This booklet tells of what it was like in the early part of the 1900s for a young Quechan Indian boy to grow up on a Native American Indian reservation. The story is about his early years and his experiences with life as he and his family went through the social transition brought about by the first European and then American colonization of their Quechan tribe's historic homelands. It tells a little bit about his tribe's history, their customs and traditions which had been handed down from one generation to the next. This is his point of view from two points in time, before and after the coming of Europeans to this continent, as the boy grew up into manhood in a world his ancestors had never even dreamed of. The importance of this boy's story is that his was the last generation of Quechans to know how things used to be, before 1941 and the beginning of the Nuclear Age.
Indian reservations are still a mystery to most of modern America.
In fact Indians themselves are a part of that mystery which has been created because of a mixture of indifference, ignorance and an unwillingness to learn, on the part of non-Indians. Many non-Indians prefer to know only the fictional romanticized view of Indian life imparted from writings of early western writers and partly from smarmy and not so smarmy films and documentaries. Depending on one's own view gained from history books or early writings, Native Americans were either stoic, heroic, wise capable of delivering extemporaneous profound speeches, and at one with Nature, or, on the other hand he was a fierce Godless savage, warlike, a killer of white men and kidnapper of blonde, blue-eyed white women. Neither view is correct, of course. Above all, they were human, with the same attributes and frailties seen in other races.