Little Beaver and the Streamliner

Went to see my dentist this morning for the semi-annual cleaning and checkup.  Leafing through the current issue of the National Geographic magazine in his waiting room, I began to mull over how the changes in the magazine over the years reflected the changes in this country. As a young man, I subscribed to the magazine and looked forward each month to the arrival of the familiar yellow-bordered cover picture in my mailbox.

In those far-off days the advertisers were companies like TWA, and Burlington Railroad, and Matson Lines, and Studebaker automobiles.  All gone.  Long vanished from the Big Board.

The America in those ads was exemplified (for me, anyway) by the black and white illustration of a sleek streamlined train speeding through a Southwest desert landscape, in the foreground of which stood a little Native American boy, who could have been a model for Little Beaver, the sidekick of the cowboy Red Ryder in the comic book.

The boy in the ad is waving at the last car, the observation car, of the speeding train, from whose windows a white family, mother in hat and gloves, father with a fedora, and their two kids, a boy and a girl around the Indian boy's age, are all waving back.

The Southwest setting of the tableau is shown in a few artful strokes of the illustrator's pen  — a streamlined saguaro cactus near the Native American kid, one or two streamlined stratus clouds overhead, and radiating lines to represent a setting sun.

These days when we think of Native Americans, it's unlikely we'll think of Little Beavers waving at passing streamliners filled with vacationing white families.  Chances are we'll be thinking of Indian casinos and the vast sums that have been paid to lobbyists and politicians, and federal indictments that have come and may yet come.