This is a classic depiction of the heroic American frontiersman battling the savages of the wilderness, a caricature which more often than not was the antithesis of events of record on the frontier.
Historian Arrell Gibson has
written that "Nineteenth-century Anglo-American society was
obsessively ethnocentric. Americans feared, scorned, and
rejected people unlike themselves in culture and physical
appearance. American settlers in Georgia, Alabama, and
Mississippi, regarded neighboring Indians as barriers to the
consummation of their material goals."
Two centuries later, many
tribal people would argue that there is still very little trust
between the Native American and the society built by the European
immigrants.
Homesteaders on the Great Plains
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