100 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865energetic writer. His early works included Kee p Cool (1817), a novel that was also a
tract against dueling, two narrative poems titled “Battle of Niagara” (1818) and
“Goldau, or, the Maniac Harper” (1818), and Otho (1819), a romantic tragedy in
blank verse. Among his other, later publications were a Revolutionary romance
(Seventy-Six (1823)), a romantic epistolary novel (Randolph (1823)), a romantic
novel set in colonial New England (Brother Jonathan (1825)), a fictional study of the
Salem witchcraft trials (Rachel Dyer (1828)), and a picaresque tale about a New
Englander abroad (Authorship (1830)). Living in England for a while, Neal also
wrote a number of articles for Blackwood’s Magazine, a journal notoriously hostile
to American writers. And among the most remarkable of these were a series of five
papers on American authors. Marred by errors of fact, and Neal’s own prejudices,
they nevertheless represented the first serious attempt at a history of American
literature; and they were eventually published in 1937 under the author’s own chosen
title, American Writers. Logan: A History is an essentially romantic account of a noble
savage, the Indian chief who gives the book its title. The reverse side of the coin is
suggested by Nick of the Woods, the work of Robert Montgomery Bird (1806–1854),
an equally prolific author whose output included historical drama (The Gladiator
(1831)), a tragedy dramatizing the assassination of the Spanish conquistador Pizarro
(Oralloosa, Son of the Incas (1832)), a tragedy set in eighteenth-century Colombia
(The Broker of Bogota (1834)), two novels concerned with the conquest of Mexico
(Calavar; or, The Knight of the Conquest (1834); The Infidel; or, The Knight of the
Conquest (1835)), a romance of the Revolution (The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow (1835)),
and a series of travel sketches (Peter Pilgrim; or, A Rambler’s Recollections (1838)).
Nick of the Woods, an immensely popular tale in its day and also Bird’s best work, has
a complicated plot involving Indian raids and massacres, a romantic heroine taken
into captivity but eventually rescued, and an eponymous central character who is
bent on revenge against the Indians for the slaughter of his family. Throughout all
the plot convolutions, however, what remains starkly simple is the portrait of the
Indians. As Bird depicts them, they are violent, superstitious, and treacherous. They
may be savages but they are very far from being noble.
The Oregon Trail is another matter. For a start, it was written by someone, Francis
Parkman (1823–1893), who went on from writing it to become one of the most
distinguished historians of the period. Parkman was one of a generation of American
historians who combined devotion to research with a romantic sweep of imagination,
and a scholarly interest in the history of America or democratic institutions or both
with dramatic flair and a novelistic eye for detail. Apart from Parkman himself, the
most notable of these romantic historians were John Lothrop Motley (1814–1877),
George Bancroft (1800–1891), and William Hinckling Prescott (1796–1859). Motley,
after writing a novel about the colony of Thomas Morton (Merry Mount (1839)),
devoted much of his life to historical study of the Netherlands, drawn to this subject
by the analogy he perceived with the United States, and the opportunity it offered
him to dramatize the triumph of Protestantism and liberty where previously there
had been despotism. “The laws governing all bodies political,” Motley declared in his
book Historic Progress and American Democracy (1869), proceeded as “inexorably asGGray_c02.indd 100ray_c 02 .indd 100 8 8/1/2011 7:54:37 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 37 AM