What? Intelligent, coherent writing from Drew? You lie!

In Gunfighter Nation Richard Slotnik relates elements of the historiography of both Frederick Jackson Turner and Thedore Roosevelt. Slotnik argues that Turner approached it primarily from the standpoint of the farmer and the agrarian point of view whereas Roosevelt came more from the side of the adventurer, the individual who knows "Indians", who has fought with them and taken on some of their traits.
He argues that Roosevelt was heavily influenced by the Leatherstocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper and as a result he saw history through the eyes of the person beyond the edge of polite society.
While certainly it was Hawkeye who was Cooper's most famous character it has been convincingly argued that Hawkeye was not the only such figure in Cooper's books. He frequently mixed gender roles, racial steretypes, and in other ways formed a convergence of different identities. His character type then led the way for the imagining of both fictional characters and for how the stories of men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were related.
It is neither the "civilized American" nor the "savage Indian" (note: these are not my terms but rather throughout this post I will continue to use them so there is no confusion on the part of anyone who wishes to trail back along the thought-trail and read Slotnik, Roosevelt, Turner or Cooper; I am using their terms for the sake of consistency regardless of how I might feel about their usage today) who are the heroes either in the real or imagined Frontier. Rather it is the men between the worlds...the Frontiersman able to pass in civilized society but very uncomfortable there, he understands the ways of the Indians.
It is these men who will bridge the "savages" and the "civilized", infusing fresh blood and ideas into the tiring civilization. It is unclear what is tiring the civilization, although you could certainly extrapolate it is because there is no more momentum from the expansion of the borders. Yet it must be more than that because the idea of mixing the blood to revitalize is drawn, at least in Roosevelt's writing, from the experience of the development of Britain.
New "savage" tribes would arrive and alter the make-up of the national character.
It is important to remember Roosevelt was writing under the aegis of Social Darwinism...a lot of these thoughts bear that stamp and the terribly misguided developments that came from it. In just a few decades it would result in the Final Solution during World War II, the Armenian massacres during the Great War (WWI), in the excesses of the robber barons/captains of industry...Roosevelt bought into it as well...as did most concurrent writers.
So the comparison was the Indians as a whole to the Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and whatever other tribes invaded England. The difference is men like Roosevelt, Turner, Parkman, and other concurrent writers could not allow the mingling of blood such as was done in England. So instead the people who bridge the gap between savages and civilization are the half-Indian who has know Indian blood but adopts the "best" of their customs and lifestyles...the woodsman who can track "like an Indian", hunts effectively, "is in tune with nature" and so forth. The civilzation co-opts the features they lust after through such men...after all, if Davey Crockett is great and he is a great hunter, ergo hunting is great...and so are the buckskins, etc...thus the nature of American civilization has a justification for seizing the cultural heritage of the conquered native tribes without the necessity of accepting their blood.
Nor was it just historians who, consciously or unconsciously, put forth these views. There was a heavy dose of similar literature. There was the subset of captive narratives, going back almost to the founding of the colonies in which whites, normally female but occasionally male. The white would be captured by the savages and forced to adapt. Later they would have the opportunity to return to the white world...some would and some refused. This of course granted legitimacy to aspects of native life as it proved to be preferable to the corruption of metropolitan life. This theme would run through a great deal of literature.
As a side note, it is interesting the number of males who were captured and preferred the native life...yet did not write their story, nor did anyone else write it. Yet when it comes time for fiction...i.e. the Man Called Horse series, Little Big man, etc, it is exactly the reverse...curious. Yet perhaps not...this feeds partially into what Slotnick, Parkman, Roosevelt and Turner are claiming...the warrior culture is more interesting, violence requisite to make a story fascinating. The National Myth must center on the violent periods and events or people will lose interest. Note I am not claiming accuracy for this...in fact, I suspect it might be like the Christian ideal, the idea of featuring black actors in major movies, and so forth...it is suspected it won't work so it just isn't tried even though whenever it has been tried in small doses it has succeeded phenomenally well...
Back on the main point, the literature of the dime novels, the penny dreadfuls, the serials, and even newspapers followed this theme of the hero as a man who understood the Indian world.
And here is where I take off on my own tangent. By setting up the hero to be this man then his enemies must of course be the Native Americans. And with a great deal of literature being produced, both well-known by men such as the aforementioned Cooper, Parkman, Roosevelt and Turner and also by hundreds of lesser known writers ranging from very talented to complete hacks (they weren't called penny dreadfuls because they were well written...), the saturation point of the Native American as a murderous, warring angry savage was overwhelming. Add to this cacophony of bad press the traveling Wild West shows that invariably ended with howling, painted "savages" attacking the hapless, heroic settlers only to be driven off at the last second by the arrival of the heroic cavalry and you have created a world where the understanding, fears and beliefs of the white community are skewed unreasonably far from true events by their only experience.
It is my belief these are contributing factors to the way the Native Americans were viewed around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.