Richard Irving Dodge
THE HUNTING GROUNDS OF THE GREAT WEST; A DESCRIPTION OF THE PLAINS, GAME, AND INDIANS OF THE GREAT NORTH AMERICAN DESERT. London, Chatto & Windus, 1877.

Indians Hunting Buffalo
Richard Irving Dodge
[F594 D6 opposite p. 139]

Richard Irving Dodge, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the U.S. Army, had extensive dealings with Indians in the western United States. He held commands at forts along the western frontier and also enjoyed the company of wealthy American businessmen and prominent politicians.

William Blackmore, the noted British investor and financier wrote the introduction to this volume.

Blackmore traveled and invested in railroads, land, mining, and related ventures throughout the American West. He compiled an extensive collection of Indian artifacts and cultural antiquities, and published several books. Blackmore held a view shared by many men of his time, which he articulated in the introduction to this work by his friend and fellow traveler, Richard Dodge.

Although sympathetic to the plight of American Indians, Blackmore saw the extermination of the "Red Man" as a natural evolution. "All authorities who have investigated the subject are unanimous in predicting that the Red Men are a doomed race . . . But sad as the fate of the Red Man is, yet, even as philanthropists, we must not forget that, under what appear to be immutable laws of progress, the savage is giving place to a higher and more civilized race." Blackmore dismisses the significance of this process by offering the "Red Men" little more than a historical footnote, " . . . in a few years the only reminiscence of the Red Men will be the preservation of some of the extinct tribes and dead chiefs in the nomenclature of the leading cities, counties and States of the Great West."

The New York edition of this work, published by Dodge & Blackmore, is titled The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants.