A History of American Literature

294 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

and Anglo-Americans. Some, for instance, celebrated the superior prowess of

Mexican-Americans as fighters or lovers, farmers or ranchers. In a corrido called

“Kiansas” (or “Kansas”), describing a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, the Mexican-

American cowboys are celebrated as superior to the other cowboys in every respect –

tougher, more fearless, and more accomplished. Others spoke and sang of more

open, violent conflict. In “Gregorio Cortez” a rancher shoots “the Major Sheriff ” to

defend his brother. Knowing that he will never receive justice in a Texas court, he

flees for the Mexican border, but then gives himself up when he learns that his people

are being persecuted and killed by the authorities because of him. The ballad presents

Gregorio Cortez as “godlike” and heroic: “the Americans,” we learn, “were whiter

than a poppy / from the fear they had of Cortez and his pistol.” He is presented, in

effect, as an emblem of resistance to Anglo domination. So, for that matter, is the

eponymous hero of “Jacinto Treviño,” who faces down the Texas Rangers when they

come to arrest him. “Come on, you cowardly rinches, you’re not playing games with

a child, /” he tells them, “You wanted to meet your father? I am Jacinto Treviño!” And

his courage inspires awe, we are told, even among his enemies: “The chief of the

rinches said, even though he was an American, / ‘Ah, what a brave man is Jacinto; you

can see he is a Mexican!’ ”

Racial pride and resistance of a different kind was expressed during this period in

the speeches and songs of Native Americans who were also trying to counter white

domination. Among the speeches, perhaps the most famous was the one given by

Standing Bear (1829–1908), a member of the Ponca tribe, in 1881, when he per-

suaded the whites not to remove him and his people to Indian Territory. The speech,

transcribed and translated by a native speaker, is a powerfully simple protest against

racial injustice. Spare and stoical in a way characteristic of Native American oratory,

it is also a vivid rehearsal of communal identity. “You have driven me from the East

to this place,” Standing Bear declares, “and I have been here two thousand years or

more.” Standing Bear, as he describes himself, is his people, the individual is one with

the community. And it is in the name of his people that he declares: “My friends, if

you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this

land. I wish to be an old man here.” Standing Bear successfully used persuasion, the

traditional powers of Native American oratory. Others anticipated revenge and

redemption. “The spirit host is advancing, they say,” the “Ghost Dance Songs” declare:

They are coming with the buffalo, they say.

They are coming with the new earth, they say,

They are coming with the new earth, they say.

The Ghost Dance originated when the Paiute prophet Wovoka had an apocalyptic

vision. He saw the Crow coming to bring the whirlwind and the earthquake to “the

whole earth” and destroy the white invaders. The slaughtered buffalo and Indian

people, the “ghosts,” would then, he prophesied, return to reclaim their land, which

had belonged to them at the beginning. This vision, and the hypnotic dance and

song that expressed it, spread rapidly among Native American tribes from the west

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