century myth of the noble savage, the romance of the wilderness appealed most of all to those farthest removed from frontier conditions, who took it for granted that the frontier was "essentially evanescent," in Irving's words, and for that reason would come to "seem like the fictions of chivalry or fairy tale."

Only a safe distance made it possible to idealize Indians or to portray them as philosophical critics of civilization. On his way to Oregon in 1839, Thomas J. Farnham interviewed a Dartmouth-educated Indian who told him that westward extension of agriculture would destroy the "single‐ minded honesty, the hospitality, honor and the purity of the natural state." This sounds more like the genteel primitivism of the comfortable classes, a primitivism more sophisticated than anything that could have been acquired even at Dartmouth, than the bitter resentment of white encroachment experienced by Indians—a resentment, of course, that periodically drove nature's noblemen to nasty, bloody reprisals. "As soon as you thrust the ploughshare under the earth, it teems with worms and useless weeds. It increases population to an unnatural extent—creates the necessity of penal enactments—spreads over the human face a mask of deception and selfishness—and substitutes villainy, love of wealth and power, and the slaughter of millions" for the Arcadian conditions that formerly prevailed.

Richard Slotkin, a student of the frontier myth, notes that Kit Carson's biographers gave him a "civilized man's sympathy for Indians." In life a brawling adventurer and gold seeker, Carson, like Boone, became a legendary figure with the attributes of a Leatherstocking—"one of the best of those noble and original characters who have sprung up on and beyond our frontier," according to one biographer, "retreating with it to the West, and drawing from association with uncultivated nature, not the rudeness and sensualism of the savage, but genuine simplicity and truthfulness of disposition, and generosity, bravery, and single-heartedness, to a degree rarely found in society." Charles Webber, a prolific author educated at Princeton Theological Seminary, resorted to the same kind of language in describing Texas cattlemen: "With them the primitive virtues of a heroic manhood are all-sufficient, and they care nothing for reverences, forms, duties, &c., as civilization has them, but respect each other's rights, and recognize the awful presence of a benignant God in the still grandeur of mountain, forest, valley, plain, and river."

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