Is "The American Claimant" a veiled take on "The Indian Question"?

Question

Mark Twain's 1892 novel *The American Claimant* was written very soon after the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), which was basically revenge for the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass ("Little Big Horn"). This unprovoked and wanton slaughter was seemingly the final nail in the coffin of Indian resistance to Euro-American territorial incursion and cultural forced assimilation.Although "anti-Indian" for the first decades of his life, it seems Twain at the end re-thought his position on them.Could it be that the titled English heir in *The American Claimant* (Berkely Rossmore, who even dressed up as a cowboy and took the name Howard Tracy to remain incognito) was meant to represent wealthy Euro-Americans, whereas the uncouth and eccentric American (Mulberry Sellers) was a symbol of the "Indians"?Note that the character Washington Hawkins, a confederate of Sellers', was from Cherokee Strip (land taken from the Cherokees in the "Oklahoma Land Rush" of 1889).Also, to quote from the book where the Earl of Rossmore speaks of the rights of the American Claimant: "*...morally the American tramp is rightful earl of Rossmore; legally he has no more right than his dog.*"Even L. Frank Baum (author of *The Wizard of Oz*) admitted that the way the Indians were treated was wrong, although he still called for their utter destruction._{BTW, although I love "*Tom Sawyer*" and "*Huck Finn*" as much as (and probably more than) the next guy, *The American Claimant* may be my favorite novel from this, my favorite author. It is at least as topical as anything else he's written, too, and is replete with zombies, robots, mass-produced monstrosities, etc. etc. It could make a great movie. Are you listening, Hollywood? Netflix? Amazon?}

Answer 1

It is a plausible interpretation, but I would distinguish between reading the novel alongside Indigenous dispossession and claiming that Twain deliberately made Sellers a symbol of Native Americans. The first is worth exploring; the second faces significant counterevidence.

The distinction between moral and legal ownership is your strongest point. The Earl acknowledges the American family’s rightful inheritance while explaining why its members cannot obtain it. Their poverty prevents them from pursuing their claim. This raises a question that certainly applies to Indigenous dispossession: does legally protected possession necessarily constitute justice?

However, an important passage complicates your proposed character mapping. In Chapter III, Sellers imagines supplying the government with resurrected soldiers:

“soldiers that will chase Indians year in and year out on materialized horses”

Sellers is imagining profiting from military operations against Indigenous people. This could support a reading concerned with colonial violence and commercial exploitation, but it makes him an unlikely straightforward representative of those being pursued. Berkeley’s initial willingness to surrender his inherited privilege also complicates his identification with dispossessing elites.

The novel’s origins matter, too. Although Twain wrote it in 1891, Sellers first appeared in The Gilded Age in 1873. The claimant-and-inventor material developed through Twain and William Dean Howells’s Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, completed in 1883. The inheritance plot also drew on Twain’s maternal family’s supposed claim to the earldom of Durham. These earlier origins do not exclude later political meanings, but they weaken an argument based principally on proximity to Wounded Knee.

One historical correction: the Cherokee Outlet land run occurred in 1893, after the novel’s publication. The 1889 run opened the Unassigned Lands. Hawkins’s connection could therefore evoke contemporary territorial pressures, but not the later land run as an accomplished event.

Twain’s changing attitudes toward Indigenous peoples were also contradictory rather than a clean reversal. Likewise, Wounded Knee needs to be understood within the broader context of land loss, reservation conditions, and suppression of the Ghost Dance—not simply revenge for Little Bighorn.

Ultimately, the novel’s treatment of ownership, privilege, and exploitation can illuminate Indigenous dispossession. That broader interpretation is more convincing than a fixed allegory in which Berkeley represents Euro-Americans and Sellers represents Indigenous peoples.