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

The antiquarians also drew from both oral and written accounts of Revolutionary War soldiers, especially those who ventured into the Iroquois stronghold of the Finger Lakes. For those who did not consult the sources directly, this material found its way into popular histories and newspaper and journal articles that many antiquarians scoured for information. The thoughts and observations the Jesuits recorded while in the wilderness have had an inestimable influence on creating archetypal images of the New World in the Euro-American mind. The Jesuit Relations have contributed profoundly to literature, philosophy, theology, and art far beyond anything the authors could have foreseen and in ways they could not possibly have intended. The relations are voluminous, and the perceptions they offer as a whole are as diverse, contradictory, and complex as American culture itself.

The Jesuit Relations contain the earliest and most graphic horror tales written on American soil. They doubtless contributed to the development of American gothic literature and provided raw material for horrific and sensational frontier tales. The core figure of a martyr brutally tortured was easily appropriated and exploited, especially in the more prurient gothic horror strain that revels in sadomasochism, claustrophobia, and bondage previously set in European dungeons. They contributed to the popular and numerous tales of Euro-Americans living in captivity with the Indians; some of these stories were authentic and others fictional, most being a combination of fact and fantasy. Dissemination of the relations across Europe and America followed a more circuitous path than other texts discussed in this book. Written in America, they were sent back to France via Canada where portions (but far from all) were published. These editions proved to be very popular in seventeenth-century France, and translations filtered through Europe, eventually finding their way back to Canada and the United States. In the early editions, readers found images of Native Americans that inspired the idea of the noble savage articulated by Rousseau, which also influenced Romantic writers, as well as oppositional images of Indian cruelty and barbarity.