Abstract:This article explores the role played by savagism in American historical consciousness, focusing on its appearance in settler accounts of the Battle of Wyoming (1778) of the Revolutionary War. The story of Wyoming is told each year in the small town of Wyoming, Pennsylvania in one of the longest-running historical commemorations in the United States. Rather than emphasizing a British foe, however, these celebrations revel in gruesome descriptions of alleged Indian forms of warfare. This article explores the political uses of savagism in these accounts. The savage trope has long served settlers in deflecting attention away from their own actions and in justifying conquest. In Wyoming narratives, savagism instead serves to deflect attention away from a deeper intra-colonist conflict that pitted two factions of colonists against each other in a bitter war that lasted decades. I conclude by considering the unifying functions of savagism in the advance of early American settlerism.
