448 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
forms they have assumed at different periods of our national existence, 
and their depth. Most often they have been manifested at the vernacu- 
lar level of American culture, one expression of our cultural provin- 
cialism, which is perhaps the reason so little systematic attention has 
been paid to them. Our contacts with the Indians have affected our 
speech, our economic life, our clothing, our sports and recreations, 
certain indigenous religious cults, many of our curative practices, 
folk and concert music, the novel, poetry, drama, and even some of 
our basic psychological attitudes, and one of the social sciences, 
anthropology. 
To the outside world there is a closer association of the Indian with 
the image of America than perhaps we are aware of. For example, 
Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans” is not only read by every Amer- 
ican schoolchild, but it has been said to be the best-known American 
novel in the world. So too, “Hiawatha,” Longfellow’s poetic image of 
the Indian, is widely read and translated in other countries. Ivan 
Bunin, the Russian poet and novelist, “is probably as well recognized 
for his translation of ‘Hiawatha’ as for any of his original works.” § 
Americans have created a whole succession of images of the Indian, 
some literary and interpretative, some growing out of direct contact 
of particular types of white men with him and changing with his- 
torical circumstances. Although the Pope declared as far back as 
1512 that the natives of America were descended from Adam and Eve, 
in colonial New England Cotton Mather thought that “probably the 
Devil decoy’d ... [them] . . . hither, in hopes that the gospel of the 
Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his 
absolute empire over them.” As God’s elected agents and under his 
“wonder-working Providence,’ the colonists must convert these 
“tawney serpents” or annihilate them. However, the Indian was 
never simply The Enemy. On the earliest frontiers, the colonists were 
befriended by the natives. Who has not heard of Squanto? White 
men from the beginning profited in many practical ways from the 
Indians’ knowledge of their own country and through intimate con- 
tacts learned about their customs, manner of thought, and character, 
and were influenced by them. 
During the 18th century, when in England and on the Continent a 
literary image of the noble savage, partly derived from ideas about 
the Indian, was being created, the colonists greatly deepened their 
firsthand knowledge of the American natives. Trading activities 
brought tribal groups over a wider range into contact with the colon- 
ists. The Indians were not always fought against; on occasion they 
were comrades-in-arms, and aboriginal methods of fighting influenced 
8Clarence Golides, The reception of some nineteenth-century American authors in 
Europe, in “The American Writer and the European Tradition,” ed. Margaret Denny and 
W. H. Gilman, p. 116. Minneapolis. 1950. 
