the Europeans*. In their impatience to get furs, they had slaughtered hundreds of beavers, and the natives were very uneasy, fearing that the animals would take revenge on them for this destruction. Following the first Europeans, who were traders, were those who came to ‘settle’ in America. From the seventeenth century, there were groups of Europeans who were being persecuted because they were of a different sect of Christianity (Protestants living in predominantly Catholic countries, or Catholics in countries where Protestantism was the official religion).
Many of them left Europe and went to America to begin a new life. As long as there was vacant Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA, and a contemporary of Wordsworth, spoke of the natives in words that would lead to a public outcry today: ‘This unfortunate race which we have been taking so much pains to civilise… have justified extermination’. *Many folk tales of the natives mocked Europeans and described them as greedy and deceitful, but because these were told as imaginary stories, it was only much later that the Europeans understood the references. land, this was not a problem, but gradually the Europeans moved further inland, near native villages.
They used their iron tools to cut down forests to lay out farms. Natives and Europeans saw different things when they looked at forests – natives identified tracks invisible to the Europeans. Europeans imagined the forests cut down and replaced by cornfields. Jefferson’s ‘dream’ was a country populated by Europeans with small farms.
The natives, who grew crops for their own needs, not for sale and profit, and thought it wrong to ‘own’ the land, could not understand this. In Jefferson’s view, this made them ‘uncivilised’.