William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians

William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians. Edited and Annotated by Gregory A. Waselkov and Kathryn E. Holland Braund. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. xvi, 342 pp. $46.50. ISBN 0-8032-4772-9.

Surely eighteenth-century contemporaries thought the young William Bartram a maverick and a loser. He exasperated his fond botanist father, John Bartram, who knew that his son's talents-sketching and knowledge of nature-were not readily marketable. John expected, rightly, that he would have to underwrite the ungrateful William's activities for years. After a lusterless spell as a trader, William flopped as a planter in the East Florida wilderness, and his father despaired.

William was well into his thirties before John Fothergill, a celebrated patron of scientists, decided to subsidize his interest in flora and fauna. In 1773 Bartram set off on five years of trips through Britain's southern colonies, the result of which, ultimately, was a travel book that has stayed in print since its first appearance. It may be evidence of Bartram's continued lack of commercial flair that he did not publish Travels, penned earlier, until 1791. It is one of the few literary products of colonial America that deserves to be called a masterpiece. It is also an invaluable source for botanists, biologists, geographers, historians, and anthropologists.

Kathryn Braund and Gregory Waselkov, both eminent in their respective spheres of history and anthropology, are ideally suited for the task they set themselves in this work. The result is a triumph of taste, lucid exposition, and thorough scholarship. Simply reading their endnotes would provide an education on Native Americans of the southern colonies in the eighteenth century and on what modern historians have had to say about them.

Braund and Waselkov's useful project was to reproduce and analyze everything Bartram wrote about American Indians. In addition to relevant extracts from the Travels, they publish here Bartram's "Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians" and "Some Hints & Observations concerning the civilization of the Indians, or Aborigines." Gaining access to either of these latter works has always been difficult for researchers, and finding scholarly versions impossible.

The "Observations" consist of Bartram's detailed answers to questions posed by a Philadelphia physician in the late 1780s. Most scholars have been able to read them only by obtaining the American Ethnological Society's Transactions for 1853, in which they appear as edited (and distorted) by Ephraim Squier. Braund and Waselkov use two earlier and more accurate versions of the "Observations": the words are those copied by John Howard Payne, but the illustrations are the ones copied by J. Woodbridge Davis, who was a better, or at least more accurate, draftsman.

The "Hints" are in the papers of Henry Knox, secretary of war in postrevolutionary America. They were written, it seems, soon after the "Observations," perhaps in 1790, and they show an astounding departure from Bartram's earlier high regard for Native Americans. In the Travels, Bartram's Quaker-Deist humanity shines. American Indians are not inferior: "As moral men they certainly stand in no need of European civilization" (p. 114). In the "Observations" Bartram wrote: "We [whites] might possibly better our condition in civil society by paying some more respect to, and impartially examining the system of Legislation, Morality & Economy of those despised, persecuted, Wild People" (p. 158).

Despite such judgments, late-twentieth-century adherents of political correctness have no hero in Bartram because he struck a very different note in the "Hints": "No more eligeble [sic], or laudable step can be pursued, than the introduction of our [i.e., whites'] Language, System of Legislation, Religion, Manners Arts & Sciences . . . amongst them [i.e., Indians]" (p. 195). Bartram thus showed that he had become a convert to the then fashionable "civilizing" policy, which meant forcing American Indians to adapt to white mores, even though Bartram admitted that it would revolutionize their traditional way of life.

Collecting Bartram's Indian writings highlights the contrast between the scientific precision of the "Observations" and the artfulness of the Travels, where, for effect, he rearranged the sequence of his adventures. He seems also to have aimed, rather successfully, at a kind of Spenserian pastoralism in his description of his encounter with Cherokee women picking strawberries. Elsewhere he gives the flavor of a nursery story to a tale of kings and feasting.

Bartram's omissions further reveal his craftiness. At the best of times violence and tension dominated the southern frontier regions, and both had reached excruciating heights during the period from 1773 to 1777, the years of Bartram's travels. Yet he never mentions the Revolution nor the political sympathies of the American Indians he visited, most of whom were loyalists.

This work did not need three pictures of the Long Warrior. The print on its map of the New Purchase Cession cannot be read. There are also repetitions in the notes on, for example, the artificial origin of shell middens. But these are objections to a book easier to cavil at than to criticize. Braund and Waselkov have done a considerable service in publishing not only the "Hints" manuscript but also some of Bartram's unpublished drawings. Above all, they have brought Bartram, best known until now as a naturalist, into focus as an essential source on southern Indians.

ROBIN F. A. FABEL

Auburn University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Apr 1998
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