‘Injin gifts’: Interracial exchange and the image of the white avenger in frontier fiction

The essay focuses on the so called ‘Injin gifts’ – a racialist notion that James Fenimore Cooper attributed to his famous frontier hero Natty Bumppo in The Deerslayer (1841). While implying that certain traits of character, as for example vengefulness, was God’s ‘gift’ to the indigenous people, this notion also paradoxically questions the racial boundaries. The ‘gifts’ are both vertical (bestowed by God) and horizontal (liable to exchange) as Cooper’s novel demonstrates. To support this argument, the essay discusses the plot of racial violence and frontier war in the work of Cooper’s contemporaries – James Hall and Robert Montgomery Bird. Both authors introduce a new cultural hero – a white character who kills indigenous people out of revenge. While revenge is justified as an act of counter-violence, it also threatens to blur the racial boundaries since white characters put on the traits and share the spirit of their antagonists. This is especially evident in Bird’s novel Nick of the Woods (1837): Bird’s racist discourse, paradoxically and unwillingly, turns against itself as his white character Nathan Slaughter engaged in the potlatch-like exchange of violence and deaths, ‘mirrors’ the indigenous Americans he is trying to destroy.

Kindred Contemporaries

This essay traces lines of influence between Edgar Allan Poe and five of his American contemporaries: George Lippard, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving. Various categories of influence are identified, including suggestive parallels (allegedly present in many works by Poe and Hawthorne), negative influence (Poe avoided in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym a technique he had previously criticized in reviewing Bird’s Sheppard Lee), avowed inspiration (Poe worked from a published hint by Irving in developing the story “William Wilson”), and plagiarism (Poe plagiarized from Irving’s Astoria in his own fictionalized adventure narrative covering similar geographical/temporal terrain, “The Journal of Julius Rodman”). The current impasse in influence studies is addressed. The essay concludes by noting that Poe’s body of work betrays numerous affinities with Thomas Gray’s pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner, published in Baltimore in 1831, though direct influence cannot be definitively established.

IX.—The Dramas of George Henry Boker

Notwithstanding the pre-eminence of George Henry Boker in our dramatic literature before the Civil War, an eminence not seriously threatened in America except by Robert Montgomery Bird, no accurate account of his life has been published and nowhere is available even a trustworthy statement of the productions of his plays. Several of his dramas remain unpublished in manuscript and even their existence is known apparently to but few. I shall not. attempt here to go into detail concerning his life, but will endeavor to give the facts concerning his plays that have come to light in the course of my examination of the Boker manuscripts kindly placed at my disposal by Mrs. George Boker, the daughter-in-law of the dramatist.