["The Last Frontier"] is something new in Americana. At first sight one recognizes that it comes out of the healthy, increasing trend to rewrite the history of our frontier with a new honesty which has tended, first, to be reasonably truthful at last about the Indians on whose dead bodies America was founded, and more recently to perceive that the Indians too, are a part of American society and that our treatment of them was and is a part of our democracy's success or failure. "The Last Frontier," a novelized history of the flight of the Northern Cheyennes from Oklahoma to Montana, and of the series of whippings they administered to the United States Army, does belong among these treatments of a vivid sector of our history. But by its unusual angle of presentation as well as the unusual quality of Mr. Fast's writing, it becomes something new, a book to be hailed with joy and read for pure pleasure and excitement….
The subject of his book is, as stated, the remnant of the Cheyennes in their terrible retreat in 1878, which sounds remote enough in all conscience; but the unique narrative method brings out clearly for even the least understanding reader the place that this incident occupies in the formation of the American scene. Mr. Fast tells his story entirely through white men. Although he gathered plenty of information for his book among the Cheyennes themselves, at no time does he enter into an Indian's mind. Thus baldly stated this sounds like a serious fault. It is not….
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Fast, Howard (Melvin) 1914–: Critical Essay by Oliver La Farge Access Pass.
