This chapter provides a survey of nineteenth-century American literature, arguing that the depiction of the Native American as a pitiful savage whose disappearance was inevitable was a dominant theme. It explains that these literary sources appear to assume the value of expert testimony in the Marshall cases, substantiating Marshall's damning judgments about the capacity of the Native American to manage his own lands. The chapter offers a Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans which is an example of the literary works that constructed the Native American and forms the subject of Chief Justice Marshall's contemplations. It examines how The Last of the Mohicans helped to forge a post-colonial mindset with respect to the vanishing American Indian. Cooper's depiction of the vanishing Indian incorporates a notion that actually depicts the American Indians as having already vanished. The myth of the vanishing American Indian was propagated by the Romantic Movement in England and America between 1790 and the American civil war.