What interests me aboout Twain's racial attitudes is the apparent
inconsistency
between his views on blacks and Indians.  I am an ethnohistorian and Twain
fan
and am exquisitely uncomfortable with my hero's characterization of Indians
as
degraded savages.  Yet this is the same man who wrote the great anti-slavery
novel, _Huckleberry Finn_.

Alan Reese suggests that Twain had little contact with Indians, but this
isn't
exactly the case.  The Hannibal of Twain's youth was only a few decades past
the frontier stage and Indians would have been a common sight.  Ditto for
Virginia City, where Indians camped on the outskirts and caged handouts from
the miners.

I think that part of the answer lies in the kind of Indians Twain met.  He
never experienced a healthy and independent Indian culture.  The natives who
came to Hanibal were probably either traders or drunks ala Indian Joe.  And
the
Paiutes and other Great Basin peoples he encountered lived at an extremely
low
level of technology, digging for roots and mice and holding communal hunts
for
rabbits.  Small wonder they found the castoffs of a mining camp more
attractive
than the scant provisions of the high desert.

The point is that although probably *thought* he knew Indians very well, his
experience was limited to a few defeated peoples.  Maybe this is why he
showed so little sympathy to Native Americans in his writings.

Larry Cebula
College of William and Mary