ABSTRACT
The lithograph “American Progress” depicts a central tension that runs through nineteenth-century legal and cultural texts concerning the political status of American Indian communities (see Figure 5.1). First circulated in 1873, the lithograph, based on a painting by John Gast and titled “Westward, the Course of Destiny,” was commissioned by George A. Crofutt, a New York–based publisher and author of periodicals and travel guides. It portrays the figure of an angelic woman elevated above a teeming wilderness inhabited by wild animals, pioneering settlers, and “Indian” peoples seemingly driven to the edge of extinction by the onslaught of Western progress. A stage coach in the middle section draws the eye upward to a covered wagon and two steam locomotives that energize the print mid-frame, animating signs of culture and technology that direct the gaze toward ships in the east and mountains in the west, both of which are brought together by the figure of a woman who carries a book in one hand and telegraph wires in the other. The Indians, in scanty garb on horseback and on foot, appear doomed by the encroachment of Western technologies that exemplify colonial expansion. They are harried from the land mid-frame, apparently about to take the final plunge into an oblivion that is outside the frame of the print.
