because of the economic and social complexities created by modern reservation life, is infinitely more colorful and kaleidoscopic than that of the old romantic days. In this transitional type of the Original American there is a rugged charm distinctive of the New World, and of the race of pioneers that struggled here to beat back the wilderness and to fling out the borders of a new civilization. About this bronze figure, the symbol of our vanished West and of our beaten borderlands, hovers a wild poetic beauty as peculiarly American in fragrance as the redolence of burning pine, or the odor of a cornfield after rain.
Beneath the drab surface of the modern transitional type of Indian in his semi-civilized setting of the reservation there is comedy, cosmic tragedy, and a wealth of literary materials that are epic in sweep. Consider the pathos of his desperate struggle of three centuries to stem the tide of a subtle, irresistible civilization, to withstand the ravages of the white man's diseases, to beat off the packs of astute grafters who were ever ready to pounce upon him as wolves upon a wounded deer. In the great drama enacted in the American wilderness these bronze stoics have played every rôle,—hero and villain, hunter and hunted, victor and vanquished; yesterday defiant, imperious, battling victoriously with naked hands against storm and wind and snow and cyclone, against man and beast and hunger and pestilence; today poverty-stricken, servile, making their exit in the West and the North, a handful of broken people, a thin line of bedraggled figures in the twilight, straggling across the desert
