SOURCE: Helstern, Linda Lizut. “Indians, Woodcraft, and the Construction of White Masculinity: The Boyhood of Nick Adams.” The Hemingway Review 20, no. 1 (fall 2000): 61-78.

Indians, to use the common but problematic term, captured Ernest Hemingway's imagination at a very early age. His first full sentence—“‘I don't know Buffalo Bill’”—was duly recorded by his mother in 1901. He would soon assert, “‘I not a Dutch dolly, I Pawnee Bill. Bang. I shoot Fweetee’” (cited in Baker 4-5). The little boy, who also acted out scenes from Longfellow's Hiawatha with his sister in the role of Minnehaha, had already seen his first wild west show—Pawnee Bill's Historical Wild West and Indian Exposition—by the time he was two (Baker 4-5). The fantasy of becoming “the White Chief of the Pawnees” was one the young Hemingway undoubtedly shared with many of his generation, for the number of Wild West shows touring as family entertainment reached its all-time high in the first years of the 20th century (Russell 11; 68). Here, in fictional re-creations of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the massacre at Wounded Knee, Indians were both the savage enemy and, with their values but not their warrior instincts restructured, scouts who joined the cavalry to save civilization from the Indians (Russell 53).

Given their mass audience appeal, it is perhaps not surprising to find Indians at the heart of the decade's purported solution to the “boy problem”: in prototypical American youth organizations, Indians were formally implicated in the construction of white masculinity. Hemingway follows the trend of American popular culture when in the Nick Adams stories he frames the discourse of boyhood in terms of the discourse of the Indian. Indians appear as major characters in four of Hemingway's canonical short stories—“Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,” “Ten Indians,” and “Fathers and Sons”—all stories of the very young Nick Adams or his very young son. And in “The Light of the World,” the only other story published during Hemingway's lifetime where Indians appear, the putative Nick admits to being just seventeen (SS [The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway] 387).

The idea of turning American youth into American Indians, but only “the best Indians,” was conceived by naturalist and writer Ernest Thompson Seton in 1901, the same year Hemingway saw Pawnee Bill, “the White Chief of the Pawnees.” Determined to protect his estate in Cos Cob, Connecticut and its wildlife from marauding teenagers, Seton invited the local boys for a weekend of camping. They readily embraced Seton's offer to teach them Indian ways, and so began both the restructuring of their personal values and the Woodcraft League of America. In 1902, Seton began to refine his idea in a series of monthly columns for the Ladies Home Journal called “Ernest Thompson Seton's Boys,” directed primarily at readers under the age of fourteen (Keller 163-65; Seton, July 1902, 17). By 1910, when the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated, the Woodcraft Indians enjoyed a nationwide membership of 100,000 and had already become the basis for Robert Baden Powell's British Boy Scouts, as well as several American boys' organizations (Keller 169-70).¹

Seton originally targeted boys between twelve and twenty for the Woodcraft Indians. Tribes were run democratically with the assistance of older boys, who could become Guides at age eighteen, and adult advisors, known first as “Medicine Men” and later as “Head Guides” (Seton, Manual 10-11; Seton, Woodcraft 20). Seton formulated his original program of activities in consultation with Dr. Charles Eastman, a Lakota graduate of the Boston University Medical School (Keller 164). One of the most visible examples of the “civilized Indian” and a prime spokesmen for Indian assimilation into white culture, in 1902 Eastman published his first book, Indian Boyhood. A testament to Eastman's pride in his Lakota heritage, the book had already been serialized in St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks (Wilson 131).²

Although no evidence suggests that Ernest Hemingway was a member of the Woodcraft Indians, his personal library did include the 1917 edition of Seton's organizational bible, The Woodcraft Manual for Boys,³ and the 1918 British pamphlet, Woodcraft, in which Seton and unnamed editors delineated the progressive evolutionist philosophy of child development at the heart of the Woodcraft movement (Reynolds 180-81).⁴ The date of the manual may be significant. In 1917, Hemingway could have qualified as a Guide, although ultimately, it was his sister Marcelline who, as a Camp Fire leader in the early 1920s, would follow her father and grandfather's footsteps in youth work (National Portrait Gallery).

Altogether, Hemingway owned six individual titles by Ernest Thompson Seton, published between 1909 and 1921, and a set of collected works published in 1927 as The Library of Pioneering and Woodcraft. The total ranks Seton among Hemingway's favorite writers, a company including Turgenev, Mark Twain, Ezra Pound, and naturalist William Henry Hudson. Hemingway's books by Seton span the range of his writing—children's fiction, animal lore, and practical woodcraft—and together provide important insight into the anti-nationalist and anti-materialist value structure that grounded the Woodcraft organization. Seton's philosophy, placing true civilization in the realm of the primitive, is most succinctly stated in his signed Preface to the 1915 edition of The Woodcraft Manual: “It was Woodcraft that originally constructed man out of brutish material, and Woodcraft may well save him from decay” (v).

