The political visits of the eighteenth century had faded from collective memory by the mid-nineteenth. As the concept of his inevitable decline spread from the U. S. to Europe, the noble savage lost his nobility. Charles Dickens’ ‘Household Words’ on the subject were definitive.

It is all one to me whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or bird’s feathers in his head: whether he flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue…. Yielding to whichsoever of these agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage – cruel, false, thievish, murderous.

Dickens’ 1853 opinion was a long way from the popular reception of Tejonihokarawe in 1710. He was a long way, indeed, from acknowledging that a Native American Emperor could even exist. In the absence of a pressing political need for alliance, as there had been in 1710 and 1775, or a pressing political obligation such as that which motivated the legislation of 1764 in the House of Lords, the Native American became a Savage. When George Catlin brought his gallery of portraits and artifacts to Britain in 1840 the ideological baggage that he brought was as significant as any physical element of the exhibition. Catlin brought a refreshed and invigorated ‘Vanishing American’ with him across the Atlantic and, in a gallery dedicated to preservation, presented the British public with a Native pre-destined to fade before the westward expansion of the United States. By intimating that the Native was to be eclipsed, Catlin paved the way for the more extreme views of Dickens, and his opinion of 1853 that the noble savage ‘passes away before an immeasurably better and higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods.’ The academic curiosity that Catlin attempted to satisfy gave way within decades to the enduring, popular and discriminatory love of the ‘side-show’ that would carry the Native American in England into the Twentieth Century in the company of William Cody.

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Last revised: February 19th, 2004.