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.

In the following essay, Helstern investigates the ways in which white masculinity gets constructed in the Nick Adams stories.

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...