SOURCE: "The Vanishing American," in The American Western Novel, College University Press, 1966, pp. 141-76.

In the following excerpt, Folsom examines Garland's treatment of Native American assimilation into Euro American society. The critic finds that most of the stories in The Book of the American Indian promote the idea that "the Indian must change, " but that "The Story of Howling Wolf" illustrates the difficulty of this process.

In many ways Hamlin Garland's Indian studies are a transition between traditional and modern literary treatments of the Indian. Both "The Silent Eaters"—a fictionalized biography of Sitting Bull—and the short stories which together make up The Book of the American Indian (1923) are written out of a feeling of indignation over unjust treatment of the Indian; and both as well have a very definite social reference which, in the weakest of the stories, deteriorates into a thinly disguised program of social...