ABSTRACT
Americans tend to be surprised when they learn of the large amount of popular interest in everything relating to North American Indians prevailing all over Europe. Europeans, when asked about the reasons for this strange fact, tend to be somewhat puzzled themselves, and will often point to a special relationship between their own nation and the "Indians." The "struggle-for-national-unity" theme that pervaded European Indian fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting the great importance of such issues in many European countries at that time, has almost completely lost its attraction. European dressing up as Indians dates from the seventeenth century, at least. The power of expectation was such that early European visitors reported sightings of what existed only in their imagination. In the eighteenth-century, Indians began to be featured in European fiction on a large scale but the transition was gradual.
