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Tales of the Northwest - Sketches of Indian Life and Character by a Resident Beyond the Frontier (Paperback, 2nd ed.)
Loot Price: R597
Discovery Miles 5 970
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Tales of the Northwest - Sketches of Indian Life and Character by a Resident Beyond the Frontier (Paperback, 2nd ed.)
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Loot Price R597
Discovery Miles 5 970
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This is a reprint of a book that is now extremely rare in
collections of early American literature. Published anonymously in
1830, these "Sketches of Indian Life and Character" constituted one
of the first collections of short tales to be brought out in the
United States and also the first appearance in American Literature
of the plains Indians. Fewer than a dozen copies of the Tales have
been found after a careful search of American libraries. William
Joseph Snelling, the author, wandered through the mid-western
country in the 1820's, fraternizing with the Indians and
penetrating their dark barriers as few other white men have ever
done. His stories consequently bring to life real Indian-neither
the "noble savages" of romantic fiction nor the bloodthirsty
sadists of popular imagination. Snelling knew his Indian, and his
writing about them, though fictional, is forthright and sincere.
"In 1830 no American save Cooper wrote better narrative than
Snelling at his peak," says John T. Flanagan, who has made an
extensive study of the life and writings of Snelling and who writes
the Introduction to this second edition of Tales of the Northwest.
Seven of the ten tales deal with the relations between men and
white. The other three are tales of Indians. All are written with a
keen eye for the unique Indian psychology-the craving for justice
inherent in an almost religious devotion to revenge, the scorn of
pain and hardship, and the deep-seated oriental despair that more
than anything else made the Indian incomprehensible to the
insurgent whites. These traits Snelling brings out admirably in his
stories, which tingle with the freshness and vigor of the Upper
Mississippi country, where the author spent some of the richest
years of his life. Son of Colonel Josiah Snelling, for whom Fort
Snelling was named, young Joseph lived among the Indians or stayed
with his father at the fort until in 1823 he joined Major Long's
expedition to Lake Winnipeg, as interpreter between the explorers
and the various Indian tribes they encountered. Returning to his
native Boston in 1828, Snelling became the militantly outspoken
editor of the Boston Herald, where he brought his crusading zeal
into play against city grafters and gamblers and became an ardent
member of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He never went back
to the Northwest, but immortalized the region and its peoples in
his Tales of the Northwest, published under the modest pseudonym of
"A Resident beyond the Frontier."
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