A Hopi child is torn from his parents and sent off to boarding school; white settlers encroach on the Cheyenne reservation, and the Cheyenne vow to fight to the death rather than give up their land; Howling Wolf witnesses the brutal murder of his brother and, when he protests, is in turn brutalized; after Sitting Bull’s triumph over Custer’s forces, he vows to fight to the death rather than submit to the white invaders.

 

In these and other stories written from 1890–1905, Hamlin Garland sought to capture his vision of the spirit of the Native American Indian in transition. Based on ten years of visits to reservations in the American West, these stories are of interest for readers today in part because they illustrate a sincere and well-intentioned white reformer coming to understand a culture radically at odds with his own—and discovering in the process that his own culture is less “advanced” than he had supposed.

Best known for his collection of short stories Main-Travelled Roads and for his novel Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) was also an accomplished writer of tales of American Indians struggling to adapt to reservation life during a time of confusion and government brutality. This edition reprints the text and illustrations from the 1923 printing as well as two of Garland’s essays indicting the treatment of Indians. An introduction places the stories in the historical context of Garland’s life and times.

 

Keith Newlin is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is the author of Hamlin Garland: A Bibliography, with a Checklist of Unpublished Letters and the coeditor of Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland (Nebraska 1998).