SOURCE: “William Gilmore Simms and the American Indian,” in South Carolina Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, June, 1973, pp. 57-64.

In the following essay, Howell discusses the attitude of William Gilmore Simms, the preeminent Southern writer of his time, toward the American Indian and compares it to that of James Fenimore Cooper.

The history of the white American's attitude towards the Indian ranges the full gamut of human emotions. He hated the red man while he was still a threat to his existence and idealized him when the threat was removed, and in some cases heaped on the white man bitter accusations for the rape of a continent. The Puritan settler of New England saw the Indian as an agent of the Devil, a view later translated into secular terms as the frontier moved west. As late as 1867, the Topeka Weekly Leader called the Indians “a set of miserable, dirty, lousy...