A Question of National Character 
For more than a century, American intellectuals looked about for something in the American experience worth writing about, worth the effort.  Even through the writings of Henry James in the late nineteenth century there remains the not-so-faint uneasiness that America amounts to little more than D. H. Lawrence's American "muck heaps of gold." America might well be a land, as the University of Chicago's Dr. Boutnoy, professor of the famed historian Frederick Jackson Church, once observed, whose motto ought to be, "No one welcome here except on business!"--that America was "first a business enterprise, a nation only secondarily." 

The Frontier Fever 
But America was discovering a subject worth writing about, worth the effort--it was the "untainted," expansive American wilderness.  Europe had long since lost any open range and territory, but the American frontier was wide open.  For its entrepreneurs, the frontier represented commodity ready to exploit and market.  For those fleeing tyrannies abroad, the frontier represented new opportunity to begin again where reward matched each ounce of invested labor.  For the American intellectuals, the frontier and wilderness took on a spirituality best translated in Ralph Waldo Emerson's touchstone essay, "Nature" (1844). 

The Hudson River Valley and Mountain House 
In the late 18th century and at the turn of the 19th century, Americans began flocking to the outdoors. Excursions into the Hudson River Valley in upper state New York were spurred by the popularization of its vistas by America's first artistic school of painting, the "Hudson River School," attracting both artists and writers alike.  The most famous New York hotel of its day, the Catskill Mountain House, perched on a peak overlooking the goblin-ridden "Sleepy Hollow," would draw visitors for 144 years.  Artists and writers alike flocked to the Mountain House to take in the natural beauty of the landscape and all its changing colors stretched out spectacularly before it.  Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole, two of the most popular painters of the school, were close friends with William Cullen Bryant who admonishes "Cole, The Painter, Departing for Europe," to "keep that wilder image bright where upon [his] great canvas lies."  

By the end of the nineteenth century, no fashionable hotel bar would be complete without a majestic landscape by Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, or Thomas Cole, or others inspired by the trackless beauty of the great American frontier.  Americans on excursion just couldn't get enough of the distant frontier, but America's future was tied to a moving, not a static frontier.  "Go West, young man!  Go West!" cried the journalist, Horace Greeley, and with the discovery of silver and gold in the Nevada Comstock and the gold fields of the California Esmeralda, thousands of young men did just that. 

The Disturbing Issue 
The disquieting "a-hem" that kept coughing up in the background, of course, was the "Indian question '--what to do with all the Indians between the Eastern seaboard and the Pacific Ocean--each one a specific obstacle in the way of what clearly everyone agreed was America's "Manifest Destiny."  In his monumental work, The Great Frontier, Texas scholar Walter Prescott Webb notes the four options that European settlers enjoyed as they addressed the question "face to face": 1) to intermarry with the indigenous populations, 2) to live beside them in community, 3) to segregate themselves, or 4) to exterminate them.  Mark Twain, originally no "Indian lover," to be sure, came around to a more favorable estimation of America's "red men"; he once composed in his notebook an imaginary conversation between two army officers on the western frontier: "Well, Sergeant, how many Indians did you all kill today?"--"'Bout 200!"--"How much you reckon that cost the gov'ment?"-- Oh, 'bout a million dollars!"--"Heck, we could have given them all a college education for that much!"  In a nation where Indians were allocated a rung on the social ladder lower than slaves who were accorded by law in some southern states the status of only 3/5ths human, the French solution of intermarriage was worse than the hanging offense of miscegenation between a white man and his slaves. 

Differing Opinions 
While the horrific and systematic extermination of the "Native Americans" continued unabated until the mid 1890's with the last attack at Wounded Knee, a number of American writers championed the indigenous people as they encountered them.  One of the earliest accounts in Mourt's Relation  recalls the harvest ceremony that lasted for more than four days in the Plimoth Colony, what many note as America's "First Thanksgiving."  Both Benjamin Franklin and Washington Irving wrote favorably about Indian character, and St. Jean de Cèvecouer speaks tollerantly of the Indian in his Letters from an American Farmer. But the "romance of the Indian" begins with the Leather-stocking Tales. 

