Indian Studies

Indians: symbols and Men

artram is one of the earliest American writers to see the Indian as a symbol of the history of the North American continent. In studying the monumental remains of these “ancient inhabitants,”(226) he finds the most complex “natural production” of the New World and faces his greatest challenge as an historian. Bartram is fascinated by races of Indians who rose to civilized heights, and then declined and fell, like the fabled race of Yamassees, who were destroyed by the Creeks a century earlier.(227) These early people raised huge artificial hills, the exact purpose of which the Indians of Bartram’s day no longer knew. Such a loss of contact with antiquity is an ominous portent of further decline in their culture, as Bartram warns, for now white settlers, “vast armies of these evil spirits,” have invaded the continent and steadily press in upon the Indians, on all sides.(228) The Indian ruins bring Bartram’s historical epic to an appropriate close; in his final paragraph, he surveys them one final time, remarkably like Gibbon, whose own history closed with a last glimpse of the ruins of ancient Rome:

“To conclude this subject concerning the monuments of the Americans, I deem it necessary to observe, as my opinion, that none of them that I have seen discover the least signs of the arts, sciences, or architecture of the Europeans or other inhabitants of the old world; yet evidently betray every sign or mark of the distant antiquity.”(229)

Bartram’s fascination with the origins of Indian culture is characteristic of 18th century history and of most epic literature, which seeks to explain the origin and development of racial or national traits. Even though he worked in a traditional manner, his image of the Indian was too advanced for ready comprehension in 1791. Not until much later in the 19th century did American readers begin to accept his version of the Indian. His sympathetic opinion of the native race is all the more surprising in view of his own grandfather’s death by Indian hands. John Bartram wrote that the only way to handle the Indian was to “bang them stoutly,”(230) but William disagreed.

Footnotes

226. Bartram’s Travels, op. cit., cf. p. 75, Harper, cf. p. 61.
227. Ibid., p. 139, Harper, p. 88.
228. Ibid., p. 491, Harper, p. 311.
229. Ibid., p. 522, Harper, p. 332.
230. Darlington, Memorials, op. cit., p. 255.