SOURCE: "Hamlin Garland's Indians and the Quality of Civilized Life," in The Critical Reception of Hamlin Garland: 1891-1978, Charles L. P. Silet, Robert E. Welch, and Richard Boudreau, eds., The Whitston Publishing Company, 1985, pp. 426-39.

Henry Nash Smith on the Importance of Garland's Short Fiction:

Garland's early stories are not a literary achievement of the first or even of the second rank, but they mark the end of a long evolution in attitudes. It had at last become possible to deal with the Western farmer in literature as a human being instead of seeing him through a veil of literary convention, class prejudice, or social theory.

Henry Nash Smith, in his Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Vintage Books, 1950.

[In the following essay, Davis argues that the stories in The Book of the American Indian and the novel The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop reflect...