“In a Few Years the Red Man Will Live Only in Legend and in Cooper’s Charming Accounts”: Portrayals of American Indians in Danish Travel Literature in the Mid- and Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

During the middle and late nineteenth century, a number of Danish travel writers visited the United States with a view to narrating about the New World to their readers back home. Four of the most prominent writers were Hans Peter Christian Hansen, Vilhelm C.S. Topsøe, Robert Watt, and Henrik Cavling. Among the many topics covered by these writers was that of American Indians. Establishing a narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” the writers endeavored to tie the Indians to a receding landscape of the past and—for the most part—to establish a contradiction between Indians and white “civilization.” Likewise displaying an interest in Scandinavian immigrants, the travel writers sometimes attempted to create links between the Indians and Scandinavian settlers. With no clear Danish interest in celebrating American exceptionalism in the shape of classical U.S. “Manifest Destiny,” the travel writers were nevertheless involved in processes of bonding with the dominant population element of the United States through their common “civilization” and whiteness.