American Indian Culture and Research Journal

So long as the "Indian wars" were still going on, the American people had newspaper headlines and articles to keep them informed about the nature and character of the American Indian. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the fighting, the excitement, and the news about Indians had ended. Euro-Americans were still interested, however, and to satisfy that curiosity the short story became the primary vehicle by which writers expressed their thoughts about the American Indian. Such turn-of-the-century stories have been generally ignored as sources of information about the developing attitudes of the white man toward the American Indian. Literary scholars have understandably passed these stories over because almost all are artistically flawed: the characters are weak, the plots silly, and the themes simple-minded. Historians also have generally passed these stories over because they are, after all, fiction-"made-up" yarns by writers who tended to know little about the Indians they described, and who cared more about selling a story than telling a truth. (To be sure, some scholars no doubt knew that these short stories might yield up useful information about the changing popular attitudes toward the American Indian; but until recently no bibliography of the genre was available, and those who might have been interested in reading this body of fiction about Indians had no convenient way of finding it.) The purpose of this study is to show, through discussion of one character type as portrayed in stories published during a twenty-year period, that the turn-of-the-century short story can give us worthwhile information, not about Indians, but about the attitudes of many whites toward them.