Details
[CLEMENS, SAMUEL LANGHORNE]. DODGE, Colonel RICHARD IRVING. Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years' Personal Experience among the Red Men of the Great West...Introduction by General [William Tecumseh] Sherman. Hartford: A.D. Worthington...1883. Thick 8vo, 653 pp., original brown cloth, binding broken (needs rebacking). Second edition (the first was issued the previous year) of this comprehensive study of the Plains Indians by a sympathetic army officer who was aid-de-camp to General Sherman, illustrated, FROM MARK TWAIN'S LIBRARY -- A SOURCE BOOK FOR "HUCKLEBERRY FINN" -- WITH VERY EXTENSIVE ANNOTATIONS BY HIM: SOME 366 SEPARATE ANNOTATIONS TOTALLING APPROXIMATELY 1418 WORDS (virtually all in pencil) on 167 pages, with underlinings and marginal markings in pencil on nearly all of these pages plus another 21 pages. Howes D403; Gribben, pp. 196-197.
The most copiously annotated of any book from Twain's library to appear on the market in quite some time (including the large number of his annotated books in the Estelle Doheny Collection). Gribben records that both this copy of Our Wild Indians and of another Dodge work, The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants (New York, 1877), "were listed as having been purchased on 14 July 1884...Twain 'chiefly depended upon Dodge's book' [Our Wild Indians] for information about Indian depravity in writing 'Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians' in 1884. He also borrowed information about Indian religious beliefs, the Germaine massacre, prairie fog, the waterspout phenomenon, and the Indian' custom of not harming travelers believed to be insane..." When Clemens had ordered the book in a letter of 6 July 1884 to his business agent Charles L. Webster, he "explained that he planned to 'take Huck Finn out there' to the plains and mountains" (Gribben).
A few of the Clemens annotations: on p. 30, next to a passage about "an Indian [able] to make himself invisible as air," Twain has written: "Jim" (a Huckleberry Finn reference); "Killing a husband and child is no impairment of respectability" (p. 81); "We have to keep our God placated with prayers, & even then we are never sure of him -- how much higher & finer is the Indian God" (p. 108); "The Indian's Bad God is the twin of our only God; his Good God is better than any heretofore devised by man" (p. 109); "Our illogical God is all-powerful in name, but impotent in fact; the Great Spirit is not all-powerful, but does the very best he can for his Injun and does it free of charge" (p. 112); "[Indian] women do all the work" (p. 144); "Indians & [biblical period] Hebrews (by command of God), practisers of massacre" (p. 524; "The Indians & the 'chosen people' kill the men & save the women & girls for lechery" (p. 525). Gribben records two copies of Dodge's The Plains of the Great West in Clemens's library, but neither is really annotated.
Provenance: Samuel Langhorne Clemens sale, New York, Anderson, February 1911, lot 132 (with sale label pasted to inside front cover attesting that this book is from Clemens's Library, signed by the literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine).
The most copiously annotated of any book from Twain's library to appear on the market in quite some time (including the large number of his annotated books in the Estelle Doheny Collection). Gribben records that both this copy of Our Wild Indians and of another Dodge work, The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants (New York, 1877), "were listed as having been purchased on 14 July 1884...Twain 'chiefly depended upon Dodge's book' [Our Wild Indians] for information about Indian depravity in writing 'Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians' in 1884. He also borrowed information about Indian religious beliefs, the Germaine massacre, prairie fog, the waterspout phenomenon, and the Indian' custom of not harming travelers believed to be insane..." When Clemens had ordered the book in a letter of 6 July 1884 to his business agent Charles L. Webster, he "explained that he planned to 'take Huck Finn out there' to the plains and mountains" (Gribben).
A few of the Clemens annotations: on p. 30, next to a passage about "an Indian [able] to make himself invisible as air," Twain has written: "Jim" (a Huckleberry Finn reference); "Killing a husband and child is no impairment of respectability" (p. 81); "We have to keep our God placated with prayers, & even then we are never sure of him -- how much higher & finer is the Indian God" (p. 108); "The Indian's Bad God is the twin of our only God; his Good God is better than any heretofore devised by man" (p. 109); "Our illogical God is all-powerful in name, but impotent in fact; the Great Spirit is not all-powerful, but does the very best he can for his Injun and does it free of charge" (p. 112); "[Indian] women do all the work" (p. 144); "Indians & [biblical period] Hebrews (by command of God), practisers of massacre" (p. 524; "The Indians & the 'chosen people' kill the men & save the women & girls for lechery" (p. 525). Gribben records two copies of Dodge's The Plains of the Great West in Clemens's library, but neither is really annotated.
Provenance: Samuel Langhorne Clemens sale, New York, Anderson, February 1911, lot 132 (with sale label pasted to inside front cover attesting that this book is from Clemens's Library, signed by the literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine).