SOURCE: “The Correlation between Societal Attitudes and Those of American Authors in the Depiction of American Indians, 1607-1860,” in American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1974, pp. 1-26.

In the following essay, Hamilton presents an overview of fictional representations of Native Americans by Anglo writers.

The problem in this research is to identify the changing attitudes of American fictional authors toward the American Indian and the roles they attributed to the natives from early America to the Civil War, and to explore the relationship of these attitudes and prescribed roles to changing societal views about the native Americans.

From Captain John Smith's dramatic rescue by Pocahontas in the early seventeenth century down to N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1969), the American Indian has furnished inspiration to a multitude of writers. Specifically, the westward movement of an aggressive Anglo-Saxon culture left its imprint in the records of those who...