In American Studies we assigned “Up the Coulee,” a story from Main-Traveled Roads written by Hamlin Garland and published in 1891. I don’t remember too much about it except that a farm boy returns to the midwest after years in the east and realizes how bleak midwestern farm life really is.
About a month ago I was looking for something to read and pulled out a novel by Garland entitled The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop published in 1902. The book is melodramatic and includes a romance between an Indian agent and the daughter of a Senator who thinks Indians should be exterminated.
What struck me about the novel was the sympathetic treatment of American Indians. The Indian agent does his best to treat the Indians with respect, and he is almost killed trying to prevent a lynch mob of cowboys and settlers from hanging an Indian who killed a white man encroaching on the reservation.
Here is a quotation: “It seems as though our settlers were insane over Indian lands. I honestly believe, if we should lay out a reservation on the staked plains there’d be a mad rush for it. ‘The Injun has it–let’s take it away from him,’ seems to be the universal cry. I am pestered to death with schemes for cutting down reservations and removing tribes. It would seem as if these poor, hunted devils might have a thumb-nails breadth of the continent they once entirely owned; but no, so long as an acre exists they are liable to attack.”
(The staked plains are the name given to the eastern part of New Mexico and the north-west part of Texas.)
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