MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Mark Twain wrote, “Years ago, I was accused of loading an Indian up with beans lubricated with nitro-glycerine & sending him in an ox wagon over a stumpy road. This was impossible, on its face, for no one would risk oxen in that way. But it shows how far malice will deflect an aborigine from the equator of truth” (Letter to Charles H. Clark, March 6, 1880). Twain shared an animosity toward Native Americans, prevalent in the Western states and territories following the Civil War. In those regions, settlers and Native Americans faced clashes over culture, land, and the preservation of each’s way of life. In the nineteenth-century newspapers for which he wrote, Mark Twain’s unique perspective and writing style displays for the general American reader what life was like in the Western United States and neighboring territories, much of which was meant to be satire or generally humorous, though his writings on Indians can be interpreted otherwise. Twain wrote some poignant newspaper articles that characterize Native Americans and their interrelations with Whites. I will analyze “Mark Twain on the Indians” as published in the Terre Haute Weekly Gazette on 20 July 1876, along with some reprintings, to contextualize the article within its newspapers as well as within the historical events (Including the Battle at Little Big Horn) that surrounded the printings. Not only does this article represent Twain’s own unforgiving attitude toward Native Americans’ recent actions, but also the attitudes of his readership – both positive and negative. By discussing its interplay with Twain’s own writing history and the newspapers’ literary and historical contexts, I illuminate the human-rights activist posture of many Eastern inhabitants that Twain challenges during the several tumultuous years at the end of the 1800s that saw both Westward Expansion and continued violence involving Native Americans.