ABSTRACT
Press accounts of Native Americans generated a number of falsehoods, especially that of savagism—that indigenous peoples weren’t fully human, civilized, peaceful, or settled. Writers instead depicted all tribes as brutal heathens who lived a nomadic existence. They questioned even that reality, too, portraying them as finally vanishing with removal and because of battles with the U.S. government. White Americans thus pretended Indians didn’t exist when Europeans arrived in the New World and chose to believe they disappeared with the buffalo—dissolving their beginning and fantasizing their ending.
