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. . . When he and Garland had
first planned the volume, Edward Marsh [Garland's editor at Harper &
Bros.] had proposed including extensive illustrations by Frederic
Remington to increase sales. Like Garland’s stories, the illustrations
had previously appeared in Harper’s Magazine or Harper’s
Weekly, periodicals published by the Harper firm, so the material
would be available without payment of permission fees to another
publisher.
At first, Garland opposed
including Remington’s work, in part because he detested the
man--Garland, a teetotaler, was repelled by Remington’s drinking, as
he recorded in a diary entry of January 5, 1899: "Remington was at
the club and we talked of the trail together. He was against the man who
stood in criticism of the army, lumping me with Bryan and the Injuns,
all sons-a-bitches. He would assault me if he dared to do so, no doubt.
That is to say, on the question of the army and the Indians. He was a
little confused by drink, so I said nothing." But he was also
deeply opposed to the manner of Remington’s sketches, which he
believed to be markedly at odds with his own perspective. Years later he
summarized his objection: "My design was directly opposite to that
of Remington, who carried to the study of these hunters all the
contempt, all the conventional notions of a hard and rather prosaic
illustrator. He never got the wilderness point of view. His white
hunters were all ragged, bearded, narrow between the eyes, and his red
men stringy, gross of feature, and cruel. I recognized no harmony
between his drawings and my text . . . ." Marsh apparently
convinced Garland that the firm’s bottom line needed the
illustrations, for they planned a handsome, oversize book (12" x
9"), with a generous page size (a text block of 7" x 4"),
both to set off the illustrations and to compensate for the shortness of
text, that would sell for $6.00, rather than the usual $1.50. Harper’s
was also busily building a list of books about the American Indian, with
such titles as Adventures of Buffalo Bill, William Cody’s
autobiography; Crooked Trails and Pony Tracks, Remington’s
collections of illustrated essays (both reissued in 1923); and a number
of other novels and collections. The large-format The Book of the
American Indian, marketed as an art book (with the authorial credit
reading "Written by Hamlin Garland / Pictured by Frederic
Remington"), would be the standout book of the list.
The inclusion of
Remington’s illustrations proved to be a wise marketing decision.
Although the book was not a bestseller, it did sell "more than ten
times the number of copies" Garland anticipated, and today copies
are in demand in used- and rare-book stores. Reviewers tended to praise
the stories as an important moment in the nation’s history. The New
York Times Book Review, for example, lauded Garland for his
"service to American literature." Of the stories, the review
concluded that "If they do no more than prick our conscience as to
a national responsibility toward an ancient race which, as the Indian
Bureau reminds us, is slowly increasing, then they will bring their
greatest honor to a distinguished American writer." The New York
Evening Post called the book "an American document of
distinct value," and Henry B. Fuller, reviewing for the New York
Herald, praised Garland’s "full knowledge of the various
human elements involved" and his spirit of reform: "He writes
with indignation and with a strong emphasis on special cases."
Fuller certainly well understood Garland’s aims, for as Garland’s
closest friend, he had read the drafts of "The Silent Eaters"
in manuscript and knew the pains Garland had taken to make his stories
an accurate reflection of the life he had witnessed. Indeed, the review
focuses on the accuracy of Garland’s portrait of Sitting Bull.
"Here at last," Fuller remarked, "is a detailed account
of the affair and its culminating catastrophe from the Indian viewpoint.
As a volume designed as a
"gift book"--what today we would call a "coffee table
book"--The Book of The American Indian has a certain appeal,
for it was indeed a handsomely executed volume. As Garland later
realized, the book would not have been published if it hadn’t included
Remington’s illustrations, but he also appreciated the irony of their
inclusion, for the illustrations have virtually no connection with the
stories themselves, having been selected largely because of their
availability and the appeal of Remington’s name. Indeed, he must have
been aghast at the disjunctive effects of some of the illustrations. For
example, the illustration "A Kiowa Maiden" appears within
"Wahiah--A Spartan Mother," a story about Cheyenne Indians at
the Darlington Agency in Oklahoma, not the Kiowa. Worse, the
illustration’s caption is markedly and vehemently at odds with the
plot of the story. "Wahiah" is about the subjugation of
Cheyenne children to the white man’s desire to put them in school. The
focus of the story is the headmaster’s discipline, which involves
whipping a child who refuses to attend school until his spirit is
broken. And the whipping is no mere show whipping: the headmaster wears
two rods to a frazzle before spanking the boy, the shame of which
finally breaks him. The parents are ready to kill the teacher but
finally come to respect the headmaster, who points out that unless the
children learn English and adapt to conditions, they are doomed; in
response, the mother snaps in two her son’s bow and arrows, his
"symbols of freedom." But the caption of the illustration
ignores the plot and theme and substitutes instead a fantasy of wish
fulfillment:
That Indian parents
are very proud of their children’s progress is evidenced by the
eagerness with which they send their sons and daughters to the
schools established by the Government on the different Indian
reservations. The Kiowa maiden here pictured is one of the many
Indian girls and boys who are more and more availing themselves of
the opportunity to obtain an education and thus fit themselves to
take their places in civilized society.
The illustration was
originally published as an accompaniment to Richard Harding Davis’s
"The West from a Car Window," in Harper’s Weekly of
May 14, 1892. That illustration included no caption, as indeed did none
of the illustrations in their original magazine publication. When
assembling The Book of the American Indian, some functionary at
Harper’s, with an eye out the window rather than on the text,
apparently wrote this and the other captions without reading the stories
themselves.
Similar effects occur
elsewhere in the volume, suggesting that the uncredited caption writer
had devoured popular accounts depicting Indians as blood thirsty
savages. The sketch "An Apache Indian" is placed within
"The Iron Khiva," a story of the Hopis, and its caption
describes the "hideously cruel" Apache of the title as a
"red-handed murderer." Occasionally, the editorial writer had
better luck: "The Medicine Man’s Signal," originally
illustrating Remington’s report "The Sioux Outbreak in South
Dakota," appropriately appears within "Rising Wolf, Ghost
Dancer." And the writer may have been familiar with Garland’s
other work, for the caption to "Footprints in the Snow,"
illustrating "The Storm-Child," about a child lost in the
snow, warns the unwary trapper about Indians "popping out of some
coulee," and Garland had made the coulee country of Wisconsin his
domain in his non-Indian stories. Sometimes, too, the caption writer
simply gave up and confessed his ignorance. The caption to "An
Indian Trapper," incongruously placed within "The Story of
Howling Wolf," reads, "This Indian trapper depicted by
Remington may be a Cree, or perhaps a Blackfoot . . . ."
Ironically, although Remington did illustrate "Drifting Crane"
for its original 1890 publication in Harper’s Weekly, that
illustration did not appear in The Book of the American Indian. .
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