Idealization of the "Red Man" 
James Fenimore Cooper idealized the sachems of the Mohican tribe, set apart from the depraved and blood-thirsty Iroquois, in his five-volume series featuring the American nobel savage, Chingachgook, and his stalwart white companion, Natty Bumpo, America's first fully developed frontier hero.  Cooper had had little, if any, direct contact with Indians in and around the Cooper family estate at Otsego Lake, New York, when he began to write about them.  The two heroes were sagacious champions of the right, that sense native-born to anyone who lives simply, one-on-one with nature and nature's God--a Christian God, of course.  They developed throughout the five novels a cunning "woodcraft" which pulled them out of scrape after scrape.  In "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," Mark Twain lampooned Cooper's idealized red men who more than championed mother nature, but rather seemed to be an extension of nature itself. 

Savage  vs. Noble Savage 
The romance of the indigenous people of North America was the elaboration of the "Noble Savage" concept that dates to the eighteenth-century French Jean Jacques Rouseaux, who claimed that people who grow up in nature, removed from the entrapments of society, live a more pristine, if not more fully human existence.  Traffic with society, so the logic of  the concept goes, necessarily compromises away native human traits and natural abilities, what St. Jean de Cèvecouer refers to as "certain constitutional propensities."  In short, the "Noble Savage" is an innocent who knows no evil and who lives his or her life in an idylic state of natural splendor. 

Hoxie Neal Fairchild (The Noble Savage) traces the origins of the "Noble Savage" concept to the stories brought back to the European courts by explorers, the celebrated appearance of selected indigenous people in the same courts, romantic philosophy about the "nature of nature," and the popularization of the "savage" as side-show accoutrements.  In time, the concept fed the utopian movements, like Brook Farm and the Oneida communities.  Thoreau, however, found a compromise, as one must assuredly do, since few have ever found it possible to live completely outside human community.  Even Thoreau enjoyed his occasional visitor to his cabin at Walden Pond where they would discuss politics and philosophy for hours, and to sustain himself, he sold his vegetables to friends in Concord.  

The Literary Legacy 
The "Noble Savage" flourishes well into the twentieth century with William Faulkner's old Sam Fathers, half black, half Chichasaw chief to whom the Sunday primitives come once a year to repeat their annual, ritual hunt for the Bear.  Only after Ike McCaslin does what Sam his mentor, has taught him, only after giving up the flimsy "mechanicals" of civilization--the watch, his compass, and the gun--will he be eligible to meet the Bear--on its terms--and when it happens, the experience is nothing short of transfiguring epiphany for the young boy.  Come to the wilderness and learn what, says Faulkner, is the only thing worth writing about, all the "old verties and truths of the heart which alone make good writing" . . . "without which any story is ephemeral and doomed"--"love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."  Some of St. Jean de Cèvecouer's "constitutional propensities," no doubt! 
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Study Questions Over the Readings 
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Philip Freneau’s Poetry 
1) Cite evidence of the gothic and adventurism in “The Indian Burying Ground.” 
2) What suggestion of an emerging Romantic motif is demonstrated by “The Yellow Violet?” 
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Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” 
1) What two American folk types are featured in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”?  To which one is Irving sympathetic? 
2) Be able to reconstruct a literary burlesque found in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” 
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William Cullen Bryant’s Poetry 
1) On the basis of your reading of “To Cole, On Departing for Europe,” be able to contrast European and American Romantic motifs. 
2) In what ways might “Thanatopsis” (which means a “study of death”) be considered unconventional? What features suggest it as a Romantic poem? 
3) What elements in “The Prairies” suggest a Romantic mood?  What is that mood? 
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