The version of The Surrounded published in 1936 shows McNickle to be absolutely in control of his language, a point made by Birgit Hans in the article on McNickle in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 175.

McNickle writes spare, exact, and visual description of settings, characters, and actions. He reveals characters deftly through action and speech. He selects an omniscient point of view to narrate the story of Archilde's return to meet his fate. His thirty-four chapters take us from Archilde's return from Portland, Oregon, to the family ranch in western Montana to his arrest in the novel's final scene. He makes effective use of flashbacks to provide the historical background of the principal figures in the novel. His most notable technical device, however, as James Ruppert argues in his useful Western Writers monograph, is a deftly managed parallel structure that highlights the clash of the two cultures&mdash...