To Seton, saving civilization meant saving Indian ways from extinction. If Eastman saw the Indian's ultimate survival in the ability to adopt white ways, Seton saw the loss of traditional tribal lifeways as certain death for the race. The only hope for the Indian lay in incorporating tribal skills and values into white society: reverse assimilation, if you will. Seton saw his project of training boys in the ways of Indians as a step beyond James Fenimore Cooper's mere recognition of the import of woodcraft. Cooper, according to Seton, was “content to stand with us afar off and point it out as something to be worshipped—to point it out and let it die” (Woodcraft Manual 203-04). Seton counted himself among the “the Red-man's friends,” who responded when asked in his fable “The Indian and the Angel of Commerce,” “… what shall save the Indian, with his noble lesson of simple life and unavarice?”:

Nothing! He was doomed; he was dying; for he stood in the Angel's way. But we, his friends learned wisdom. … He shall not die. His lesson—of the highest in our time—shall live and grow, preserved by the awful Angel, upheld by the pitiless Angel.

(Woodmyth n. pag.)

In her perceptive article “Screaming through Silence: The Violence of Race in ‘Indian Camp’ and ‘The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,’” Amy Strong examines Hemingway's representations of race with particular attention to their implications for the exercise of power. In the latter story, and specifically in the characters of Dr. Adams and Dick Boulton, she delineates an instability of racial identity that seems to her to anticipate current essentialist/constructionist debates. In “Indian Camp,” however, she suggests that race is merely “a biological feature” (20). I would like to suggest that there is also an instability of racial identity in “Indian Camp,” and one closely tied to Seton's “The Indian and the Angel of Commerce.” Both of these stories interrogate the discourse of assimilation, pointing up the evils of assimilation for Indians and the import of “reverse assimilation” for whites.

“Indian Camp” is, first and foremost, a story about the power of medicine, set in the context of a culture that traditionally accords such power the highest respect, though Indian medicine here has clearly failed. Despite two days of labor with the support of the most experienced women in the community, the Indian woman is unable to deliver her child. But this is not where the story begins. It begins at a white campsite that would have been more familiar to readers in the 1920s, the decade when membership in the Woodcraft Indians peaked, than it has been to later critics (Seton-Barber). The Woodcraft Manual Hemingway owned defines “Indian camp” as a synonym for gee-string camp, the preferred style of all-male primitive camping where activities were carried out with the bare minimum of protective gear (186).

Seton's 1911 juvenile novel, Rolf in the Woods, which Hemingway owned, sheds light on another question raised by “Indian Camp”: Why is Nick taken across the lake to begin with? The novel tells the story of an orphaned teen who runs away from an abusive foster family to grow up Indian under the guidance of Quonab, the last of his tribe. To earn money for their wilderness outfit, Rolf and Quonab put themselves to work for a Dutch farmer on the far edge of civilization. When the farmer's wife goes into labor, Quonab is sent paddling urgently across the lake in a birchbark canoe to fetch the closest neighbor woman, despite the reputation of Indians as “‘drunken good for nothings.’” The farmer, befuddled and teary, sends his three fearful children with Quonab. Why they, like Nick, should journey across the lake at all is never clear, although Quonab returns in an hour with the woman and, presumably, the children. The vignette ends with the miracle of the mother's safe delivery, and Seton's exaltation of the sisterly solace given to “womanhood beyond the reach of skillful human help” (72).

If the proximity of “skillful human help” is a small miracle in “Indian Camp,” the need to summon the white medicine man is the most obvious sign of the decay of traditional Indian culture. Each act performed by an Indian in this story is inept or incompetent, beginning with the Indian oarsmen who row back across the lake “with quick choppy strokes” (91). This is not power rowing but wasted effort. The young husband who has lain in his bunk for three days, having cut his foot badly with his ax, is even more inept than the oarsmen with the tool of his trade. But that is precisely the problem: he is sufficiently assimilated to have a trade. From the location of the camp in a cutover area along the logging road, the reader can infer that he is a wage worker in the lumber business, not a woodsman in the traditional sense.

Still, the Indian husband smokes a pipe rather than a cigar, the traditional symbol of white male politics and privilege. The pipe, according to Hemingway, was the Indian way. In “Sepi Jingan,” one of Hemingway's high school stories, Billy Tabeshaw not only savors his favorite brand of pipe tobacco but can distinguish rival brands by their smell (Montgomery 50-52).

