American Literature Research Projects
and PowerPoint Presentations 
Fall 2005

American Romanticism: Settling the Wilderness and The West

 

John Gast,  Manifest Destiny (1872)

 

Manifest Destiny: 

During the early nineteenth century new conceptions of human nature and history combined to change American identity as our nation expanded first into the Mississippi River Valley and then into the vast Western wilderness. 

Originally, the Europeans who voyaged to the New World brought with them visions of their new lives that had been informed by the cultural history of their home countries. They imagined that this vast wilderness contained opportunities to recreate the Golden Age. In New England, the Puritan colonists believed that by creating a righteous 'city on a hill' in the wilds of the Northern woods, they could heal moral corruption in the Old World.  Despite the power with which these myths gripped the first generation of colonists, their actual experiences with the land, the elements, and the Indians began to transform their understanding of the quest.

During the 18th century city folk like Ben Franklin urged trades people to re-invent themselves as citizens prepared to compete in a market economy. But farmers still dominated America's growing population, and the sons and daughters of the original colonists needed new land of their own to clear and cultivate. The vast territories beyond the Appalachians beckoned. They had been explored by trappers, hunters, and scouts, but the wilderness was peopled by hostile tribes in alliance with French and Spanish. After the American Revolution, the barriers to expansion began to crumble; led by great hunter/scouts like Daniel Boone, the trickle of  settlers moving West soon became a flood.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the opening of abundant territories beyond the Appalachians, in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, would secure the ongoing viability of the republic. Yeoman farmers working small plots of land would learn self-reliance, gain independence, and live simple lives that exemplified virtue. Yet, Jefferson was also the president who negotiated the Louisiana Purchase and brought its vast expanse into the Union. From that moment on, Americans began to justify more aggressive actions to seize land and remove the Indians and Mexicans living there.

This vast Westward migration occurred at a unique moment in the history of ideas. Philosophers in Europe had begun to question the mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment philosophes and had begun to explore a new relationship between man and nature. They believed that nature was a living, breathing aspect of God's spirit. Reason could not grasp the vast plan of life unfolding in history, but great poets and artists could glimpse our human destiny through great works of the imagination. 

Artists and poets in America looked at their own vast landscapes with the same imagination. They recognized the fingerprint of God and a direct clue to his intentions. Inspired by this powerful myth American heroes would re-shape the continent itself and enable the nation to assume its unique destiny in human history. John O'Sullivan declared in 1839, amid the frenzied propaganda leading to the Mexican War, that it was our nation's "manifest destiny" to gain sovereignty over all North America. He declared,

The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can. (Mt. Holyoke) 

Writers promoted this new nationalist mission in sermons, poems, and novels, but printing presses also churned out editorials, pulp fiction, and harrowing tales full of breathless adventure on the frontier. Artists explored the same nationalist themes not only in awe inspiring landscape paintings and heroic pioneer portraits but also in illustrations for dime novels and eventually in that new medium, photography.

The historian Henry Jackson Turner argued that in the process of exploring, settling and taming the West, a unique American character was forged. In Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Henry Nash Smith explores the impact of the West on the consciousness of Americans. He studies the ways that Americans transformed stories about the hunters, trappers, pioneers, and soldiers who explored and settled the West into powerful national myths which justified conquest and expansion. 

Your task is to explore these myths and compare them with reality.

Write an essay in which you explore the American myths described in one of the following topics. Compare the myth with reality. Explain how the myth helped justify American expansion. Use at least three sources.

Then create a PowerPoint in which you share your discoveries with the class.

Your essay is due on Tuesday November 23rd  by 3:30 p.m.

Topics:

  1. Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School: Landscape as America’s National Religious Symbol
  2. Passage to More than India: Walt Whitman and Henry Nash Smith's The Virgin Land
  3. Daniel Boone: Myth and Reality in the American Consciousness
  4. Frederick Edwin Church’s Landscapes: Manifest Destiny and The Reconciliation of Science and Religion
  5. Romancing the Indian: Sentimentalizing and Demonizing in Captivity Narratives
  6. Changing Depictions of the Indian in American Art: Manifest Destiny and the Art of Kean, Catlin, Bingham, Miller, Leutze, Deas and Bodmer
  7. The Sons of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking: Kit Carson: The Mountain Men
  8. The Sons of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking: Deadwood Dick, Calamity Jane and the Birth of the Western Dime Store Hero
  9. George Caleb Bingham and America's Big River
  10. South by Southwest: The Caribbean Slave Empire
  11. The Garden of the World: The Southwest and the Myth of the Garden
  12. The Domestic Frontier: The West in Women’s Personal Narrative
  13. African-Americans in the American West
  14. Photography and Virgin Land
  15. John James Audubon and the Birds of America: Reflections of the American Romantic Sensibility
  16. Thomas Moran and William H. Jackson: Exploring Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon
  17. The Last of the Buffalo:Albert Bierstadt, The Lakota Sioux and The Ghost Dance Movement
  18. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show: The Closing of the Frontier and the Birth of Pop Culture
  19. Frederic Remington’s Wild West: Social Darwinism and Nostalgia for the Mythic West
  20. The Silent Western: Early Hollywood’s Myth of the West

 



Research Starting Points:

Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950)
University of Virginia “Virgin Land Hypertext Project”: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/hns_home.html 
Robert Hughes, American Visions (1996), “Wilderness and the West”
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) “The American Wilderness” 
William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination(1986)
Ron Tyler's Resources for his Course on the American West

The American West (Spartacus)

Independent Study Projects:

Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School: Landscape as America’s National Religious Symbol

 

 

Passage to More than India: Walt Whitman and Henry Nash Smith's The Virgin Land

 

Daniel Boone: Myth and Reality in the American Consciousness

Bingham, 'Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap

George C. Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, 1851-52

 


Frederick Edwin Church’s Landscapes: 
Manifest Destiny and The Reconciliation of Science and Religion
 

 

 

Romancing the Indian: Sentimentalizing and Demonizing in Captivity Narratives

 

 

South by Southwest: The Caribbean Slave Empire

 

Changing Depictions of the Indian in American Art: 
Manifest Destiny and the Art of Kean, Catlin, Miller, Leutze, Deas and Bodmer

 

The Scalp Hunters: 

 

 

Kit Carson and The Mountain Men

 

Kit Carson, the fighting trapper
Deadwood Dick, Calamity Jane and the Birth of the Western Dime Store Hero

 
George Caleb Bingham and America's Big River

Bingham, George Caleb Fur Traders Descending the Missouri 1845

 

 

The South and the Myth of the Garden:

 

The Domestic Frontier: The West in Women’s Personal Narrative

Everyday Life in America (1831)

Women in America, 1820-1842

Uncle Tom's Houses: The American Domestic Ideal, 1840-70

 

African-Americans in the American West

 

Slave Narratives from the Old South

 

Photography and Virgin Land

 

John James Audubon and the Birds of America: 
Reflections of the American Romantic Sensibility

 

 
 

 

Thomas Moran and William H. Jackson: Exploring Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon

Moran, Thomas Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone 1872

 

The Last of the Buffalo: Sacred Nature: Albert Bierstadt vs. The Lakota Sioux and The Ghost Dance Movement

 

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show: 
The Closing of the Frontier and the Birth of Pop Culture

 

Frederic Remington’s Wild West: 
Social Darwinism and Nostalgia for the Mythic West

Remington, Frederic The Cavalry Charge 1907

 


The Silent Western: Early Hollywood’s Myth of the West