Prompt:

Bryants The Prairies is a wonderful document of the American optimism in the early nineteenth century, but it also reflects some of the uglier consequences of that optimism. For instance, Bryant assumes that the Native Americans, who he calls “the red man,” could not have been the mound builders (read the Wikipedia article for a bit more info). In fact, there are a lot of ways in which the poem supports the idea that is the American people’s Manifest Destiny to spread their culture from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

In this week’s post, talk about how you see evidence of this attitude of Manifest Destiny in “The Prairies,” and talk about how Bryant seems to feel about the people who are being displaced. Provide evidence from the poem to support your claims. Quotations do not count towards your 300 words.