Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

western stories mimicked his Eastern ones and the setting seemed inconsistent with the content. Another
author explains, “To Schoolcraft and Catlin he left the frontier’s ethnology; to Cooper its adventure; to
Crockett its tall tale.” (Ellsworth, viii). While Irving did not concern himself with creating a “frontier
work,” he laid the foundations for the frontier as a literary topic. Irving’s concern for the loss of American
republicanism and tradition led him to see the frontier as but another means of expressing these concerns,
but, in the end, his treatment of the prairie seemed out of place.
Despite these accusations of shallowness, the Tour on the Prairies contains deep reflections on human
nature, racism, the loss of freedom, the loss of republicanism, and the meaning of the American identity. In
the Tour Irving reshaped the themes lamenting the old America into a lament for the loss of the unrestrained
freedom of the Indians and thereby relates the loss of that freedom to the loss of American republican
freedom. Irving portrayed the Indians as human and also as symbolic of American freedom. This double
portrayal indicates that in marginalizing the Indians the Americans were in a way loosing their own free
character. Although Irving did not in any way diminish the wild freedom of the Indian races in his book, he
did portray them as uniquely human, expressing joy and sorrow. His description details characteristics to
which any human might relate:
In fact the Indians that I have had an opportunity of seeing in real life are quite different
from those described in poetry. They are by no means the stoics that they are
represented…taciturn they are it is true, when in company with white men, whose good
will they distrust…the white man is equally taciturn under like circumstance. When the
Indians are among themselves, however, there cannot be greater gossips. Half their time is
taken up in talking over their adventures…they are great mimics and buffoons, also, and
entertain themselves excessively at the expense of the whites…they are curious
observers…they give full scope to criticism, satire, mimicry and mirth… as to tears, they
have them in abundance both real and affected; for at times they make a merit of them.
(Washington Irving, Three Western Narratives, 35-36).
Irving described real humans and their emotions vivid ways that they undermined the racist arguments for
Indian removal. Irving’s words reveal that he saw the portrayal of the Indians in the American imagination
as a primary cause of the Indians’ mistreatment and sought to correct it. (Littlefield, 138). Irving concluded
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