by Jill Lepore
Death or my nation’s glory! That’s the talk. (Exit.)
And that is, after all, the talk.
In The Last of the Pollywogs, John Brougham parodied more than a few elements of the stage Indian, and, perhaps most powerfully, he resisted the vanishing-Indian theme prevalent in nineteenth-century Indian drama by simply refusing to kill off his protagonist. In its final lines (“I will not die to please you”) Brougham’s parody acknowledged the cultural importance of the dead stage Indian in placating whites’ fears of real-life Indians. But while The Last of the Pollywogs mocked the conventions of early Indian dramas, it also expressed bitter scorn for Indian peoples, an attitude that was becoming increasingly widespread at midcentury.116 In 1852, at the height of Brougham’s parody’s popularity, Massachusetts governor George Boutwell delivered a speech at the dedication of a King Philip’s War monument whose tone suggests the pervasiveness of this diminishing regard. Boutwell made a point of distinguishing between the Indians of King Philip’s time, who, he admitted, may have been unjustly treated, and the Indians of 1852, who deserved little sympathy. While acknowledging that New England Indians had not become extinct, the governor expressed nothing but contempt for Philip’s descendants:
Parody of Forrest’s Metamora. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection
The human family has ever been subject to one great law. It is this. Inferior races disappear in the presence of their superiors, or become dependent upon them. Now, while this law shall not stand as a defence for our fathers, it is satisfactory to feel that no policy could have civilized or even saved the Indian tribes of Massachusetts. The remnants that linger in our midst are not the representatives of the native nobility of the forest of two centuries ago.
(Boutwell even attempted, albeit halfheartedly, to vindicate the sullied reputations of the Puritan historians of the war. “It is just to say that our ancestors made no concealment of the facts, although the comments of Mather and Hubbard are often strangely barbarous in spirit.”)117
As the nineteenth century progressed, Edwin Forrest’s Metamora, the victim of changing attitudes and a brilliant burlesque, became less and less popular.”118 It met with bad reviews throughout the 1860s largely because, as one reviewer remarked, “the Indian has become a nuisance.”119 After Forrest’s death in 1872, the play lay dormant until it was resurrected in 1877 (possibly occasioned by the bicentennial anniversary of King Philip’s War), with the title role performed by D. H. Harkins. By then Metamora had clearly become a stark anachronism. A New York Times review found Harkins inferior to Forrest while conceding that “Mr. Harkins could scarcely have hoped to awake any interest in the piece itself, which is about as stupid as a piece can be, but the character of King Philip, who prefers to be called Metamora, can be made entertaining by a suffusion of robust manhood.”120 Ten years later, when yet another production of the play premiered, its datedness was even more poignant. This time the Times theater critic dismissed Metamora entirely.
The play met with favor while such a popular actor as Forrest played the title role. But this was years ago, before the present conception of the Indian began to prevail. A longer experience with the red man has changed the ideal in the popular mind, as the corrupting influences of border civilization have changed the savage himself. Neither change has served to increase the popular sympathy in his behalf. An actor therefore who in these days strives to touch an audience by a recital of the Indian’s woes has a much harder task than was the case in Forrest’s time.
The sole redeeming element of this performance, it seems, was the supporting cast, which included “a detachment of real Indians from Buffalo Bill’s party,” who “helped to make the play go well.”121
By the 1880s Buffalo Bill’s Indians, and the idea of the Indian as an exhibit piece, had gained ascendancy. No longer did occasional Indians in the audience at Indian plays provide entertainment; now they were themselves on the stage, living relics of an earlier age. The long-winded speeches that Forrest uttered as Metamora were no longer popular; now a new kind of “Indian talk” prevailed. A dreadful play about King Philip’s War written in 1884 contains no virtuous speeches or scathing curses, only ludicrous constructions and bad syntax. (It is possible that experience with the western Sioux and other tribes—who were unfamiliar with English and whose languages whites generally did not bother to learn—had convinced white Americans that Indians were incapable of grammatical speech.)122 Sassamon’s warning to the English, for instance, reads bizarrely: “Me have strong surmises that King Philip’s treaty, recently ratified, will not restrain him from hostile invasions.” And, during Sassamon’s murder trial, the three accused Indians provide dunder-headed comic relief. The following excerpt is from the scene in which Wampapaquan, Mattashunannamo, and Tobias are asked if they have any objections:
WAMPAPAQUAN. Me no lawyer, me no object.
