SOURCE: “Frederic Remington's Anglo-Saxon Indian” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 22-27.

In the following essay, Randall discusses painter Frederic Remington's ambivalent view toward the western Indian in his novel John Ermine of the Yellowstone.

Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, in which he “tried to fashion a narrative of the conquest of the American West as the victims experienced it,”¹ suggests in his introduction that his white American audience, who are accustomed to looking westward, read this book facing eastward. This good advice is perfectly consonant with our modern fashion of regarding our history not as a consensus, but as a series of confrontations in which the “good guys” often lose. In this instance they were those natural ecologists, the Indians. An example of an author who took their side is a minor but interesting writer who not only painted and...