Scalping times
Sir : It is puzzling that Mr Waugh, who admits that he is `no close student of Indian affairs,' should be chosen to review three books on the American Indian rather than, say, Sir Denis Brogan (12 July).
Mr Waugh spends a long paragraph wittily deciding to allow George E. Hyde's book on George Bent to be genuine. He is clearly un- aware that Mr Hyde—who died last February in Omaha, Nebraska—is regarded as one of the leading authorities on the American Indian, and that some of his books are standard works, Red Cloud's Folk among them.
Mr Waugh assails the American Heritage Book of Indians, which is a point of view, jet he writes that 'the sole purpose (my italics) bf the Indian wars 'was to capture redskin women and children for sale into slavery ant prostitn. tion,' a statement so remarkable that one can only suppose he skimmed the book and hap- pened to alight on the horrifying section devoted to the fate of California's Indians—and then produced a simplification. In fact, there was no `sole purpose'—of the many discreditable reasons for the wars, land hunger was the chief.
Mr Waugh rightly praises Father Point's magnificent Wilderness Kingdom, but for the general reader the Heritage book, despite the generalisations which creep into any work of such huge scope, is of even more value.
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