Consider the John Vanderlyn painting The Death of Jane McCrea, which shows two Indians murdering a white woman. One holds her head while the other raises a hatchet. The murderers are not simply enemies but monsters, giants twice as wide as their victim. The story of Jane McCrea was retold numerous times in works of frontier fiction, in which Indians are described as “monsters, only human in outward form.” Captivity narratives, rape fantasies, and rescue stories, while originally focusing on American Indians, are later applied to Africans, Muslims, and African-Americans.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 571