MAT. Me no lawyer, but me object.
TOBIAS. Me object to um all.123
IN THE 1830s AND 1840s Edwin Forrest’s Metamora served as an important vehicle by which white Americans came to understand Indian removal as inevitable, and Philip, newly heroized, became a central figure in the search for an American identity and an American past. An American identity founded on a romanticized Indian required that Indians themselves be “long vanished hence,” and Metacom was, in this regard, an ideal candidate for canonization. For Indians’ role in American history (even as wartime enemies) to be cherished, romanticized, and fetishized, Indians themselves must exist only in the past, mute memorials, silent as a rock. Either that or else they could be far, far away—exiled west of the Mississippi. By itself, Metamora neither advocated nor condemned Indian removal—the text of the play is deeply ambiguous. But if theater audiences are any reflection of the general population, most Americans who applauded Metamora’s curse supported Indian removal. And in the end, and especially in its ending, Metamora made Indian removal palatable to the American public by insisting that Indians look best from a distance.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the Indian had “become a nuisance,” Metamora became an unprofitable throwback, utterly inconsistent with mainstream American culture’s more thorough denigration of Indian culture and, especially, of Indian oratory. By then, “real,” present-day, nearby Indians were once again a problem as Plains warfare raged in the West. And after the Civil War, white Americans became less interested in their imagined Indian ancestry and more interested in their Anglo-Saxon past. The nation was old enough to have its own history, and Indians were no longer necessary to Americans’ understanding of themselves as a nation. Forrest’s Metamora flopped; Brougham’s Metamora triumphed, and white hatred of Indians was freed from the restraints of nationalistic nostalgia.
For Edwin Forrest, reenacting King Philip’s War was a step on the path toward an American national drama. Like so many other artists of his generation, Forrest appropriated Indianness and Indian ancestors to make himself American, to distance himself from all that was English. In this he exactly reversed what writers like Mather and Hubbard had tried to do so furiously—and so prolifically—a century and a half earlier. Late-seventeenth-century colonists had tried to purify themselves of the contamination of America’s indigenous inhabitants and make themselves more English. Early-nineteenth-century Americans tried to take on the attributes of Indianness to make themselves less English. Language was central to both endeavors. In the 1670s the colonists defined themselves through what they wrote and printed, and speech was itself a marker of Englishness: English captives were recognized by their ability to speak English, and Indian languages were considered by many to be babble. In the 1830s a certain kind of public performance of Indian speech—epitomized by Metamora’s curse—came to be embraced by whites, and even applauded. Oratory was central to Forrest’s performance (“Speak, Metamora, Speak!”), to Brougham’s and other parodies (“Death or my nation’s glory, that’s the talk”), and to Apess’ Eulogy (complete with spurious Philip speech)
. In the 1670s colonists silenced New England’s Indians at every turn. In the 1830s Americans listened to them, but only if they were dead (Metamora) or if they were speaking about dead Indians (Apess’ Eulogy) or if they were speaking in a dead Indian language (Apess’ Lord’s Prayer).
William Apess used the fascination with Indian speech to find a broader audience for his unapologetically political addresses while the Mashpees learned the lesson of Metamora and effectively targeted New Englanders’ consciences in comparing their plight to that of the Cherokees. While the romantic Indian remained popular, men like William Apess and groups like the Mashpees used that image to their advantage. If whites were willing to say Indians fighting for their land were patriotic heroes, the Mashpees were willing to take them at their word and press their own claims. (The heroic Philip may have even inspired a Seminole resistance leader in Florida to take the name “King Philip.”)124 In these Indians’ protests they took Indianness back from performers like Forrest and laid the foundation for new generations of Indian activists in New England. Just when the noble savage was falling out of favor and Philip was becoming less useful as an American hero, Indians in New England, especially Wampanoags and Narragansetts, began embarking on a road toward cultural renewal and revival, a road that would eventually lead them to their own public and private commemorations of the events of King Philip’s War.
