Washintgon Irving :: essays research papers

In spite of Irvings seventeen years in Europe, his search for ingrained themes led him to contri excepte importantly to portraiture of the American Indian. Although his firsthand honoring of Indians was limited, he was liberated om the pioneers need to justify Indian displacement. He was open to view Indians sympathetically, bringing the perspective of a worldly man to questions of refinement and savagery.In his first book, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the stamp out 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 raritys 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 abridgment of colonization this passage is reprinted below.In a more stra ightforward way, but not more devastatingly, Irving takes up the topic of displaced Indians again in twain 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 raise writers. In this essay, Irving praises the Indians for courage and magnanimity, and explains their deep resentment of white injuries he calls it "the smutty story of their wrongs and wretchedness." In the next sketch, "Philip of Pokanoket,,, he brings together materials for the many 19th century treatments of Philip (most notably, Coopers and Stones). Irvings rec ognition of the heroism of this "true-born prince" in trying to save his tidy sum is in sharp contrast to earlier views of Philip as devilish.In these cockeyed 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 tribes in A Tour on the Prairies ( 1835). His most intimate achieve with Indians was gathered through his acquaintance with a half-breed guide on this trip.