Critical discussions of “Indian Camp,” most notably Joseph Flora's, point out the historic role of tobacco in Indian-white relationships. The cigars handed out by George suggest the complexity of unstable identity markers in this story. A white commercial product derived from the Indian's gift, the cigars are now being given back to the Indians, it might be suggested, as payment for their labor. George, who passes the time smoking as he waits for the doctor, gives cigars to the two oarsmen only when their work is done and both boats have landed. He thus configures himself as a white boss, a man of power racially akin to the doctor. George has shared the doctor's passenger status, an honor and mark of privilege accorded the doctor based upon his skill, although he is as capable as the Indians of distance rowing. George has no special knowledge to share, only cigars.⁵ Ultimately, sharing his tobacco with the Indians makes George just another male in the group, a role he enacts during the operation when he and three Indians share the task of holding the pregnant woman immobile.

The doctor, seemingly free of commercial taint, stands out as the only tobacco-free adult male in “Indian Camp.” He is thereby the only appropriate role model for a young boy who is just learning the Woodcraft lessons of health and respect for the body. Seton does not specifically address smoking in the 1917 Woodcraft Manual for Boys, but he had done so previously, and in one Ladies Home Journal column confided to readers that he himself had never indulged in the habit (“Ernest,” October 1902, 14). Indeed, the tobacco problem was of such concern at the beginning of this century that Hemingway's first minister made smoking the topic of one of his children's sermons published in the local Oak Park newspaper (Grimes 41).

The Indian women are no more competent in their work than the men. The laboring woman cannot deliver her child, and the older women are powerless to help her. The arrival of the doctor's entourage is greeted by the screams of labor, precisely what white readers have been taught to expect from any laboring woman. However, this white gender mark runs contrary to the stereotype of the Indian able to withstand torture silently, with no hint of emotion, with what Joseph Flora calls “an admirable stoicism” (25).

In “Indian Camp,” such stoicism is the doctor's stock-in-trade, and the first lesson he must teach his son in his role as medicine guide. When Nick asks for something to make the woman stop screaming, his father gives him a lesson in values: the screams are not important. Among the dozen moral precepts he sets forth, Ernest Thompson Seton enjoins Woodcraft boys first to “Be Brave; for fear is in the foundation of all ill; unflinchingness is strength” and second to “Be Silent. It is harder to keep silence than to speak in the hour of trial, but in the end it is stronger” (Woodcraft Manual 25).⁶ As the night goes on, Nick will witness two examples of behavior through which to interrogate his father's position: George's outcry and the young Indian's silent suicide.

Only the young husband in his bunk is more stoical—and therefore presumably more masculine and more Indian—than the doctor, as he silently withstands the self-inflicted pain of slitting his own throat. Yet because in our culture the act of suicide traditionally registers as more cowardly than brave, a term that places us squarely in the discourse of racialized masculinity, this act calls into question just how Indian this young husband is—and just how masculine. By contrast, the young wife succeeds in biting George, even in the throes of labor as she is held down by four men. The bite may be interpreted as the agonized, hysterical response of a wounded animal, totally instinctive, but it can also be viewed as active self-defense, showing the Indian woman to be of the braver, rather than the weaker, sex. George's angry “‘Damn squaw bitch’”—at once sexist and racist—is anything but stoic (SS 93). Here his outcry merely draws laughter from the Indian men. Whatever its emotional source, perhaps embarrassment, perhaps derision, the laughter itself calls into question the notion of the unemotional, wooden Indian, as does the bite that occasioned it.

Because the young father's suicide dwarfs even the horror of the primitive Caesarean, one must acknowledge that among traditional Native Americans the idea of suicide is perhaps more unthinkable than it has ever been in white society. Given the suicide rate among young Indian men today, it is important to emphasize the word traditional. Donald St. John read “Indian Camp” aloud to the Willises, an elderly Ottawa couple who had lived in Michigan during the period when the Boultons lived at the Indian camp near the Hemingway cottage on Walloon Lake. After St. John finished, Mr. Willis commented apologetically, “‘Indian no have heart,’” as he “pulled his shoulders together in a little shiver.” His wife affirmed, “‘They not kill selves for anything. Indian no commit suicide. No believe in suicide. Not like Indian. … Only white man commit suicide’” (St. John 82-83).

No definitive reason for the Indian husband's suicide can be determined from the facts provided by Hemingway, who allows the motives of this subaltern husband, to use Gayatri Spivak's term, to remain opaque. We know only that he turns his face to the wall at the moment when the doctor pronounces his wife's screams unimportant. In giving up, the young husband, however, embodies a key and almost forgotten stereotype of the American Indian, his “timidity or defeat in the face of White advances and weaponry” (Berkhofer 28-29).

