68 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



the accounts given him by traders or other white people, who 

 have resided among them." *" His distrust of " conjecture " 

 and " accounts " extended to the Indians as well as to the white 

 traders. " The Cherokees themselves," he reports, " are as 

 ignorant as we are, by what people or for what purpose these 

 artificial hills were raised; they have various stories concerning 

 them, the best of which amount to no more than mere conjec- 

 ture, and leave us entirely in the dark . . ." ^^ Bartram, too, 

 repeated accounts given him by others, but first he tried to verify 

 them and carefully distinguished verified material from mere 

 hearsay. He had heard it reported, he tells us, before he went 

 among the Indians, that " when their parents through extreme 

 old age, become decrepid and helpless," they are, " in com- 

 passion for their miseries," sent to the other world, "' by a 

 stroke of the tomahawk or bullet." Upon inquiry, he was 

 assured by the traders " that they knew no instance of such bar- 

 barism, but that there had been instances of the communities 

 performing such a deed at the earnest request of the victim." *^ 

 As proof of the traders' assurances he offers an instance of the 

 reverential treatment of a blind old man that he himself had 

 witnessed. 



If the literature of travel is, in the last analysis, as Professor 

 Lane Cooper suggests, "to be understood in its bearing upon 

 imagination and poetic art," ^^ Bartram's contribution to the 

 literature of travel exerted its influence upon imagination and 

 poetic art not only by virtue of its vivid narrative and its 

 descriptive power, but by virtue of its careful notes on history, 

 geography, and on a multitude of related sciences. In an age 

 when poetic imagination among travelers ran faster than their 

 observation, Bartram, whose imagination could travel as fast 

 as anyone's, strove to copy nature as it is before he painted it 

 in the glowing colors he loved to use. His Indians are first of 

 all definite American Indians, having a habitation and a name, 

 before they are noble children of nature. 



*" observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians, p. 22. 



^'^ Travels, 367. 



*^ Travels, 498-9. *^ Cambridge History of American Literature, I, 185. 



