Reviews 315 efforts to save the species, the legends surrounding the white buffalo, attempts to breed bison with domestic cattle, and the use of the buffalo as a symbol on postage stamps, a ten-dollar bill, and official state seals, as well as in advertising material and a variety of other places. A short final chapter considers the future of the American buffalo. In telling his story, Dary makes extensive use of previously published anecdotes, some occupying as much as three or four pages of text. Enter taining though most of them are, the reader may have the sense of wading through a compendium of excerpts from other books. Since many of these are not readily accessible, however, and since Dary’s notes usually identify his sources, his predilection for giving warmed-over information is not a serious defect in the book. There are minor errors of course — the dis tinguished frontier historian Wilbur Jacobs turns up in a note as Wilbur “Jones” — but the number is not excessive. Not an encyclopedic work like Frank Gilbert Roe’s The North American Buffalo, nor even quite what the subtitle calls it — “The Full Saga of the American Animal” — Dary’s book is a handy collection of information, eminently readable, well illustrated, and equipped with sufficient documen tation to lead the serious reader to the primary sources if his stick floats that way. Not, like Roe, bent on debunking hoary myths about the bison, Dary usually presents both sides of controversial issues and offers a judicious commentary, free of dogmatism. Some readers may find him too non committal, insufficiently critical where a considered opinion is called for; but for the audience to which the book is presumably addressed, this posture will probably not be objectionable. Yes, Wayne Gadient would very likely find The Buffalo Book good reading. Whether he would want to pay the $15.00 asked for it is another matter. But with the price of beef where it is these days, he ought to be doing a good business in hump ribs and boudins, and maybe he can afford it. ROY W. MEYER, Mankato State College The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians. Edited by Kenneth Rosen. (New York: The Viking Press, 1974. 178 pages. $6.95.) This anthology of short fiction written by Southwestern Indian authors is worth reading. Some of these stories are technically lacking, but others are impressive. The better stories will undoubtedly appeal to teachers looking for Indian fiction to include on reading lists in literature of the West or literature of American minorities. These stories will also appeal 316 Western American Literature to persons seeking to know contemporary Indians as they see and know themselves. This anthology bears the stamp of a single ethnic identity. The stories show a single large pre-occupation — the transition of a distinct people from an established, inherited culture to an attractive but formidably foreign new culture. The incongruity of the two cultures is evident in many ways. The settings of the stories often depict one reservation or another, but they also at times depict the impinging Anglo world — the off-reservation cop, the modern air terminal, a big city ghetto, or a distant Army base. The characters who are treated with sympathy are Indian; against them are posed antagonists of Anglo or Chicano background. From this incongruity arise the conflicting, ambivalent attitudes and themes discernible in the stories taken as a group. In some stories tradtional Indian culture is affirmed or made triumphant over Anglo culture. In others, the brutality and indif ference of Anglo culture are portrayed. In still others, the impotence and dwindling influence of inherited Indian culture are emphasized. In all, the fact is evident that the contemporary Indian lives between two worlds. Two stories will serve as illustration. In a story entitled, “Whispers from a Dead World,” Joseph Little, a Mescalero Apache, brings the fate of a reservation Indian into ironic and tragic contrast with the moral idealism of Euro-American culture. Throughout the story, paraphrases from great European religious and moral philosophers are interspersed among a narra tive about an Indian man whose squalid, deprived life terminates in suicide when...