Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn, Celluloid Indians:Native Americans and Film, University of Nebraska, 1999
Paradoxically, the perception of an inherent native closeness to the earth has led some to endow Native peoples with a certain nature-based nobility and spirituality-the Noble Savage, the alter ego of the Bloodthirsty Savage, on and off (xvii) the screen. This presumed spirituality and closeness to the earth has spurred in recent years the creation of a related stereotype, the Natural Ecologist. pgs vvii-xviii
It is interesting to note that these stereotypes contradict reality by a great deal. Consider the buffalo hunts where they would pile up thousands of them by running them off the cliff or the way their farming habits were far from ideal and only marginally effective. (my thoughts in standard font, book quotes in italics)
Discussing James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, ...who most thoroughly established in the realm of fiction the stereotypical extremes of the Indian-the noble savage and the bloodthirsty savage-and introduced a depiction of Native American behavior that book and film audiences would come to expect. Cooper's most famous novel, The Last of the Mohicans, has been made into a Hollywood film five times, the latest in 1993, a time of supposedly heightened sensitivity and new sensibilities. p.2
Chingachgook and Uncas are positively regal characters, but it is important to note that they are the last of their breed. These proto-American allegories were conveniently vanishing, leaving the land open for Euro-Americans to take their "rightful" place. p3
Cooper's creation of the "manly" and Indianized white intermediary would later become a buttress of the film industry, with stars like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and even Paul Newman playing savvy woodsmen or plainsmen who were raised by Indians. p.4
The above is a reference to the story arc where a white person is raised by Indians and becomes better at "being Indian" than the Indian themself..and therefore has a certain affinity for the Indian to the point of defending him against wrongs done while taking advantage of his skills as woodsman to defeat the evil white or Indian antagonists. Need to gather some movie examples.
In the early 1800s, Euro-Americans were increasing in power and numbers, and these numbers needed more land, Indian land. Acquiring that land was one of the most problematic issues of the early nineteenth century. p.6
This hearkens back to my point that re-imagining the Indian as needing killed was needed to fulfill Manifest Destiny.
(Robert Montgomery) Bird's Indians were among the first to discover that they were pronoun challenged.
Unfortunately, the pronoun fault and the addition of 'um' to every other word became the all-purpose Indian speech for authors who came after Bird, so it is he we can 'thank-um' p.8 for the only recently diminishing dialect of the all-purpose Hollywood Indian. p.8-9
Robert Montgomery Bird had Indians say stuff like, "Me wantum trade foodum." It was completely a fabrication made to present Indians as stupid and in fact he typically did present them as dumber than a box of rocks.
The opening of the Oregon Trail and the gold strikes in California spurred a swarm of white men, women, and children moving across Indian lands. Clashes were frequent, and the government assigned thousands of military men to protect the Euro-American citizens from the non-citizen Indians. It was the stuff of which legends are made, and the excitement of real and imagined dangers created a reading public that was well prepared for the heroic Indian-fighter of the dime novels, first published by Irwin P. Beadle & Company in 1860.
Authors of these short, fast stories took the ingredients in Cooper's works about woodland and plains Indians, Bird's attitudes about all American Indians, and the romance and danger of the frontier and made them into a mix-and-match recipe for western fiction that has survived well over a hundred years of use in novels and provided the basis for the model Indian in Hollywood's movie-making. p9
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, acculturated Indians had become a rare commodity in the East. All that most Eastern Americans knew about them was gleaned between the bright yellow covers of the novels, mostly written by men like Ned Buntline (Edward Z.C. Judson) who didn't actually meet an American Indian until late in his life.
The setting for the Western dime novel and later the western film is necessarily the point of contact between the civilizing white presence and the savages of the West providing the conflict central to the genre. p. 10 for above 2 pieces
The reasons for the public's misperceptions of western Native peoples are numerous, but Grant's Board of Indian Commissioners pointed to at least one source of the problem:
In addition to the class of robbers and outlaws who find impunity in their nefarious pursuits upon the frontiers, there is a large class of professedly reputable men who use every means in their power to bring on Indian wars, for the sake of the profit to be realized from the presence of troops and the expenditure of government funds in their midst. They proclaim death to the Indians at all times, in words and publications, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. They incite the lowest class of men to the perpetration of the p. 10 darkest deeds against their victims, and, as judge and jurymen, shield them from the justice of their crimes. Every crime committed by a white man against an Indian is concealed or palliated; every offense committed by an Indian against a white man is borne on the wings of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land, clothed with all the horrors which the reality or imagination can throw around it...
The publications to which the Board referred were newspapers, of course, and one could also point to the dime novels that found their way into the hands of countless Euro-American readers.
The frontier formula developed in those novels requires that the "savage" presence must give way to the dominant white presence, but not before offering a challenge to the heroes, the point men of "civilization". Although the actual moment of this interaction was of relatively short duration, the western saga gave it a broad field in time and space, allowing plenty of room for heroics.
The woodsman of Cooper's work was usually transformed in these stories into the six-gun-toting cowboy whose role was to eliminate the opponents of civilization, either outlaws or Indians. An Indian man was a particularly useful character, since he could fill either description. As outlaw-Indian, he was usually a bloodthirsty savage intent on wreaking havoc among peace-loving white settlers. There was little or no motivation given for his actions, aside from a nasty nature. This image still lives on in novels and films such as Larry McMurtry's popular Lonesome Dove, whose character Blue Duck is an amoral killing machine.
The very popular dime novels thrilled readers with outrageous feats of gun-slinging, riding, and bravery, all of which quickly became a part of the definition of what an American was/is, a definitive part of the "imagined community", as Benedict Anderson has named it, and a bulwark of American national identity. They also reached a frenzied level of sensational violence that spoke loudly about the perceptions of Indians held by the common reader. p. 10-11
Occasionally, the dime novel Indian could assume the noble savage guise and function as a trusty sidekick to the white hero, assisting in the demise of the white-or Indian-outlaw. The Native Other as sidekick has always been comforting to that part of the audience that desired a painless solution to racial harmony, and one could be certain that Tonto would be true to Kimo Sabe, no matter who might be wearing the black hat that week. Eventually, the perceive disappearance of actual, threatening Indians made it even easier to romanticize them as part of the past, and the sidekick provided the direct link between the natural nobility of the vanished American Indian and the Euro-American hero. p. 12
By the late nineteenth century, the bloodthirsty savage and the western hero were firmly entrenched in the new American mythology, and one of the American heroes in perpetual confrontation with the savages was Buffalo Bill Cody. A prolific self-promoter, Buffalo Bill was one of the most popular of the dime novel heroes and a seminal figure in the rise of the modern cinematic western. A natural showman, he used his popularity as a dime novel hero to launch his Wild West Show, which ran for most of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. p. 12
Slight factual error as it was operating well into the 20th century.
It is largely due to the Wild West Show that the cowboys and Indians became so closely intertwined. For a nation infatuated with the heroic deeds of Indian-fighters but who had never seen either an American Indian or a cowboy, Cody's show provided a dip into the life of adventure and danger that was rapidly passing out of existence by the 1880s. It was a combination of circus and melodrama, with plenty of shooting and whopping to keep things interesting. The eastern United States in the last half of the nineteenth century was becoming industrial, and the shows were enormously popular with factory workers and immigrants, but everyone, including presidents of the United States, came to see them. p. 13
Audiences initially jeered Sitting Bull because they held him responsible for the death of Custer, an American hero of mythic proportion. However, the newspapers soon found that Sitting Bull made for great stories, and he was increasingly depicted as noble or dignified. p. 14
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