Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935

by Martin Padget

Overview

Indian Country analyzes the works of Anglo writers and artists who encountered American Indians in the course of their travels in the Southwest during the one-hundred-year period beginning in 1840. Martin Padget looks first at the accounts produced by government-sponsored explorers, most notably John Wesley Powell's writings about the Colorado Plateau. He goes on to survey the writers who popularized the region in fiction and travelogue, including Helen Hunt Jackson and Charles F. Lummis. He also introduces us to Eldridge Ayer Burbank, an often-overlooked artist who between 1897 and 1917 made thousands of paintings and drawings of Indians from over 140 western tribes.

Padget addresses two topics: how the Southwest emerged as a distinctive region in the minds of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans, and what impact these conceptions, and the growing presence of Anglos, had on Indians in the region. Popular writers like Jackson and Lummis presented the American Indians as a "primitive culture waiting to be discovered" and experienced firsthand. Later, as Padget shows, Anglo activists for Indian rights, such as Mabel Dodge Luhan and Mary Austin, worked for the acceptance of other views of Native Americans and their cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826330291
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press published in cooperation with the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University
Publication date:	02/16/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Martin Padget is a lecturer in American Studies in the Department of English at the University of Wales.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction	1
Chapter 1	From Manifest Destiny to Historical Romance: The Southwest in Narratives of Exploration and Travel between the 1840s and 1880s	13
Chapter 2	John Wesley Powell's Mapping of the Colorado Plateau Region	47
Chapter 3	Travel Writing, Sentimental Romance, and Indian Rights Advocacy: The Politics of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona	79
Chapter 4	Travel, Exoticism, and the Writing of Region: Charles Fletcher Lummis and the "Creation" of the Southwest	115
Chapter 5	Burbank among the Indians: The Politics of Patronage	137
Chapter 6	"Indian Detours off the Beaten Track": Cultural Tourism and the Southwest	169
	Conclusion: Reflections on Traveling through the Southwest	211
	Notes	217
	Index	245