BACKWASH OF THE FRONTIER—HALLOWELL 449 
the colonists. The speeches made by Indians in treaty negotiations 
aroused so much interest in native oratory that a novel literary form, 
with no prototype in Europe, emerged. Verbatim reports of these 
conferences were widely circulated and read in printed form. It 
has even been said that information about the organization and 
operation of the League of the Iroquois, which Franklin picked up 
at various Indian councils, suggested to him the pattern for a United 
States of America. In any case it was Franklin whose appreciation 
of the attitude of the Indians toward their own culture led him to 
express the anthropological principle of the relativity of culture 
norms when, in 1784, he wrote: “Savages we call them, because their 
manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility: 
they think the same of theirs.” ¢ 
As the eastern frontier receded westward and for most Americans 
the contemporary Indians could be viewed at a comfortable distance, 
it was their decline that became a romantic literary theme. As ex- 
pressed in poetry, drama, and the novel, it was an early backwash 
of the frontier. But it was by no means always the noble savage 
that was depicted; a double image was created—the savage as ignoble 
as well as noble. During this period, the first half of the 19th cen- 
tury, when the Indian was such a popular figure in American litera- 
ture, it is particularly significant that most of the authors who dealt 
with Indian themes derived their information from written sources 
rather than from direct observation. Cooper depended on Hecke- 
welder’s writings, and Longfellow on Schoolcraft’s “Algic Re- 
searches” (1839). It has been said that “Cooper poured the 
prejudices of John Heckewelder into the Leatherstocking mold, and 
produced the Indian of nineteenth century convention.” *® The authors 
who were busy writing about the Indians were far removed from the 
men who faced them on the new frontiers. 
Two and a half centuries after Englishmen on the eastern frontier 
faced the Indian, American frontiersmen in the Mississippi Valley 
and the Far West found themselves in a parallel situation and re- 
garded him in much the same hostile light—the Indian blocked the 
path of America’s “manifest destiny.” In 1867, the Topeka Weekly 
Leader spoke for the West when it characterized the Indians as “a 
set of miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaking, 
murdering, graceless, faithless, gut-eating skunks as the Lord ever 
permitted to infect the earth, and whose immediate and final exter- 
mination all men, except Indian agents and traders, should pray for.” ® 
‘Alfred O. Aldridge, Franklin’s deistical Indians, Proc. Amer. Philos. Soe., vol. 94, 
p. 398, 1950. 
6 Paul A. W. Wallace, John Heckewelder’s Indians and the Fennimore Cooper tradition, 
{bid., vol. 96, p. 500, 1952. 
® Robert Taft, “Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900,” p. 66. New York. 
1953. 
