Robertson’s and Whitman’s poems, written at the beginning of and then at the height of Indian Removal, respectively, sit comfortably in a larger canon of poems that are ostensibly about the Inca but simultaneously serve to help American readers navigate their relationship to Native American peoples, settler colonial practices, and the shadow of the Spanish Black Legend. From poems such as George Yellet’s four-canto, 110-section “The Maid of Peru: A Poetic Romance,” to “Dirge for the Last Inca” by James S. Buckingham, to the scores of poems written by more anonymous writers, such as “The Ruins of Pachacamac” by Julia, “Ancient Peruvian Burial” by H., “Montezuma: or, The Spaniards in America” by Delta, and “Temple of the Muses” (unknown), this canon sought to use the Inca as a historical corollary to comment on America’s colonial relationship to native peoples from a variety of ideological perspectives.9 As mentioned earlier, the close of the 1840s was accompanied by an appreciable decline in the practice of recurring to the Inca to navigate the US relationship to native peoples in the contemporary moment; however, the practice did not vanish entirely. In fact, even as references to the Inca began to decline, they were still recurred to as the nation transitioned from eastern to western removal in what would become the next chapter in the saga of removal and settler colonialism in America, namely the California Genocide—precipitated in large measure by the gold rush of 1849.10 In 1850, the Family Favorite and Temperance Journal published “The Miner’s Dream,” written by an author using the pseudonym Trismegist. In the poem, a gold rush miner dreams of a “noble palace of gold which the ancient Spaniards sought.” In it, “on a glittering throne the Inca sat” surrounded by “guards [that] wore golden plumes,” and “helmets [that] shone like suns.” The miner, clearly desirous of the wealth seen around him, is addressed by the Inca who unexpectedly proclaims, “‘I give thee all!’… ‘my palace, my guard, my throne, –/And the river’s bed, and the mountain’s side, their treasures are thine alone.’” The Inca, presumably Atahualpa, then fades from the dream as the miner finds himself musing on the charms of “his old New England home,” and ultimately wakes to thoughts of “his wife, and his child, and his home.” The poem ends with the miner recognizing the value of these “treasures of the heart” and, taking his “bag of [gold] dust” he travels south to the Isthmus of Panama, and ultimately makes his way back to New England “by way of Chagres”—the Spanish town on the gulf side of the isthmus where most of the gold looted from the Inca was prepared for shipment to Spain (Trismegist 1850, p. 107).
The poem is notable for several reasons. On the surface, it suggests that there are greater treasures to be had than gold—namely the love of family and a life of domesticity. Such an ennobling and antimaterialist sentiment nevertheless papers over some startling assertions, the import of which relies heavily upon the invocation of the Inca. In the context of the miner’s dream, the appearance of the Inca is remarkable. The Inca never controlled any part of what would become California, and so Atahualpa’s giving of this land to the miner only makes sense if we understand him as representing both the voice and will of native peoples in not only ancient Peru but modern-day California, as well. By invoking the Incan emperor, the poem therefore joins the ancient history of Peru to the modern history of California, and in doing so arguably joins the Spaniard’s thirst for gold and the miner’s. Nevertheless, in this moment, the miner’s fantasy (indeed, the fantasy of nearly all settler colonialists) is enacted, as the native voice proclaims him the owner of all that he desires—land, wealth, and power. The miner’s fantasy is that the native has not only functioned as a caretaker, holding wealth and resources until the moment the colonist appears, but having fulfilled this mission, the native vanishes without resistance and without conflict.
While this poem is unquestionably a call to reflection, it is notable that it asks readers to reflect on the value of domestic life compared to the value of monetary gain while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the pursuit of gold has destroyed the domestic lives of thousands of native peoples whose lands the miner and other 49ers now occupy. The miner’s inability to recognize the irony of this choice marks the transformation of Atahualpa into little more than a manifestation of the miner’s own desire. Divorced from his historical moment and geographical context, evacuated of his personal, tragic history, he has been reduced to the mouthpiece of settler colonialism, forced to bless a colonial enterprise not all that dissimilar from the one that resulted in his own death. In short, Atahualpa’s blessing of the colonial prospecting going on in California also comes dangerously close to blessing all such colonial enterprises—including that of Spain.
As a commentary on the interactions of white settlers and native peoples, this otherwise endearing proclamation of the value of home and family is perhaps the most blindly neglectful of all examples brought forward in this essay. It suggests that there is essentially nothing related to native peoples for white settlers and prospectors to concern themselves with—and perhaps never has been. Similar to much of the period’s Indian policy, which operated via removal and thus erasure of the native presence from now “white” spaces, this poem simply ignores rather than “make[s] explicit the contradictions implicit in American national ideology and social experience,” as perhaps Robertson and Whitman had done. Gone are Robertson’s calls for reform, absent is Whitman’s traumatization of his readers with the sense that they may be culpable for native peoples’ disappearance. According to this poem, there is, and perhaps has been since the days of Pizarro, an open invitation to occupy native peoples’ lands, and thus no moral conflict to navigate—no Black Legend to concern oneself with. The poem has served “to absorb such tensions and incorporate them into coherent and compelling narratives” that depict “the nation as a…union of virtuous citizens” in which native peoples are simply absent, forgotten, “vanished” (Scheckel 1998, p. 4). The moral quandaries and perils of earlier decades have been, in this poem, quite literally and willfully imagined away.
Taken together, these poems point toward the collective problem with the larger use of the Inca as a historical corollary during the period of Indian Removal. Certainly, images of the Inca were mobilized by individuals with different positions to support their cause—Robertson and Whitman to suggest that we had failed morally, “Trismegist” to condone colonial actions. Nevertheless, in using the history of the Inca as these writers did, they collectively demonstrate that the invocation of the Inca during the period was less about native peoples themselves—their ethical treatment at the hands of Americans and the responsibility of the American people to recognize these peoples’ political sovereignty and cultural autonomy—and more about coming to an understanding of how Americans should view themselves in light of the actions undertaken. Such a point is made all the more obvious by the fact that none of these writers ever allude to the fact that the descendants of the Inca did, in fact, remain a significant presence in South America at the time—to read these works, one would assume that the Inca themselves had vanished when remnants of their people, and their culture, persisted and persist to this day. In short, many of these literary expressions were essentially exercises in narcissism, as the invocation of the Inca was, at best, an