Friends:

Great and fascinating post, Bob.  I take it that by "Our Wild Indians"
you mean Richard I. Dodge's _Thirty Three Years Among Our Wild Indians_?
 Where is Twain's copy? I am on sabbatical next semester and I feel a
road trip (or three) coming on.

I had no idea that DeQuille had ever killed an Indian.  Any details?
Fellow Virginia City newsman Alf Doten's diaries have been published, I
wonder if there are any references to the incident there.

I think that Twain's experiences in Nevada and California are a key to
understanding at least his early attitude towards Indians.  The Indians
of the Great Basin lived at the lowest level of material development of
any natives in North America.  By the 1860s they had been further
impoverished and brutalized by 100 years of slave raiding from
surrounding tribes (the captives were sold in the Spanish settlements of
New Mexico), and from the recent influx of American miners, too many of
whom saw killing Indians as good sport.

The California Gold Rush sparked the worst and most systematic campaign
of massacring Indians in American history.  The worst of the killing was
over by the time Twain arrived, but the process of justification and
whitewash were gaining steam.  I think that Twain breathed in a lot of
the racism that was around him in the far west, a racism that seemed
confirmed by first-hand observations of the shell-shocked and
bedraggaled native survivors who he saw first hand.

At the same time, several members of this list present convincing
evidence of Twain's changing attitude towards Indians in the second half
of his life.  Unfortunately, the writing projects that would have
highlighted this new attitude were never completed.

Cordially,

Larry Cebula
Missouri Southern State College