Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935

Martin Padget

Indian Country analyzes the works of Anglo writers and artists who encountered American Indians in the course of their travels in the Southwest during the one-hundred-year period beginning in 1840. Martin Padget looks first at the accounts produced by government-sponsored explorers, most notably John Wesley Powell's writings about the Colorado Plateau. He goes on to survey the writers who popularized the region in fiction and travelogue, including Helen Hunt Jackson and Charles F. Lummis. He also introduces us to Eldridge Ayer Burbank, an often-overlooked artist who between 1897 and 1917 made thousands of paintings and drawings of Indians from over 140 western tribes.

Padget addresses two topics: how the Southwest emerged as a distinctive region in the minds of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans, and what impact these conceptions, and the growing presence of Anglos, had on Indians in the region. Popular writers like Jackson and Lummis presented the American Indians as a "primitive culture waiting to be discovered" and experienced firsthand. Later, as Padget shows, Anglo activists for Indian rights, such as Mabel Dodge Luhan and Mary Austin, worked for the acceptance of other views of Native Americans and their cultures.

Named a Top Pick for 2004 in the Southwest Books of the Year from the Tucson-Pima County Public Library.

". . a very thought-provoking examination of how explorers such as John Wesley Powell, writers Charles F. Lummis and Helen Hunt Jackson, and artists such as Elbridge Ayer Burbank played a significant role in shaping the public's perception of this distinctive region of the country, and how their often distorted, Eurocentric views changed, even molded, the lives of Indians."--Southwest Books of the Year

"Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935 by Matrin Padget, is a thought-provoking examination of how explorers, writers and artists helped shape the public's perception of the Southwest."--Arizona Daily Star

"Indian Country is primarily a work of scholarship, disciplined and sometimes dense. Padget invites us to re-read- or at least, to reconsider- a whole library of Euro-American texts."--Los Angeles Times

"Indian Country is well written with a flowing literary style. It is light on jargon and contains insightful analysis."--Journal of American Ethnic History

"[Indian Country] illustrates how a broad range of Euro-American explorers, novelists, and painters helped to forge an identity of the Southwest as a 'land of enchantment,' a place of unparalleled natural beauty. . . ."--American Historical Review

"Martin Padget has produced a fascinating. . text, thoroughly researched."--Western American Literature

"Padget treats his subjects critically yet sympathetically; Indian Country serves as a good introduction to a growing literature on representations of the Southwest by European and Anglo-American outsiders."--Journal of American History

"Padget...intelligently shows us how people like Helen Hunt Jackson and John Wesley Powell conditioned popular conceptions of Native Americans. His book is so convincing that Padget's next project should turn the tables in a collection of Indian writings about Anglos that shows how those commentaries affected Indian society."--True West Magazine

"Pagdet provides insights into the prevailing attitudes held by the general society at the time of the writing. There is also a considerable amount of information about lesser-known tribes and the results of the Euro-American ethnocentric impingement on their ultimate demise or survival. . . This book should be required reading in any course about Native Americans. Highly Recommended." --CHOICE Magazine

"What we have from Martin Padget is a lively, fresh look at important sources useful in distilling how late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth century commentors interpreted the Southwest to the American public."--Montana Magazine

"While many scholars have tackled the task of deconstructing how imagery of the West was created, few have done so as successfully as Martin Padget in Indian Country."--Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Martin Padget is a lecturer in American Studies in the Department of English at the University of Wales.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

6 x 9 288 pages 9 color photographs, 15 halftones in cloth edition; 24 halftones in paperback