102 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865law and society” – are sometimes landscapes of desolation. “If a curse had been
pronounced upon the land, it could not have worn an aspect more forlorn,” Parkman
declares of one area he visits on the prairie, where “all alike glared with an
insupportable whiteness under the burning sun.” The only relief he found on this
bleak terrain, he recalls, was a solitary “pine-tree clinging at the edge of a ravine,” its
“resinous odors” recalling “the pine-clad mountains of New England” and a greener,
more gracious world.
Yet, for all that, Parkman remembers that he found much to admire, or even
cherish, in the West. The two scouts who accompanied him are portrayed in frankly
romantic terms. One has the rough charm of the prairie, and an indefatigable
“cheerfulness and gayety,” the other a “natural refinement and delicacy of mind”; the
both of them, in their different ways, are true knights of the wild. Native American
life, too, is celebrated for its color and occasionally chivalric touches. “If there be
anything that deserves to be called romantic in the Indian character,” Parkman
explains, “it is to be sought in ... friendships ... common among many of the prairie
tribe.” Parkman himself, he discloses, enjoyed just such an intimacy, becoming
“excellent friends” with an Indian he calls “the Panther:” “a noble-looking fellow,”
with a “stately and graceful figure” and “the very model of a wild prairie-rider.” “For
the most part, a civilised white man can discover very few points of sympathy
between his own nature and that of an Indian,” Parkman cautions. But, in this
instance, “there were at least some points of sympathy between him and me” and
“we rode forward together, through rocky passages, deep dells, and little barren
plains.” This is the homoerotic romance across the line between white and Indian
that Cooper imagined, replayed here in however muted a key. Parkman is framing
his recollections within a literary tradition that includes the author of the
Leatherstocking Tales and, before him, Sir Walter Scott. Parkman is drawn to
the romance of the West, what he sees as its primitive beauty, its bold colors and
simple chivalry, even while he is also repelled by its rawness, its lack of refinement.
So he ends up decidedly at odds with himself, when he eventually returns from the
trail. “Many and powerful as were the attractions of the settlements,” Parkman
concludes, “we looked back regretfully to the wilderness behind us.” That was a
broken, uncertain note to be sounded in many later stories about going West,
negotiating what the traveler sees as the borderline between civilization and savagery.
Parkman was playing his part, in The Oregon Trail, in inaugurating the frontier as a
site of vicarious risk, imaginative adventure: with the West perceived as it was
precisely because it was seen through the eyes of the East – as a place destructively,
but also seductively, other.
A year after the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, in 1827, a very different
story about the relationship between white people and Native Americans appeared,
and one different in turn from the accounts of Neal, Bird, and Parkman: Hope Leslie
by Catharine Marie Sedgwick (1789–1867). Sedgwick had already produced two best-
sellers, A New England Tale: Sketches of New-England Character and Manners (1822)
and Redwood (1824). She was to go on to publish many other books, including
Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830), set in and around New York City, TheGGray_c02.indd 102ray_c 02 .indd 102 8 8/1/2011 7:54:38 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 38 AM