As racial instability manifests itself in the characters of the doctor and the husband, the white Indian and the Indian white, the plot of “Indian Camp” ironically enacts the assimilationist philosophy—“Kill the Indian. Save the child.”—of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle served as the prototype of federal Indian education for nearly four decades. Pratt's voice resounded through discussions of government Indian policy from his first educational experiments with Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches incarcerated at Fort Marion, Florida in the mid-1870s, until his death in March 1924, and beyond (Adams 37-38). He advocated total immersion in white culture at boarding schools far off the reservation as the only means for inculcating radical lifestyle changes into Indian children.

Pratt's philosophy received its greatest public exposure in the glory days of the Carlisle football program, from 1903-1913, when during most seasons the Indians went virtually undefeated against such prestigious opponents as Penn, Yale, and Army. Though the Carlisle curriculum was at the advanced elementary rather than the college level, the football team stood as living proof that the Indian could be whiter than white, playing the white man's sport and beating him at his own game (Adams 183-185). In The Torrents of Spring, Hemingway explicitly invokes Carlisle football (100-2). When in “Indian Camp” he likens the doctor's post-operative elation to that of football players in the dressing room after a game, Hemingway subtly places his story in the popular discourse of assimilation, while suggesting who the real winner is.⁷

The white world, after all, sanctions the doctor's power. That he operates without anaesthetic, even in an emergency, strikes us as barbaric, but I would suggest that the savagery is calculated. From the early nineteenth century on, as Roy Harvey Pearce notes in Savagism and Civilization, such torture had been the Indian's stock-in-trade in American popular fiction such as R. M. Bird's 1837 novel Nick for the Woods (196-236). Here, torture serves as an important marker of the “savage” identity the doctor has assimilated.

The primitive Caesarean performed by the doctor represents the most advanced medical technology of the first decade of the 20th century, and was almost certainly one of the procedures covered in the post-graduate obstetrics courses Clarence Hemingway attended at the New York Lying-In Hospital in 1908 and the Mayo Clinic in 1910 (Baker 10-11). Abdominal deliveries had been performed for centuries, but until the late 19th century, these had always meant the death of the mother. Originally, Caesareans were performed only after the mother's death and only by a priest. The modern medical protocol for the Caesarean was developed in Europe in the late 1880s. The first such operation in the United States was performed in 1894, but the procedure remained highly controversial for another two decades. Unlike the high forceps delivery, the Caesarean was never used in home births (Shorter 160-66). Ultimately, it was the availability of this birthing option that shifted public favor from home to hospital birth, which accounted for just five percent of all deliveries in the United States at the turn of the last century (Mitford 54). Dr. Adams's Caesarean—Hemingway's much-commented-upon spelling follows the standard spelling utilized in early medical textbooks describing the procedure—is, indeed, one for the record books (Mitford 45).

The doctor's thoroughgoing skill with a jackknife marks the doctor as a master of both woodcraft and technology, more Indian than the young husband, who uses the traditional tool of the barber surgeon, his straight razor, to cut his throat. The jackknife was the implement Seton endorsed above all others for its all-purpose utility to campers (Woodcraft Manual 220). Nick carries invisible wounds from both knife and razor when he and his father leave with the first morning light. Yet his young soul will be healed, as Ernest Thompson Seton would ardently desire, through contact with the pristine natural world. At sunrise on the lake, Nick's medicine guide himself rows their boat back where they came from, almost but not quite beyond the reach of civilization—performing yet one more task more skillfully than the semi-civilized Indians.

While the Angel of Commerce remains veiled in “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife” speaks explicitly to Seton's “awful Angel” and does so in the language of commercialized woodcraft and Biblical spirituality. In the context of his own society, the doctor is primarily concerned with potentially useful wood rotting on the beach, not the decay of moral fiber. Concern for the morality of the doctor's utilitarian pragmatism is left to the Indian lumberjacks he hires—or more specifically, to the half-breed among them. Dick Boulton speaks both English and Ojibway fluently.⁸ He understands the white man's value structure so well that he can turn the doctor's own arguments against him, as Dick does when he begins baiting the doctor about the logs he has stolen. In traditional Native American cultures where the natural world is not objectified and resources have no owners (though songs may), such an argument is specious. It works only because private ownership, the underpinning of commercial capitalism, and indeed the very notion of civilization, is given credence in the Biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.”⁹

The opening of “The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife” enacts the assimilation of the Indian into the white world of industrial technology. Even as Dick Boulton and his crew emerge from the Indian camp, they carry an array of tools that clearly ally these Indians to the local lumber enterprise, which includes not only a mill but the steamer Magic, as close as the white man can come to Indian “medicine,” it would seem. Through Boulton, Hemingway interrogates one of the most common Indian stereotypes: the thieving Indian, a stereotype that likely arose through a difference of cultural opinion about the appropriate use of available resources. Here, positioned in a domestic/commercial context rather than the wilderness, the thieving Indian becomes a thieving white man.

