The happy hunting ground is a concept of the afterlife associated with the Native Americans in the United States.[1] The phrase most likely originated with the British settlers' interpretation of the Indian description.[2]
The phrase first appears in 1823 in The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper:
"Hawk-eye! My fathers call me to the happy hunting-grounds."[3]
Historian Charles L. Cutler suggests that Cooper "either coined or gave currency to" the use of the phrase "happy hunting ground" as a term for the afterlife.[4] The phrase also began to appear soon after in the writing of Washington Irving.[5]
In 1911, Sioux physician Charles Eastman wrote that the phrase "is modern and probably borrowed, or invented by the white man."[6]