Evening star., 1934-11-04
BY DIR. FRANK THONE.


~ ANG! And another paleface hit the
dust!
* Thus Deadwood Dick in reverse
might have been written by an Indian
author, if Indians had been authors
back in the days of the paper-back
thriller that was the pre-move ancestor of to-
days westerns" (How many a substantial
American parent who now loudly lamentS the
debased cinema preference of his children used
to sneak out to the barn for drafts of forbidden
excitement out Of those flaming red-and-yel-
low coversD
Most of us retain. from those surreptitious
readings in those strictly authentic histories Of
Indian wars on the plains, a sort Of hazy i'm
preston that life consisted then of furious gall
lopings away from overwhelming hordes of
yelling painted horsemen; of even more furious
gallopings back again with the Cavalry, who
had just come in the nick of time to save
the beleagured outpost, not to mention the
girl almost invariably yellow haired; of pick
ing of whole tribes of befeathered warriors
with a miraculous, trusty rifle that never missed
its target; of a general super -Homeric hyper
heroic atmosphere where life was really WORTH
while
The curious thing is that the Indians seem
to have had something of the same idea too.
True. they had little knowledge of writing and
none of printing. Lead slug to them most
emphatically did not mean something in type
case.
But most vivid graphic record of the In
dians' point of view, back in the exciting days
when the West was plenty Wild" is now in
the hands of the Smithsonian Institution here
in Washington. There is writing in it, only
pictures. But the pictures are worthy of any of
our boyhood blood-and- thunder masterpieces.
both in nveliness and in crudity And thanks
to the long memories of a veteran soldier OF
the old West and an elderly Crow Indian, we
have at least tolerably well-connected inter-
probation and a story of the thrilling events
recorded by the four successive authors of the
book.
COR the heroes of this Indian picture record
of daring deeds on the plains recorded
their own stories-or at least all but the con-
Guiding chapters thereof. There is plenty of
battle. murder and sudden death, including the
deaths of the four horsemen of the Western
Apocalypse.
The man who first depicted in childish
drawings of brown and yellow and red the out
standing facts of his violent life was killed by
the second author Author No. 2 added some
drawings of his high heroisms in battle and
raid, until he was knocked of in turn by au-
thor No. 3, who likewise drew until he died at
the hands of author No. 4.
The last recorded act in the book Is depicted
as a parley which will decide between peace
and Thus, note of dramatic sus-
perSe, this saga OF the West closes, and thus it
was found in the grave with the bones, pre-
sumably, of its last possessor.
It is we'll that the Smithsonian Bureau Of
American Ethnology able to enlist the as
sistance of two first-class rememberers of the
old West, for the book was found under such
obscure and in-recorded circumstances that
without their aid the sheets would have been
largely unintelligible.
The tale of the book is roughly this: About
mai Warren.
with q ranch near Bozeman, Mont, was pres
ent when workmen digging q railroad cut in
his land broke into an Indian grave. The
grave contained the bones Of an Indian man,
with some of the usual funeral gifts An Indian
took with him to the Happy Hunting Grounds.