Tracing the history of New England’s Native Americans throughout the course of the nineteenth century is an extraordinarily difficult project. Most white New Englanders believed Indians no longer existed in their midst, making them difficult to trace in historical records. Native people and communities, some of whom had remained in hiding since King Philip’s War and had “passed” as either white or black, began to build a collective identity, to reassert their tribal identities, and, increasingly, to think of themselves as “Indians.”125 If tracing those communities is difficult, linking their sense of themselves to productions like Edwin Forrest’s famous Indian play is an even more daunting task. Penobscot attendance at a performance of Metamora at the Tremont Street Theater is about as close as one might expect to come to demonstrating a connection between the play and New England Indian protests of the 1830s and subsequent tribal and pan-Indian consciousness. Yet one final tantalizing clue remains to suggest that memories of Metamora may have survived among New England Indians for more than a century. In 1935 a Narragansett lawyer living in Providence, Rhode Island, placed an ad for his services in the Narragansett newspaper Narragansett Dawn. His name was James Stockett, Jr., but his middle name was Matamora.126
Epilogue
THE ROCK
South of the Kickamuit River, on the shore of Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, Rhode Island, a large, graywacke rock sits at the tide line. Its surface is low and flat and worn and scarred and, much of the time, underwater. But when the tide is low and the sun is high, the rock’s surface reveals the shallow, faded marks of an inscrutable inscription: vague outlines of a boat above a row of mysterious, narrowly carved characters. In 1845 a Bristol historian proposed that the inscription had been made by Norsemen in the eleventh century, and even though he refuted his attribution in decades to come, when the American infatuation with Viking visitors began to wane, the rock soon became widely known as “Northmen’s Rock.” In 1919 the Rhode Island Historical Society even held a ceremony to christen it with corn, wine, and oil, taking the occasion to rename it “Lief’s Rock,” an act that so galled a Brown psychology professor and inscribed-rock enthusiast named Edmund Delabarre that he set about to disprove the theory of the inscription’s Norse origins.1
Delabarre began by pointing out that the inscription had not been observed or described before about 1835 and, as he claimed, there is no reason to believe it was made much before then, the “ancient” appearance of its characters being due to their shallowness when first carved rather than to centuries of erosion. The theory of the inscription’s Norse origins, Delabarre concluded, was an elaborate myth, built on the equally mythical, unsound, and improbable assertion that Vikings visited southern New England in the year 1007. In place of the Norse myth, Delabarre offered a new theory, one that, on the surface of things, seems even more improbable and wildly fanciful than its predecessor. Delabarre proposed that the inscriptions characters belonged not to the ancient runic alphabet but to the Cherokee syllabary. Not only that, but the inscription could be read. According to Delabarre’s reconstruction, when the row of characters is correlated with Cherokee syllabic symbols it produces a combination of sounds that is pure nonsense, but if it is taken to be a Cherokee transcription of spoken Algonquian in the Wampanoag dialect and then translated into English, it reads: “Metacomet, Great Sachem.”2 And Metacom, of course, is the Wampanoag name for King Philip.
The Mount Hope Rock, Bristol, Rhode Island. Photograph by the author
The inscription, then, had to have been made after 1821, when the Cherokee syllabary was invented, but before 1835, when the curious rock was first noticed.3 This window of time, intriguingly, coincides not only with a peak of interest in King Philip’s War—ushered in by Washington Irving’s 1814 essay and sustained, after 1829, by Edwin Forrest’s Metamora—but also with Cherokee resistance to Indian removal (itself made possible by the invention of the syllabary). Whoever carved an inscription in the Cherokee syllabary on a rock in Rhode Island to praise Philip may perhaps have been spelling out the links between Cherokee and Wampanoag resistance. Still, one very tricky question remains: Who could have done it?
