Ever since James Fenimore Cooper made use of frontier life in his
novels, the Indian has been romanticized in fiction as the noble savage.
But Cooper’s Indians did not bear much resemblance to the real Indians
who were, after all, savages living in a primitive environment. A good
observer of Indians as they actually were was the eminent historian
Francis Parkman, who spent the summer of 1846 traveling as far as
Wyoming on the Oregon Trail. Here is his account of one of the tribes
living on the plains: