An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic 105

Wallace Stegner decried the devastation wrought by imperialism
on Indigenous peoples and the land, he reinforced the idea of US
uniqueness by reducing colonization to a twist of fate that produced
some charming characteristics:

Ever since Daniel Boone took his first excursion over Cumber­

land Gap, Americans have been wanderers .... With a conti­

nent to take over and Manifest Destiny to goad us, we could

not have avoided being footloose. The initial act of emigration

from Europe, an act of extreme, deliberate disaffiliation, was

the beginning of a national habit.

It should not be denied, either, that being fo otloose has al­

ways exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape

from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations,

with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. Our

folk heroes and our archetypal literary figures accurately re­

flect that side of us. Leatherstocking, Huckleberry Finn, the

narrator of Moby Dick, all are orphans and wanderers; any of

them could say, "Call me Ishmael." The Lone Ranger has no

dwelling place except the saddle.^22

The British novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence, who lived in
northern New Mexico for two years, conceptualized the US origin
myth, invoking Cooper's frontiersman character Deerslayer: "You
have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other
stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of
by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a
killer. It has never yet melted." 23
Historian Wai-chee Dimock points out that nonfiction sources of
the time reflected the same view:

The United States Magazine and Democratic Review summed

it up by arguing that whereas European powers "conquer only

to enslave," America, being "a free nation," "conquers only

to bestow freedom." ... Far from being antagonistic, "em­

pire" and "liberty" are instrumentally conjoined. If the for­

mer stands to safeguard the latter, the latter, in turn, serves

to justify the former. Indeed, the conjunction of the two,