American frontier monsters inhabited the same spaces as American Indians.

Evidence

Even without foreign monsters, America was a landscape filled with imaginary characters. Frontier monsters in rivers, forests, deserts, and caves populated the American imagination. It is not accidental that these monsters inhabited the same spaces as American Indians. Stories of water monsters in the Ohio and other rivers were often described as “demonic” due to their proximity to American Indians or otherwise related to an indigenous narrative, often implicating American Indians with some kind of maleficence. The language of savagism employed in such narratives excluded American Indians from the human family. Savagism is a language situated in notions of monstrosity: “Images of the Indian as a beast drew on legends of monsters, wild men, and quasi-human creatures that had long been part of the European tradition.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 589

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Muslim-monster mapping exactly: monster categories projected wholesale onto an unfamiliar people. Connects to the savagism discourse and settler-colonial othering. — connects to: Frontier captivity narratives transferred the monster trope from Indians to Muslims and Africans.
• SEED: The reader’s thesis widens: the same monster-inventory was reused for Indians as for Muslims—a reusable projection template across the colonial project.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 589