Beyond the Outposts

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Books are queer things, mostly written by people who want to show how many ways they can tell a lie. Scratch a writer and you’ll find a liar every time. As old Chief Standing Bear used to say: “A man cannot work in two ways. He must live by his hands or by his tongue. Talk is for squaws, my son.”

But every white man, including me, is half squaw, and that’s why I’m writing this book. Partly, too, because a good many things I’ve done have been misunderstood. Everything that I put down here is fact, and I hope the doubters will come to me for the proofs. That includes you, Chuck Morris. All that I write is the truth and only half the truth, at that, because how can Indians and the prairie be packed into words?

Now that I’ve said this, I suppose that I’d better start in the usual way.

When a man writes of his own life, he generally begins with the house in which he was born and goes back to the list of his ancestors - modestly, of course, and by a sort of inference. For instance, in furnishing the hall he cannot help mentioning that the clock was given to the family by his father’s dear friend, the Duke of Abercrombie, or that the basket-hiked sword that hangs from the wall was won by his great-grandfather, Sir Ernest, at Colloden. He goes on in this way until the reader, unless he is a born fool, has to guess that there is the blue blood of an old nobility in the veins of the writer. I confess at once that my family never had a coat of arms. If it had, my grandfather, Tom Dorset, would have traded it for one dram of whiskey, and, for another dram, he would have thrown in the whole family tree. As for the house in which I was born, I cannot remember it, because to celebrate my birth there was such carrying on that the house caught fire and burned to a cinder.

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