Watts applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville, and shared the following:
Page 99 finds the reader late in chapter four, a chapter that looks at the creeping suspicion among readers that “Indian Haters” might not be the uncritical heroes they become in dozens of stories, novels, poems, plays, histories, and travelogues between 1820 and 1860. Based on the legends of historical figures like Tom Quick or Lewis Wetzel, “Indian Haters” were white men on the American frontier between 1760 and 1830 who purportedly responded the loss of family members at the hands of a few “Indians” (strawmen of settler fantasy, nothing to do with genuine indigenous peoples) by vowing to kill all Indians and then largely succeeding, “out-savaging the savage,” in the terms of one scholar, marking racial superiority at an atavistic level. For decades, Indian Haters had been portrayed in sensational texts as heroes and martyrs, doing the necessary dirty work of settler colonialism, sacrificing personal safety for the race and nation. However, as Indian Haters were depicted more and more sensationally, skepticism crept in. On page 99, my discussion of Charles Averill’s ridiculous novel Kit Carson: Prince of the Gold Hunters (1849) concludes. Averill portrayed Carson as an Indian Hater, an obnoxious attempt to cash in on public interest in both the California Gold Rush and Carson’s celebrity after his depiction in John C. Fremont’s popular narrative. As the page ends, Carson’s own refutation of his textual exploitations begins in a responding text supposedly dictated to Dewitt Peters: the historical Carson was not an Indian Hater and, in fact, would marry two indigenous women, though his much later actions in the 1863 massacre of the Navajo cannot be forgiven.Learn more about Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville at the Oxford University Press website.
While page 99 accurately represents the work, it does so in a minor key, as this chapter examines a broad variety of texts that celebrate Indian Haters into virtuous heroes. Averill’s book was soon forgotten, thankfully. Furthermore, his book was part of a broader effort to transpose a legend born in the eastern woodlands to the far West in order to establish a unifying narrative for the increasingly geographically disparate US. Other chapters offer more sustained readings of major Indian Hater fictionalizations by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Herman Melville. However, the book is mostly about the function of print culture and public media in the larger project of antebellum settler colonialism as seen through the example of the trope of Indian Haters. Averill wanted badly to profit from participating in the triumphant settler agenda. However, as Peters’ redemption of Carson on page 99 shows, this process was not monolithic or unilateral (as settler culture is often theorized to be). Averill’s Kit Carson stands as a dubious attempt to create a mythology suited to the racial and cultural goals of the settler nation as it aspired to subjugate the lands and peoples it intended to control and exploit. Peters’ pushback, in microcosm, reveals an intra-cultural tension that symbolizes the fragility and incompleteness of settler nationhood, even as it so wanted stability and totality
While Carson has come down (mostly) as a hero, it is not because he was or was not an Indian Hater. In Milford, Pennsylvania, there is still a Tom Quick Inn, named for a local Indian Hater who boasted of killing ninety-nine Lenape to avenge his father. Until recently, a monument to him in a public park that explicitly celebrates those killings. Currently, the monument remains in storage, its resurrection challenged by the descendants of the Lenape Quick never got around to. In other words, while my book studies an old story, even as shown on page 99, its subject pertains in 2025, as the settler nation still struggles about what parts of its past to embrace and which to disavow.
--Marshal Zeringue
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