Washintgon Irving :: essays research papers

In spite of Irvings seventeen years in Europe, his search for immanent themes led him to contri ande importantly to portraiture of the American Indian. Although his firsthand observance of Indians was limited, he was liberated om the pioneers need to justify Indian displacement. He was able to view Indians sympathetically, bringing the perspective of a worldly man to questions of nicety and savagery.In his first book, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the eradicate of the Dutch Dynasty, by Dietrich Knickerbocker ( 1809), he satirizes pretentious historians and wittily deflates some shibboleths of American history. In Chapter Five Dietrich Knickerbocker pret endings to justify the rights of European colonists to the land they "discovered." He succeeds, of course, in revealing the falsity and injustice of their claims. At the end of the chapter, Irving offers a Swiftian analysis of colonization this passage is reprinted below.In a more straightforw ard way, but not more devastatingly, Irving takes up the topic of displaced Indians again in two sketches added to The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., in 1820. In "Traits of Indian Character," Irving expresses succinctly that bounty for wronged Indians implied in Knickerbockers HistoryIt has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America, in the early periods of colonization, to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers. In this essay, Irving praises the Indians for courage and magnanimity, and explains their deep resentment of white injuries he calls it "the nighted story of their wrongs and wretchedness." In the next sketch, "Philip of Pokanoket,,, he brings together materials for the many ordinal century treatments of Philip (most notably, Coopers and Stones). Irvings reco gnition of the heroism of this "true-born prince" in trying to save his tribe is in sharp contrast to earlier views of Philip as devilish.In these singular and serious meditations on history, Irving helped to establish the idealized Indian he worked from unoriginal sources, the northeastern Indians having been conquered and displaced by the 1820s. But Irvings treatment of the Indian does not end with these books. In 1832 he traveled across Indian territory, and recorded his glimpses of western sandwich tribes in A Tour on the Prairies ( 1835). His most intimate tie with Indians was gathered through his acquaintance with a half-breed guide on this trip.