western man seems to have seen it as the raw material which could give substance to the mythic ideals of a society which had failed hitherto to achieve its dreams. Of the land the early settlers primarily asked sustenance. Of the Indians they sought, primarily, cooperation or...