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This chapter examines Walt Whitman's desire to bring Native American themes into his poetry with John Rollin Ridge's own efforts to create a space for Indians in American society. It considers how Whitman distinguished himself not just by repeatedly mentioning Native Americans, but also by presenting his poetry as a form of indigenous expression. The chapter also looks at Ridge's experience of being a “white aboriginal” and his belief that the figure of the white aboriginal was a way to imagine a nation that embraced racial and cultural amalgamation rather than the extermination of Native peoples and the wholesale appropriation of Native culture. It concludes by discussing the challenges encountered by Ridge as he tried to assign the role of representative American bard to a mixed-race Cherokee.

Chapter 3 explores instances of “sentimental diplomacy” in the literary aftermath of the US–Mexican War and Indian Removal. It opens by arguing that the heroines of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885)—who seek to counter the violence and dispossession of late-nineteenth-century Californios—stand as unrecognized heirs to the women in John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel of Mexican banditry, Joaquín Murieta. Amidst the sensational violence of Joaquín Murieta, the first Native American novel, Mexican and Anglo-American women engage in a sentimental diplomacy that resists rampant racialized violence. In both The Squatter and the Don and Joaquín Murieta, sentimental diplomacy offers local possibilities for peace, but in neither novel can it overcome the war’s brutal legacy or the racism and systemic corruption that followed.

Chapter 14 moves the focus to the role of spatial claims to jurisprudential standing over allegories of transcendent justice. Smith’s case study is the popular literature that emerged from the struggle over Cherokee removal between the 1830s and the 1850s. The minister Samuel Worcester’s letters from a Georgia prison. William Gilmore Simms’s crime fiction suggested that encounters between antagonistic communities along the edges of jurisdictions would produce crime; he argued for the imposition of a single authority to secure the peace. John Rollin Ridge reworked the same sensational genre to produce the figure of the outlaw as an agent of vengeance in newly annexed California, with its syncretic legal system and its rampant racist vigilantism. Smith shows how each of these texts attempted to coordinate the relations between territories and moral communities in an imperial context.

This book focuses on three relatively unknown antebellum poets—African American separatist James M. Whitfield, Mormon pioneer Eliza R. Snow, and Cherokee journalist John Rollin Ridge—and the affinities they shared with Walt Whitman, including an awareness of the symbolic value that came with speaking for the nation from the fringes of national culture. It also considers some of the primary features of Whitman's project for American poetry that can also be found in Whitfield, Snow, and Ridge, such as the desire to be the poet of a new American religion, and also examines how Whitfield, Snow, and Ridge recast their identities as their qualifications to speak to and for the nation as American bards. In addition, the book explains how their shift away from the exclusivity of national identity toward various kinds of intranational and supranational allegiances enabled them to present an alternative to the literary nationalism that has long defined the antebellum period.

This chapter examines a variety of written expressions that may be read in the context of elegy and are attributed to Native American authors. It begins by considering Black Hawk's autobiography Life, published in 1833 by John Barton Patterson. Life was long read as elegiac in the Western sense, mourning what was irrevocably gone, and Black Hawk's narration is more nearly elegiac in the Native American sense; it is not Western mourning but indigenous “melancholic mourning” of a particularly creative kind. The chapter also analyzes Black Elk Speaks (1932), Reverend William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip (1836), and the elegiac poetry of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, John Rollin Ridge, and others.

This chapter focuses on novels written by Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines the themes tackled by the Native novel, from the economic and psychological effects of assimilation to the problem of maintaining an Indigenous cultural identity. It also discusses a number of works written by Native Americans, including John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854), Alice Callahan's Wynema, A Child of the Forest (1891). John Milton Oskison's Wild Harvest (1925) and Black Jack Davy (1926), James Welch's Death of Jim Loney (1979), Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1984), and Thomas King's Truth and Bright Water (1994).

This chapter examines the role of the ethnic novel in creating a multicultural nation during the period up to 1870. It first considers fictional depictions of the US-Mexico War and how they shaped ideologies of racial hierarchy, territorial expansion, and empire building. It then looks at novels by ethnic writers such as John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), Amédée Bouis’s Le Whip-Poor-Will (1847), Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–1843), Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein’s The Mysteries of New Orleans [Die Geheimnisse von New Orleans] (1854–1855), George Lippard’s The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1844–1845), and Reinhold Solger’s Anton in Amerika: Novelle aus dem deutsch-amerikanischen Leben (Anton in America: A Novel from German-American Life, 1862).