Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning wear and marking due to age. Year 1931. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The quotation is from the preface by Robert Montgomery Bied to his NICE OF THE woons in which he calls this view of the Indian absurd and gives his very different version of the savage incidentally writing one of the clanics of Indian warfare. “The Indian is doubtless a gentleman but he is a gentleman who wears a very dirty shirt having nothing to employ him or keep him alive except the pleasures of the chase and the scalp-hunt” says Dr. Bird as a small fractional part of his opinion. The Indian was a romantic and colourful character-quite literally the second; what more natural then than the mass of literature he inspired? In 1873 Thomas W. Field listed 1708 books from his library in a catalogue modestly entitled AN ESSAY TOWARD AN INDIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY. This work is valuable not only for the actual listing of the volumes their collation etc. but because of the illuminating comment the author has appended to most of the titles. The knowledge (withal slightly askew) of the Indians disseminated by these books must have been considerable to say nothing of the entertainment they afforded. But for more entertainment and less knowledge there was published during the period we speak of a series of paper-covered novels called Beadle’s HALP DIME LIBRARY which dwarfed by sheer circulation all other Indian books into insignificance. These were the original Wild West Stories tales of hair-breadth escapes in which without variation the Red man played Villain and the white man Hero. I have at hand a copy of Buffalo Bill’s FIGHTING FIVE or BLACK LARIAT’S BLOT-OUT: A STORY OF THE COLORADO DESPERADOES by Col. Prentiss Ingraham incidentally No. 981 of the series. “A dandy good one-K.” is marked on the cover in pencil and this keen comment is in a mature hand. The story is typical-there is no long-winded prea preamble-just “pictures and conversations “-Alice in Wonderland’s ideal book. “Every man of that band shall die boy that I am I savar it !… who did this (SP)