"to persuade [a Westerner] that you have mistaken him for an Indian brave." For the Western hero in the age of American imperialism, the only good Indian was a dead Indian. ^*

Theodore Roosevelt's Winning of the West, published in the I880s, illustrates the assimilation of the Western myth to expansionist ideology. True to its title, this bloodcurdling account of expansion in the old Southwest focused entirely on the warfare by means of which the wilderness was wrested from its original inhabitants. The issues that were beginning to enlist the interest of professional historians and cultural critics—the influence of the frontier on American character, its contributions to the growth of democratic institutions, the legacy of the pioneering mentality—interested Roosevelt not at all. Neither was he impressed by the image of the noble red man or the myth of the hunter's symbiotic union with nature. For Roosevelt as for Parkman, Owen Wister, and other exponents of the patrician ideology of martial prowess and overseas expansion, exposure to the hardships of the frontier was meant to provide a corrective to the demoralizing effects of comfort and overrefinement, a salutary taste of danger that would restore the fighting qualities requisite for statesmanship, diplomacy, and war. The fear of racial decadence haunted men like Roosevelt. The "Teutonic" element seemed to be losing its grip on leadership. Its absorption in business, its fastidious retreat from politics, its declining birthrate, above all its disinclination to go to war, as Roosevelt saw it, all betrayed a loss of manhood. Men with "small feet and receding chins" would prove no match for the cruder, more prolific peoples that were pouring into the country. The Winning of the West was a call to arms—a reminder that Scotch-Irish settlers had prevailed in fierce struggles against the Indians and could serve as an inspiration to those who faced a similar challenge to the continuing ascendancy of the old stock.

Owen Wister's enormously popular novel The Virginian helped to give

____________________

*	There is a sense, of course, in which this phrase, without its brutality, also describes the position of Cooper and others among the early romancers of the West. As Slotkin points out, "Cooper never loves his Indians so much as when he is watching them disappear."

-98-