The doctor is not willing to admit his thievery, however. Culturally cast as the epitome of ethical behavior, he refuses to brook even the hint of unethical behavior on his own part. Still, his veneer of civilization does not allow the doctor to escape identification as a savage. Absolutely refusing to accept the strict logic of biblical teaching, he turns red—to be furious is to be Indian—and dismisses his hired help. The idea of “savagery,” defined in part by its opposition to the Bible, was a legacy America inherited simultaneously with notions of thrift and the capitalist accumulation of wealth. Hemingway's savage is a capitalist employer with the power to declare a lock-out. Still, Boulton is not afraid to stand up to the doctor when he cannot ameliorate his anger. Moreover, standing his ground makes Boulton happy. Although the doctor sizes up the odds and walks away, turning his back on the prospect of a physical fight, he remains “on the warpath” even as he returns to the house.

Inside, there seems to be more concern with the business of medicine than with healing. The voice that speaks first is not the doctor's but his wife's. Her question—“‘Aren't you going back to work, dear?’”—serves as a subtle reminder of the Protestant work ethic (SS 101). This woman is the voice of civilization in the wilderness: she speaks from a place of darkness, as Hemingway tells us not once but four times. The doctor's wife treats him like a boy who never learns, who must be routinely chastised and reminded to behave in accordance with Christian values. Her tone becomes ever more strident until the doctor reloads his shotgun.

There will be no frontier justice here, however, and no muscular Christianity either, for the doctor's wife speaks the language of Christian Science, a faith not only founded but institutionalized by a woman. Mary Baker Eddy, who saw Christian Science, first and foremost, as the revelation of the Motherhood of God, was known publicly as “Mother” to a growing contingent of the faithful until 1902 when the practice was held up for ridicule by Mark Twain and Eddy forbade public use of the term (Gottschalk 52-53; 106). If Twain did not quite call Eddy the “petticoat pope” in his extensive writings on Christian Science, he came very close. In a single paragraph, he compared her stature both to the Eiffel tower and the giant sequoia (Twain 78). Indeed, in matters concerning the Mother Church, any request Eddy voiced to her followers had the power of a command (Gottschalk 170-72).

The doctor finally tells his wife an abbreviated story about his row with Dick Boulton, portraying Boulton as a freeloader who doesn't want to work off a major medical debt. Hemingway has already told us that Boulton is a half-breed and that “many of the farmers around the lake believed he was really a white man” (SS 100), for the fictional half-breed has always been considered heir to the worst traits of two cultures, to be trusted by neither. The doctor sees only the Boulton who embodies the stereotyped Indian's laziness and aggression.

Boulton's companion, Billy Tabeshaw, uncorrupted by any knowledge of English, stands out in sharp contrast. He is utterly non-confrontational, timid, and fat. Billy's timidity may suggest that he is cowed by the white world and the white man's position of authority, but may also be viewed as the expression of his innate civility, an aspect of the noble savage. If Billy Tabeshaw is no savage, however, neither is he very noble. The tenor of Boulton's confrontation with the doctor makes Tabeshaw sweat. Before disappearing into the woods, Billy returns to fasten the gate that Boulton has left open (SS 101). When the doctor ultimately follows the Indians into the woods, where it may be possible to regain his own civility, he takes his wife's parting shot, a message for Nick. Despite its seeming offhandedness, this request—“‘If you see Nick, dear, will you tell him his mother wants to see him?’”—carries the weight of a command, its oft-noted syntax singularly appropriate to a relationship between social unequals, that mistress and servant, perhaps, or parent and child (SS 102). The doctor's answer seems to be a disrespectful bang of the door, but he quickly apologizes and does deliver the message.

In the woods, Nick, cool and thoroughly civilized as he reads a book, already understands how to circumvent imperious demands. He will happily obey his father if not his mother, thereby keeping alight, even in his disobedience, the third ray in the Woodcraft Lamp of Fortitude: “Obey; for obedience means self-control, which is the sum of the law” (Seton, Woodcraft Manual 25). In the woods where, according to Seton, mankind learned bravery and independence, Nick asserts sufficient knowledge of woodcraft to become his father's guide, and together man and boy light out to find their salvation in the realm of the black squirrel.

