The Inca Priest on the Mormon Stage
A Native American melodrama and a new American religion
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
II.
Sheridan’s Pizarro opens in 1534, with the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro waging a war of conquest against the Inca Empire of Peru. Alonzo, a young comrade of Pizarro, has become disgusted with Spanish barbarity, has crossed over to become the leader of the Inca army, and has married the Inca emperor’s daughter Cora. Both as general and as lover, Alonzo has displaced the dashing Inca hero Rolla, who nevertheless remains his loyal friend. In a climactic battle, Rolla, Pizarro, and the Inca emperor are all killed. The Spaniard Alonzo and his Inca wife survive, along with their infant son, whom the Inca Rolla has died protecting. They will mourn the dead and found a new society on the ruins of the Inca Empire.
The impulses to deport and to celebrate Indians were closely linked...In real life, there was no Rolla, Alonzo, or Cora; no side-changing general; no climactic battle. Pizarro took the Inca emperor captive through an act of treachery, obtained from him an immense ransom, then had him killed. Controlling an empire that included modern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and parts of Chile and Argentina, the conquistadores fell to fighting among themselves. Several years after murdering the Inca emperor, Pizarro himself fell victim to Spanish assassins.
What drew nineteenth-century audiences to a play that chronicled a remote chapter of history, and did so completely inaccurately? Whatever it was about the Incas that attracted the English playwright (and the German author from whom he adapted the play), American audiences saw Pizarro primarily as an allegory about Native Americans and European settlers, and thus an interpretation of their own national situation. Pizarro fit squarely within the popular Anglo-American literary tradition of the vanishing Indian.
During the antebellum years when Pizarro was most popular, the campaign to remove southeastern native peoples to the far side of the Mississippi elevated ethnic cleansing to national policy. Yet books that celebrated Native Americans, such as Longfellow’s "Song of Hiawatha," were bestsellers. The impulses to deport and to celebrate Indians were closely linked: Edwin Forrest, the nation’s foremost actor, advocated Indian removal while at the same time commissioning plays in which he starred as a noble Indian who died tragically. The result of the hero’s death, in such plays, is that Indians melt away and are replaced by whites who mourn their passing, even while they benefit from it. One of Forrest’s favorite roles was Pizarro’s Rolla.
Fig. 2. Brigham Young. From John Doyle Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, ed. William W. Bishop (St. Louis, 1878), 391. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Historian Philip Deloria has argued that a fundamental theme of American culture is a simultaneous effort to displace Native Americans and to inherit, borrow, or perform Native American identity—a practice that he calls "playing Indian." Pizarro’s elegiac mood—glamorizing the Inca Empire as it went down to defeat—spoke to this ambivalent engagement with Native Americans.
If this ambivalence was a prominent theme in antebellum America, it was even more central to the brand-new Mormon religion. The Book of Mormon, said to have been revealed by an angel in 1827, is in fact a history of ancient Native Americans. Its protagonists are Israelites who came to America by sea in 600 B.C. before splitting into two groups, the good Nephites and the evil Lamanites. Eventually the Lamanites—the ancestors of modern Indians—exterminated their Nephite cousins. The Nephites’ last act was to leave the Book of Mormon to be discovered by Joseph Smith, their latter-day heir.
Just as their contemporaries wept for dying Indian heroes while voting to deport living Indians to the Great Plains, Mormons extolled the lost Nephites but had more troubled relations with the modern-day "Lamanites," who they believed had received dark skin as a curse for their wickedness. In this context Pizarro—in which ancient Indians die tragically and bequeath their empire to a virtuous European—seems a natural choice for the Mormons’ first theatrical production. Rolla’s noble resignation distantly echoed the Nephite Moroni’s long before (dated at 480 A.D.), which closed the Book of Mormon.
