THE INDIAN IN LITERATURE TEN KATE. 511 



We shall close these critical remarks with another instance of 

 Cooper's ethnological errors. In his Wept of Wish-ton-wish, the 

 events of which novel are supposed to occur about 1666, we are told 

 that the New England Indians scalped their enemies. They did not. 

 Thanks to Friederici's researches 5 we now know that at the time of 

 America's discovery the area of the scalping custom was very limited, 

 and that this practice spread only later and gradually, a result to 

 which the whites largely contributed. 



Notwithstanding the foregoing criticism, Fenimore Cooper stands 

 unsurpassed as a writer of Indian and frontier stories of the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries ; and as a truthful painter of scenery 

 very few Indian novelists equal him. 



During Cooper's life another American writer, William Gilmore 

 SimmSj wrote a few novels concerning the then southeastern frontier. 

 About 1825 he visited the region of the Mississippi with his father, 

 who had previously been among the Cherokee and Creek Indians, 

 from whom he had brought back wonderful tales which also must 

 have inspired the future author of Guy Rivers. This novel, which 

 appeared in 1834, was shortly afterwards followed by a second one, 

 The Yemassee, which is better known. The influence of Cooper on 

 Simms is evident, but although Simms was the author of several 

 other works also, he never reached the standard of Cooper. 



The poem, Mogg Megone, of John Greenleaf Whittier, which ap- 

 peared about 1835, is of quite a different character. It relates to a 

 tragic episode of Colonial history in 1724 ; the massacre and burning 

 by English colonists of the Catholic mission of Father Rale at Nor- 

 ridgewock, Me., in which Mogg Megone, an Abnaki Christianized 

 chief and many of his followers perished. 



With the exception of certain novels of Cooper and Aimard, and 

 of Chateaubriand's Atala, no literary work on Indians is more widely 

 known than The Song of Hiawatha by Henry W. Longfellow. Pub- 

 lished for the first time in 1855, it has been wholly or partly trans- 

 lated in several languages, even in Latin, and including a Dutch 

 rendering by J. J. L. ten Kate. Longfellow did not himself collect 

 in the far West the material for the Song, but borrowed, as we 

 know, from various Indian traditions told by Schoolcraft in his 

 Algic Researches and History, Conditions, etc., of the Indian Tribes 

 in the United States, as well as from Heckewelder, Catlin, Mary- 

 Eastman, and others. His personal acquaintance with Indians was 

 limited to the few from the West whom he saw and met at Boston. 

 In our day we know who and what Hiawatha was, but when Long- 

 fellow wrote his Song we did not. Therefore the poetical descrip- 

 tions of Hiawatha's origin, position, and character are a curious 



6 Skalpieren und fihnliche Kriegsgebrauche in Amerika, p. 17. Brunswick, 1906. 



