IRVING OUTLINED THE TROUBLED, ambivalent attitudes toward the genocide committed against Native Americans by whites: incredulity — confirmed by a silence, which not always sounds condemnatory — or indignation — spoken through many acts of contrition — are only two, perhaps the most prevalent, of the many possible outlooks on the American Holocaust. Assuming the relentless impact of the Westward expansion of the country, Irving's prediction anticipates the destruction not only of the East Coast Indians, but of all the Native American peoples and their ways of life across the territory claimed by the United States in successive years: “They will vanish like a vapor from the face of the earth; their very history will be lost in forgetfulness” (361). With a mixture of liberal nostalgia and historical fatalism, Washington Irving endorsed the prevailing myth of the “vanishing Indian,” a theme that would pervade American culture into the twentieth century. The reverse trope of this historical fatalism — its photographic negative — is, of course, the grand narrative of Manifest Destiny: the American nation as a triumphant exception in a history of constant decline and depravation.