The oblique treatment of sexuality in the 1917 Woodcraft Manual for Boys is consistent with the tenor of the father-son talks in “Ten Indians” and “Fathers and Sons.” In a page of guidance in the manual's health section (which, in the main, suggests the Guide and other respected adults as sources of information), Dr. Valeria Parker speaks not of sexuality but of reproduction, asserting that as the third manifestation of the Life Force, reproduction must be controlled lest it become “a means of degradation of body, mind, and spirit, leading to destruction” (140). The language has much in common with the Prohibition rhetoric of the day, suggesting the importance of the connection between drinking and sexuality in “Ten Indians.”

Nick's loss of sexual innocence in “Ten Indians” is illuminated by considering the assimilationist thread within a story that brings racialist discourse to the fore. The notion of the inevitable doom of Indian culture grew out of the young discipline of anthropology, the same discipline that brought stereopticon slides of bare-breasted Indian maidens into the most proper Victorian parlors—pornography in the guise of scholarship (Lyman 56). That tradition continued in National Geographic, staple reading at the Hemingway household in Oak Park (Brasch and Sigman xvi).¹⁰ Even the Bobbs-Merrill illustrated Song of Hiawatha, published a year after Hemingway received his copy of the poem, included a full-page, naked Minnehaha, her bare breasts fully visible, in the midst of a field of dancing cornstalks (115). The picture illustrates the conclusion of Hiawatha's marriage feast, suggesting what Longfellow never says about Hiawatha's wedding night. In “Ten Indians,” Nick's halting question—“‘Were they happy?’”—echoes Longfellow's circumspect lines concluding Hiawatha's wedding: “Thus the wedding banquet ended,/ And the wedding guests departed,/ Leaving Hiawatha happy/ With the night and Minnehaha” (SS 335; Longfellow 111).

What adolescents know about sexuality and how adults discuss it with them stands at the heart of “Ten Indians.” In the early decades of this century, sexuality was certainly not a “proper” subject for conversation in mixed company. Mrs. Garner upholds notions of propriety in the family wagon—but only when the conversation turns to racial slurs. Although she plays the role of disciplinarian when Carl equates Indian and skunk, Mrs. Garner does nothing to discourage the boys' talk about girls with all that is implied. While her husband gently guides the conversation to protect Nick's ego, tempering the talk with a little man-to-man advice, she offers teasing corrections that suggest dimensions other than propriety in relationships between men and women. Whatever private joke Mrs. Garner shares with her husband leads Joe Garner to claim, “‘I got a good girl,’” in a syntactic equation that balances his wife and the Indian girl, Prudence Mitchell. This is not the first sexual double entendre the boys miss, for they are generally as innocent about sex as they have been about drunkenness.

When Nick's response to his father's observations reveals his more-than-passing interest in Prudie, Nick is still the innocent. He expects an exclusive relationship. When his father suggests that Prudie fulfills the stereotype of the promiscuous Indian girl and that Nick has a rival, the boy is reduced to tears. In “Ten Indians,” this gender stereotype is balanced against the equally well-known stereotype of the drunken Indian. Early in the trip, Joe Garner keeps a count of drunks, all of them male. During the second leg of the trip, after Nick and the Garners leave the lights of Petoskey behind, the conversation turns to Indian girls. If drinking has a clear link to the white man's world, sexual behavior remains close to camp.

Like the Indians so bluntly described by his father, Nick has gone to town to celebrate the Fourth of July, the national holiday that speaks above all others to white sovereignty and Indian defeat. Nick's posture in bed, where he finally admits that his heart must be broken, duplicates the posture of the ninth Indian passed by the Garner wagon, the Indian sleeping face down in the wheel rut. Alcohol, while not yet a part of Nick's experience, is typically used in Hemingway's fiction as “pain killer,” the remedy of choice for broken hearts. If this story is true to its title, borrowed, as Paul Smith was the first to observe, from the popular children's counting rhyme, we should, indeed, expect to find “ten little Injun boys.”¹¹ Nick, immobilized and alone, like the other nine Indians, is likewise the victim of his Fourth of July celebration. And like the typical drunk, he discovers when he wakes up that he cannot for some time remember what happened to him. The forgetfulness Nick achieves, however, comes only in ways appropriate to his age, ways that Ernest Thompson Seton would endorse, through sleep and through the restless energy of the natural world—“a big wind blowing and waves running high up on the beach” (SS 336).

