Letters, Jul. 20, 1931

Squaw

Sirs:

An Indian woman, grandmother of Vice President Curtis, is a "squaw'' (TIME, June 15, p. 13, col. 3). By the same reasoning, if any, aren't Irishmen "Micks'" and Frenchmen "Frogs"? All these terms spring from tne noble tradition of Anglo-Saxon superiority and are equally worthy of perpetuation. Is TIME deliberately slighting the "Chinks" and the "Wops"?

True, it was an Indian woman who at great peril to herself guided the Lewis & Clark Expedition, giving us the States of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. One of Grant's most trusted generals in the Civil War was an Indian "buck.'' Indians saved the Plymouth and Virginia Colo nies from starvation. Indians developed the useful plants—corn, tobacco, potatoes, rubber, chocolate, the best commercial varieties of beans and cotton, to mention only a few—that comprise five-eighths of the agricultural wealth of the world today.

So TIME may be justified in exalting Indian womanhood above all other, in delicately complimenting the nation's Vice President by calling his grandmother a "squaw." The "nigger wenches" of America may have no reason to feel hurt that TIME should call them merely "Negro women.'' TIME, as usual, is doubtless right: honor where honor is due.

CHARLES AMSDEN

Executive Secretary The Southwest Museum Los Angeles, Calif.

A distinction: "Chink," "Mick." "Wop." "Dago," "Nigger." and "wench" are words invented by Anglo-Saxons for derisive application to non-Anglo-Saxons. But Anglo-Saxons learned from Indians to call Indian women "squaws." Squaw is the Narragansett (and Algonquin) Indian word meaning "a female" just as sannnp means a male Indian, a brave. TIME will continue using "squaw." with no derision intended or conveyed.—ED.

When Colt Was King

Sirs;

You lack fine discrimination when you say under "In Reno."' June 15, "True to the canons of Wild Bill Hickok and Kit Carson. . . ." Every western writer of "westerns" knows that Hickok was a two-gun law man; one of the genuine gun fighters of the West. That Kit Carson was a "mountain man" of the fur trader period; a time before the gunslinging, gunfighting period when "Colt was King" at Dodge.

William MacLeod Raine's Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws gives you the two-gun period. Leroy Hafen's Broken Hand, a story of the famous fur trader and Indian agent Fitzpatrick, gives the code of the mountain men.

ARTHUR H. CARHART

President The Colorado Authors' League

Denver, Col.

Hollywood & David

Sirs:

In a recent issue (June 22), you score some obscure current movie, a War picture, because the director featured the wheels of trucks with balloon tires on them—commenting that balloon tires were not in use in 1918. Nevertheless, on the opposite page you give prominent space to a painting, Death of Socrates, in which the painter, David, represents the famous scene against a background of a heavy wall pierced by a round opening. Now I do not believe that arched masonry existed in the Greece of Socrates; that it first appeared in Rome several centuries later.