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Early modern writers had long noted the apparent decimation of some indigenous peoples. However, such discussions took on a new and urgent form in the nineteenth century as a new scientific understanding of extinction as an endemic natural process was established. Many scholars have explored the notion of dying races in histories of colonial contact, modern land rights, or genocide; yet most have overlooked the new epistemological status of extinction as a mechanism for explaining natural change. This chapter explores how this scientific shift became combined with notions of wilderness in the American context to rationalize policies of Indian dispossession, forced removal from their traditional homelands, and the establishment of the world's first national parks. In doing so, it highlights fruitful directions for future histories of heritage, endangerment, and conservation.

As ethnographic interest in North American Indians shifted from the Northeast to peoples farther to the West in the first half of the nineteenth century, the greatest excitement arose from the discovery of the nomadic hunting peoples of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase territories. Innovations in ethnographic method came along with the new direction in ethnographic area. One such innovation was the practice of what anthropologists would later call participant observation, living for substantial periods with the people studied and taking part, as much as possible, in their way of life. Few had voluntarily undertaken it with the primary motivation of using it as a source of ethnographic information. Some saw the advantages of such an approach; and by the 1830s it was applied to American Indian ethnography by Charles Murray and George Catlin.

This chapter examines the impact made by the Ojibwa and Iowa Indians who toured with George Catlin in the 1840s—and the impression that their travels in Britain made upon them. Both groups performed dances and uttered “the dreadful war-whoop,” and both groups were, effectively, live exhibits, introduced and explained in lectures and in the question-and-answer sessions Catlin held. How did these Indians interpret England? The evidence is somewhat limited, since it must come largely from Catlin's words, in the book he published about his years in England and Europe. In conveying Indian voices, Catlin invariably makes them sound as though they think and express themselves in a simpler, more “innocent” way than the—by implication—more sophisticated product of Western civilization. A native perspective on 1840s Britain is provided by the Ojibwa Maungwudaus. Throughout his account, individual experience gains its importance not through subjective response but as something that may be shared through terms designed to reach a specific readership or audience, with its own familiar frames of reference. Native peoples are not the Other against which modernity is being postulated; rather, the modern world is being presented for them.

Chapter three traces preservation’s antebellum theorization and long-lasting repercussions. The first parts of this chapter delineate the flawed aesthetic logic of preservation, beginning with the earliest proposal for a “Nation’s Park” in painter and writer George Catlin’s Letters and Notes (1844). Preservation emerges as an environmental ethic because indigenous, “wild” natural spectacles are imagined to benefit an expanding, increasingly “civilized” white U.S. population. While Catlin calls for preservation of the beauty he sees in the Plains peoples, bison, and their threatened landscape, Francis Parkman Jr.’s The Oregon Trail (1849) writes of an ugliness in need of violent eradication. Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) illustrates the pernicious persistence of such aesthetic violence. The final portion of the chapter illuminates preservation’s flawed spatial logic. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) rejects the possibility of whale extinction by insisting that whales have ocean sanctuaries to which they can retreat. A. S. Byatt’s plastic pollution tale, “Sea Story” (2013), plays out the destructive twenty-first-century consequences of Moby-Dick’s romantic ideas about nature. Altogether, the chapter suggests that preservation is an environmental ethic imbricated in settler colonialism, incapable of fostering meaningful human or interspecies community, and whose meagre benefits only continue to diminish as anthropogenic climate crisis intensifies.

George Catlin, who traveled, wrote about, and painted the plains between 1832 and 1839, proposed a Great Plains Park created by the national government, where herds of elks and buffalo would be protected in perpetuity. Catlin was way ahead of his time. A Great Plains Park must be very large — at least 5,000 square miles — and must include both upland and river bottom habitat. It's too late to preserve such a representation of the Great Plains, but it's not too late to restore one. Canada has shown the way and even pointed to a place. Its story begins in 1956, when the Saskatchewan Natural History Society began to push for a Grasslands National Park. A grassland park in the United States is possible. It hardly needs saying that such a park would give a welcome boost to wild bison conservation.

This chapter explores efforts by the pioneering American ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to understand Dighton Rock, with the aid of the Ojibwa leader Shingwauk, using drawings in Antiquitates Americanae. It situates the rock’s interpretation within the rise of American ethnology, Schoolfcraft’s personal life, his coining of terminology for Native Americans, his view of the Mound Builders, his relationship with the men behind Antiquitates Americanae, and the polygenism versus monogenism debate for the origins of races. Artist George Catlin defends the Indigeneity of Dighton Rock.