The inscription on Mount Hope Rock, Bristol, Rhode Island. Photograph by John R. Hess, 1919. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library
A chart of various recordings of the inscription on Mount Hope Rock, matched against a row of Cherokee syllabics (line 6). Courtesy of the Harvard College Library
There is, of course, the distinct possibility that Delabarre’s rendering was flawed; perhaps the inscription is not in fact in the Cherokee syllabary, or maybe, if it is, it says something other than “Metacomet, Great Sachem.” Since the inscription has now faded almost to invisibility, Delabarre’s transcription cannot itself be checked for accuracy, and the best that can be said is that Delabarre, who cannot be proved wrong, might have been right (his transcriptions, based on early photographs, seem plausible enough, and, according to Cherokee syllabary scholar Willard Walker, “it seems possible that Delabarre’s inscription is a sequence of badly executed Cherokee syllabics”).4Yet even while granting, for the moment, that Delabarre’s basic premise about the inscription was correct, the question of authenticity nonetheless remains.
Mysterious rocks were not unprecedented in New England. In the seventeenth century, prominent colonists, including Samuel Sewall, John Danforth, and Increase Mather, all became intrigued by a series of inscriptions on Dighton Rock near the Taunton River in Plymouth. (The inscriptions had been observed since the Pilgrims’ first landing in 1620, and it was to Dighton Rock that Cotton Mather referred when he wrote of the Indians, “Reading and Writing is altogether unknown to them, tho there is a Rock or two in the Country that has unaccountable Characters engrav’d upon it.”)5 Interest in Dighton Rock was renewed in the early part of the nineteenth century, and in 1839, ethnologist and explorer Henry Schoolcraft showed a picture of the carvings to an Algonquin religious leader from Saulte Ste. Marie named Chingwauk. After careful study, Chingwauk told Schoolcraft that the carvings were ideographs relating the ancient battles of two native peoples. (Parts of the inscription have since been attributed to visiting Vikings, as well as to Portuguese explorers, though little has been definitively proved.)6
What had been curiosities to men like Sewall and Mather in the seventeenth century became a quest to ethnologists like Schoolcraft in the early nineteenth century. But Schoolcraft, who traveled across America looking for authentic Indian writings, was joined by many less-careful hobbyists. It was in the early years of this faddish fascination that the inscription on Mount Hope rock was first noticed, circa 1835. As a result i
t has been suggested that, like the notorious “Bat Creek Stone” planted in a Tennessee burial mound or the supposed “runic” marks of “Leif Ericson 1001” on No-Man’s-Land, the Mount Hope Rock’s “Metacomet, Great Sachem,” might have been a hoax perpetrated by mischievous antiquarians or amateur archaeologists.7
But if the inscription was not a hoax, and if Delabarre’s reading was not flawed, there are at least two likely attributions, both proposed by Delabarre himself. First, Delabarre suggested that the inscription might have been carved in 1833, when a group of Penobscot Indians from Maine visited southern New England to negotiate land claims and, having already traveled so far south, might possibly have made a pilgrimage to Mount Hope, Philip’s former home. There, Delabarre proposed, one of them made the inscription on the rock, memorializing Philip as “Metacomet, Great Sachem.”8 What Edmund Delabarre did not know, of course, is that the Penobscots who visited southern New England in 1833 had other memorial activities on their itinerary: on November 6 they spent the evening at the Tremont Street Theater in Boston, attending a performance of Metamora. If a Penobscot Indian really did carve an inscription on the Mount Hope Rock, it may well have been in response to the passionate performance of Metamora. Perhaps whoever wrote the inscription chose to use the Cherokee syllabary rather than English as a means of establishing the inscription’s Indian authenticity, and of spelling out the links between Cherokee removal and King Philip’s War.9 To Delabarre’s first theory, I would add the possibility that the inscription might have been made in 1833 not by Penobscots, but by Mashpee Wampanoags involved in the Mashpee Revolt (or even by Pequot William Apess himself), especially since the Mashpees’ appeals to the Massachusetts government almost always included exploiting the sympathy of northern whites for Georgian Cherokees (“You plead for the Cherokees, will you not raise your voice for the red man of Marshpee?”)10 How a Penobscot or Mashpee Indian might have come by a knowledge of the Cherokee syllabary is more difficult to explain, but it is possible that, since a Cherokee printing press was itself built in Boston in 1827, someone among the Mashpees or among the Penobscot delegation might have visited there and picked up a copy of the Cherokee syllabary (again, Apess seems a likely candidate). The inscription, after all, is formed, at best, of “badly executed” Cherokee syllabics and might have been made by a novice.