RICHARD SLOTKIN ON AMERICAN FRONTIER MYTHS: PART ONE

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1973, 1999) ("In a democracy based on the social equality of the upwardly mobile, perpetual motion is as important a sign of social importance as the possession of an established fortune. Indeed, the former is of more value, since stagnant or inherited wealth is, by the hunter's standards, a sign of lost vigor. The myth of the hunter, as seen by the Indians and by writers . . . , is one of self-renewal or self-creation through acts of violence. What becomes of the new self, onve the initiatory hunt is over? If the good life is defined in terms of the hunter myth, there is only another hunt succeeding the first. Thus [Daniel] Boone ultimately departs form Boonesborough, the cycles of departure and return, continuing beyond the conclusion of the first, Wilsonian hunts. [Davey] Crockett, having failed in Tennessee, hunts for new animals, new enemies, new voters, and a new fortune in Texas, only to die at the Alamo. The consequences are those suggested in the European myths of the accursed hunter: the abbott and his dogs, like the Greek Orion and Melville's Ahab, are doomed to pursue an ultimately unassimilable, unhuntable prey on the periphery of the cosmic round till the end of time. They do not escape the European heritage to achieve an Indian world in which the hunt completes the hoop of the world and joins man forever to the good of nature." :Believing in the myth of regeneration though violence of the hunt, the American hunters eventually destroyed the natural conditions that had made possible their economic and social freedom their democracy of social mobility. Yet the mythology and the value system it supported remained even after the objective conditions that had justified it had vanished. We have, I think, continued to associate democracy and progress with perpetual social mobility (both horizontal and vertical) and with the continual expansion of our power into new fields or new levels of exploitation. Under the aspect of this myth, our economic, social, and spiritual life is taken to be a series if initiations, of stages in a movement outward and upward toward some transcendent goal. We have traditionally associated this form of aspiring invitation with the self-transcendence achieved by hunters though acts of predation. The forces of the environment and the hidden or dark sources of our personal and collective past--factors which limit our power to aspire and transcend--become the things which, as hunters, we triumph over, control, and transcend, They become, under the aspect of the myth, enemies and opponents, who captivate and victimize us and against whom we must be revenged." Id. at 556-557. Moreover, aren't "perpetual growth," ''perpetual mobility," etc., themselves myth? "Believing in the myth of regeneration through the violence of the hunt, the American hunters eventually destroyed the natural conditions that had made possible their economic and social freedom, their democracy of social mobility. Yet the mythology and the value system it supported remained even after the objective conditions that had justified it had vanished." Id. at 557. ).