The Crimsoned Hills of Onondaga: Romantic Antiquarians and the Eu ...

Chapter 1

Romantic Antiquarian Literature

In August of 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French traveler so highly regarded for his observations of American life, passed through Buffalo, New York, on an excursion into the continent’s interior. Two decades later, that bustling port (along with Cleveland, Ohio) would be immortalized by Herman Melville in Moby Dick as a pestilent and corrupt polity that embodied the most unsavory aspects of the westward push (352–356). For the first time, Tocqueville saw at Buffalo a large group of Native Americans, an event he had anticipated with much excitement. Steeped in French political philosophy, he expected to see a proud people, enjoying freedom that resulted from their intimate connection to nature—an existence he thought inaccessible to a European whose individual growth had been stifled by complex social hierarchies and formal education. The reality was deeply disappointing, and he wrote the following passage: