This is pulled out of an article called "The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury" by Gary K. Wolfe. You can get it in the Gale Lit Resource Center if you want to see the whole thing. It's pretty great.
"In an interview in 1961 Ray Bradbury
described an unwritten story of his which was to be cast in the form of
an American Indian legend. - "One night there was a smell on the wind, there was a sound
coming from a great distance." Searching for
the source of this portent, the Indian and his young grandson wander for
days, finally coming to the edge of the sea and spotting a campfire in
the distance. Beyond, in the water, are anchored three ships. Creeping
closer, the Indians find that the fire is surrounded by strange-looking
men who speak an unknown language, who "have huge sort of metal devices
on their heads," and carry strange mechanical weapons. The Indians
return to the wilderness, vaguely aware that some great event has
happened and that the wilderness will never be the same, but not at all
sure what the event is or exactly what it means.
This small unwritten fable of the coming of
the first Europeans to North America is significant not only because
parts of it appear in another context in the story "Ylla" in The Martian Chronicles (once selected by Bradbury as his favorite among his stories)--in
which the Indians become Martians and the strange sense of foreboding
becomes telepathy--but also for the way in which the story reveals a
romantic, almost mystical, vision of historical experience, particularly
the experience of the American wilderness."
--
This is cool, b/c I'm reading the Journals of Lewis and Clark right now. And L & C, as they travel up the Missouri River, just by passing through the "undiscovered" American West, effect this magical transformation of the country. They meet with Indians along the way, they show off their guns and tools, and they move on. They don't really do anything, or build anything, they just pass through and update the maps and shoot some buffalo. But the Indian nations that they pass through are fundamentally changed. They don't know exactly what is coming but they all know that a great change is upon them.
The ultimate uninvited/unexpected guests.
ReplyDeleteJust turning up & being there changes things.
Very true. What made this story and I guess Bradbury's vision of the exploration of the West a little unnerving was the bewildered way the Martians/Native Americans viewed the explorers. It seems like the modern view of what happened in when Europeans met Native Americans that there was instant violence between the two. The Native American as Martians seemed to say "what the...?" instead. Huh. perhaps I should put the L & C journals on my reading list.
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