American literature, or at least one of the most plausible reasons given
for it, is our want of originality, particularly in point of subject
matter. It is said that our imitativeness is so servile, that for the
sake of following English models, at an immeasurable distance, we
neglect the new and grand material which lies all around us, in the
sublime features of our country, in our new and striking circumstances,
in our peculiar history and splendid prospects, and, above all, in the
character, superstitions, and legends of our aborigines, who, to eyes
across the water, look like poetical beings. We are continually
reproached by British writers for the obtuse carelessness with which we
are allowing these people, with so much of the heroic element in their
lives, and so much of the mysterious in their origin, to go into the
annihilation which seems their inevitable fate as civilization advances,
without an effort to secure and record all that they are able to
communicate respecting themselves.

And the reproach is just. In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have
either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a
business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a
thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be
troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his
hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white
people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a
missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his
neighbor. To look upon the Indian with much regard, even in the light of
literary material, would be inconvenient; for the moment we recognize in
him a mind, a heart, a soul,--the recollection of the position in which
we stand towards him becomes thorny, and we begin dimly to remember
certain duties belonging to our Christian profession, which we have
sadly neglected with regard to the sons of the forest, whom we have