The lessons of the Indian, as Seton explained, had inevitably to be lived out in a white world. This transition becomes a remembered rite of passage for the adult Nick Adams of “Fathers and Sons.” The moment that marks the transition is the moment he becomes conscious that the ultimate assimilation is miscegenation. Nick separates himself emotionally from his Indian girl—the girl who taught him the pleasures of sexuality—at the instant when her brother mentions a possible sexual pairing between Nick's older sister and their older brother. Nick instantly assumes the role of Indian killer and defender of white womanhood, apparently using one of his three very real and very precious twenty-gauge shotgun shells to blow an imaginary hole through “that half-breed bastard Eddie Gilby” (SS 494). Innocent play has taken a new turn, and Nick adds the cruelty of scalping and attack dogs to his revenge scenario, with his new-found white power given credence by Trudy's pleas for mercy.

With the power to execute, however, Nick also discovers the power to pardon: “‘All right. … I won't kill him unless he comes around the house.’” At this moment, Hemingway asserts that “Nick had killed Eddie Gilby, then pardoned him his life, and he was a man now” (SS 494). Before he will consent to another sexual encounter with Trudy (having already made her “‘feel good’”), Nick sends Billy away (SS 494). Sexual relations will henceforth be conducted in private, according to the white man's way, familial and childhood innocence banished. The moment is a legacy from Nick's own father, from whom he has inherited the concept of sexuality as a set of “heinous crimes,” as well as an outgrown suit of underwear with its defining odor, the very garment to be divested in Ernest Thompson Seton's Indian camps. Ultimately, Nick can neither kill nor pardon his father. It takes the innocent questioning of Nick's own son, clearly raised on tales of life with the Indians, to restore Nick's father to fictive greatness, even as the boy's belief in Nick himself raises echoes of a long-ago Caesarean in an Indian camp.

Notes

1. Seton also created a program of activities for girls, publishing separate Woodcraft manuals for them. Unlike the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America, which have always been separate organizations with gendered leadership structures, Seton held the position of Chief over all Woodcraft Indians.

2. Although Hemingway was too young to be aware of either series when it was first published, his parents were regular subscribers to both St. Nicholas and the Ladies Home Journal and routinely retained back copies of periodicals. Not many years later, these particular magazines were the children's special favorites, according to Marcelline Hemingway Sanford (Brasch and Sigman xvi). In 1905, Grace Hemingway gave Ernest his own copy of Longfellow's Hiawatha, already his favorite poem—a gift that suggests the level of reading material the family found suitable for their very young children (Brasch and Sigman xviii).

3. The 1917 Woodcraft Manual for Boys, published for the Woodcraft League, reflects the new institutionalization of Seton's project, listing for the first time a National Council and giving Seton the official title of Chief. This was the first manual published after the final rupture between Seton and the Boy Scouts of America. According to his biographer, Seton had been ousted from his position as the Boy Scouts' first executive secretary in 1910, and replaced by James West, a close personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt's. Seton then held the largely honorary title of “Chief Scout” until February 1915, when organizational maneuvering precipitated by his opposition to Roosevelt's military preparedness campaign prevented Seton from being re-elected (Keller 175).

   Nationalistic patriotism was not part of the program Seton envisioned when he wrote the first Boy Scouts of America Manual of Woodcraft, Scouting, and Life-Craft (1910), based on concepts he had originated for the Woodcraft Indians. In 1906, Seton had presented a first edition of his Woodcraft manual to Robert Baden Powell, who borrowed from it heavily for his first British Scout manual, published in 1908 (Keller 165). Between 1910 and 1915, Seton played a leadership role in both the Boy Scouts of America and the Woodcraft League. After his ouster as Chief Scout, as patriotic fervor rose after the sinking of the Lusitania in April 1915, Seton became openly critical of the Boy Scouts. In a speech reported on the front page of the New York Times on 6 December 1915, Seton predicted the demise of the organization. The next day, the Times carried the Boy Scout response, again on the front page: Seton was accused “of being in harmony with the views of anarchists and radical socialists” (Keller 177). After the American declaration of war in April 1917, Seton assumed a suitably patriotic tone when he asked the boys and girls of the Woodcraft League to adopt the slogan “The hoe behind the flag,” a non-militaristic counterpoint to the Boy Scout slogan, “Be prepared” (“The Hoe”).

   Compared with previous Woodcraft manuals, the 1917 edition presents a significantly toned-down version of Seton's vision of the organization. The Introduction to the 1915 edition explicitly stated that Woodcraft “makes war on alcohol and tobacco (aiming to restrict the abusive use of alcohol, and totally abolish the cigarette)”; “does not teach money-getting, believing it unwise to cultivate avarice, our racial sin, even if we give it the euphonious name of ‘thrift’”; “is opposed to military terms and methods”; and “denounces the false patriotism which lauds evildoing because it was done by ‘our own country,’” insisting that Herod and Pilate were as noble and patriotic as the American generals at Wounded Knee (xviii, Seton's emphasis).

