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