It was on the frontier, where civilized men and women confronted the wilderness, that Europeans first became Americans or so authorities from Frederick Jackson Turner to Theodore Roosevelt claimed. But as the frontier disappeared, Americans believed they needed a new mechanism for fixing their collective identity; and they found it, historian Molly K. Varley suggests, in tales of white Americans held captive by Indians. For Americans in the Progressive Era (1890 1916) these stories of Indian captivity seemed to prove that the violence of national expansion had been justified, that...
It was on the frontier, where civilized men and women confronted the wilderness, that Europeans first became Americans or so authorities from Frederic...