4. Progressive evolutionists believed that human potential could be maximized by placing children in environments that would recapitulate the evolution of the human species: the youngest children playing in a garden with pet animals (“as like as may be to the traditional garden of Eden”); older children gaining a “solid foundation of paleolithic culture” by primitive camping, preferably in rock shelters, with adult supervision; somewhat older children engaging in simple neolithic agriculture; then finally as adolescents learning the use of books and metals and passing into the modern world (Seton, Woodcraft 2).

   For Seton, the most significant moments in human evolution were learning the use of a weapon to kill for food and learning the control of fire. The Woodcraft organization explicitly sought to nurture four stages of human/individual evolution: the physical, the mental (in the evolutionary process, “nursed in the form of the hunter's cunning”), the social (with group loyalty related to enhanced hunting success), and the spiritual with fire its visible symbol.

5. Amy Strong, the only critic who entertains payment for service as George's rationale for dispensing cigars, explicitly discounts this possibility “because the doctor is obviously doing the Indian family a favor” (21). She takes the position that George derives power solely from his ability to give. In treating “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife” as a matched pair, however, Strong ignores the fact that in the second story, the doctor not only expects payment from Dick Boulton for medical services rendered to his wife but expects this payment to be rendered in kind rather than cash.

6. The twelve Woodcraft Laws set forth included: 1. Be brave. 2. Be silent. 3. Obey. 4. Be clean (in the physical sense). 5. Understand and respect your body. 6. Be the friend of all harmless wildlife. 7. Word of honor is sacred. 8. Play fair. 9. Be reverent. 10. Be kind. 11. Be helpful. 12. Be joyful. The Initiation Trials for new members emphasized laws 2, 3, and 12, stipulating that a boy maintain absolute silence for six hours either in camp or at home, give everyone encountered a smiling answer for a period of twelve hours, and “give prompt, smiling obedience” to all adults in authority for one week. New members were further required to commit themselves to an outdoor lifestyle by sleeping outside (not under roof) for three consecutive nights or ten non-consecutive nights and making a useful, traditionally Indian article (Seton, Woodcraft Manual 10-11).

7. In The Torrents of Spring, the conjunction between medicine and football establishes the context for a conversation with particular resonance for “Indian Camp.” Yogi Johnson explains war and death to two Indians he meets along the road, both, he learns later, decorated war veterans. “‘White chief heap big medicine,’” the Indians comment when Yogi begins by producing Peerless tobacco and a pocket flask for them. Yogi next establishes a common ground of experience: “War to him had been like football. American football. What they played at the colleges. Carlisle Indian School. Both the Indians nodded. They had been to Carlisle” (TOS 100-2). What follows carries the straightforward weight of profound truth, unlike anything else in the satire. In war, according to Yogi, soldiers evolve through four stages. In the first, “you were brave because you didn't think anything could hit you, because you yourself were something special, and you knew that you could never die” (TOS 104). This innocence is precisely Nick's state as his father rows him back to camp.

8. Donald St. John clarified in his interview with the Willises that the real-life Dick Boulton, whom they had personally known, spoke not Ojibway but Ottawa, like the Willises themselves. They further implied that no Ojibways lived in the Resort Township vicinity.

9. In Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, Roy Harvey Pearce traces traditional American ideas about the Indian (essentially the tenets of progressive evolutionism, which at its most extreme became Social Darwinism) to a group of 18th century Scottish philosophers and historians who equated social, technical, and moral progress. While acknowledging the virtues of the savage (courage, fortitude, eloquence, and independence), they saw the savage as limited by a culture that lacked private property and the division of labor, the marks of high civilization. Only through cooperation and the respect for hierarchy necessitated by property ownership, they felt, could the brutal appetites and tendency to ungovernable violence at the heart of a hunter/warrior society be tempered (82-88).

10. In Reading National Geographic, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins document the strategies employed by this publication in creating a vision of non-Western cultures for a middle class American readership, including the close linking of race and the female body. The underlying philosophy was a brand of progressive evolutionism, while through juxtaposition, National Geographic provided examples to invite cultural comparisons and showcase the superiority of Western culture.

11. As with most songs, the chorus, where the number of Indians increases from one to ten, is better remembered than the verses. In the stanzas themselves, the numbers, paradoxically, decrease as the song progresses, beginning when the first of the ten little Indians toddles home, and “then there were nine” (Opie 328, my emphasis). Either way, Hemingway's arithmetic works when Nick is considered as the tenth Indian.

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