Literary Giant: Washington Irving

Introduction

In spite of Irving's seventeen years in Europe, his search for native themes led him to contribute importantly to portraiture of the American Indian. Although his firsthand observation of Indians was limited, he was liberated ohm the pioneer's need to justify Indian displacement. He was able to view Indians sympathetically, bringing the perspective of a worldly man to questions of civilization and savagery.

In his first book, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Dietrich Knickerbockers (1809), he satirizes pretentious historians and wittily deflates some shibboleths of American history. In Chapter Five Dietrich Knickerbockers pretends 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 Swift Ian summary of colonization; this passage is reprinted below.

In a more straightforward 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 sympathy for wronged Indians implied in Knickerbockers History:

It 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 bigoted and interested writers have traduced their characters.

In this essay, Irving praises the Indians for courage and magnanimity, and explains their deep resentment of white injuries; he calls it "the dark story of their wrongs and wretchedness." In the next sketch, "Philip of Pocomoke, he brings together materials for the many nineteenth century treatments of Philip (most notably, Cooper's and Stone's). Irving's recognition of the heroism of this "true-born prince" in trying to save his people is in sharp contrast to earlier views of Philip as devilish.

In these comic and serious meditations on history, Irving helped to establish the idealized Indian; he worked from secondary sources, the northeastern Indians having been conquered and displaced by the 1820s. But Irving's treatment of the Indian does not end with these books. In 1832 he traveled across Indian Territory, and