Yankee came, and settled down within an hundred miles of me!!" Other commentators filled in this portrait of Boone as a fugitive from the future. "As civilization advanced," wrote a reporter for the New York American, "so he, from time to time, retreated." A writer in the North American Review pictured him "happier in his log-cabin ... than he would have been amid the greatest profusion of modern luxuries." Another biographer, however, implied a more approving view of progress in Boone's conception of himself—as apocryphal, no doubt, as all the other attitudes and sayings attributed to Boone—as a "creature of Providence, ordained by Heaven ... to advance the civilization ... of his country."

The novels of James Fenimore Cooper showed how the solitary hunter, unencumbered by social responsibilities, utterly self-sufficient, uncultivated but endowed with a spontaneous appreciation of natural beauty, could become the central figure in the great American romance of the West. As the heir to a landed fortune and baronial status, Cooper believed in the importance of law, order, and refinement; he could glorify Natty Bumppo and his faithful Indian companion Chingachgook (forerunner of Queequeg, Nigger Jim, and Tonto) only because they stood outside the pale of respectable society altogether and posed no threat to the social hierarchy. Cooper's sympathetic treatment of hunters and Indians, as Henry Nash Smith has pointed out, did not extend to yeoman farmers like Ishmael Bush, who stood on the lowest level of civilized society yet refused to defer to their betters. Clothed in the "coarsest vestments of a husbandman," Bush inspired apprehension and contempt. The farmer's hunger for land, as Cooper saw it, jeopardized the gentry's social and political ascendancy and embittered relations with the Indians, precluding peaceful settlement of Indian claims.

In the politics of the Jacksonian era, it was the genteel classes that opposed Jackson's policy of Indian removal and championed the rights of Indians, at the same time that they pressed for a national policy of economic development, promoted the growth of commerce and industry, and ridiculed the austere and to their mind regressive ideal, so dear to the Jacksonians, of a virtuous republic of small farmers. It should not surprise us, in view of the pastoral conventions that continued to inform the nineteenth-century celebration of untutored simplicity, that the nostalgic myth of the West was largely the creation of genteel writers like Cooper, Washington Irving, and Francis Parkman. Like the eighteenth

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