THE READING RHEUM: THE RED HAWK (1925)

Curiously, the cover to the 1963 Ace paperback, in which the company reprinted the short ERB novels MOON MEN and RED HAWK, looks like it belongs with a standard Burroughsian SF-romance along the lines of the Mars books. But the scene, showing a normal sized man dueling a nine-foot armored giant, derives from the end of the concluding novel RED HAWK, the one with the least amount of standard science-fiction content. (In the book the giant doesn't have blue skin or pointed ears, but-- creative license.)

Like MOON MEN, RED HAWK takes place entirely on ERB's future-Earth. In MOON MEN the key conflict only appears to concern the tyrannized Earth-humans attempting (and failing) to throw off the chains of the virtually indistinguishable humanoids from the Moon, the Kalkars. But arguably the real focus is the resistance to ethnic assimilation. The good guys, all of whom are Americans, have managed to keep themselves genetically separate from the invading Kalkars. Yet the Americans are far less persecuted by the literal aliens than by their offspring, who are hybrids of Kalkars and Earth people. The American leader is the descendant of the heroic Julian from the first book, while his worst enemy is a descendant of the villainous Orthis-- and both characters perpetuate their legacy through women from the Moon, Julian through a Va-na woman and Orthis through a female Kalkar.

Three hundred years later, the scope of the conflict has taken several odd turns. If any conflict still takes place in big cities, the reader never hears of it, and the narrative concern with religious suppression utterly vanishes. Instead, the heirs of Julian and Orthis now both lead nomadic tribes in the American Southwest, and the tribes have taken the names of their progenitors: "Julians" and "Or-Tis." There's no more distinction between pure Kalkars and half-breeds, and for all one can tell, all Kalkars on Earth may be mixed-race. In contrast to the first two books, these Kalkars have gone out of their way to practice eugenics so as to distance themselves from common humanity, in that the males are on average seven feet tall. (Apparently the females stay average-sized, since there's a scene in which the hero mistakes a non-Kalkar woman for a Kalkar.) 

Said hero is the twentieth scion of the original Julian, but his main name is Red Hawk, and all the people in his tribe have names like those of Native Americans, as well as wearing Native American attire and living in teepees. (They also practice scalp-taking, though ERB does not show this.) But both the Julians and the Or-Tis (which is both a singular and plural noun) are pretty evidently White people who have, for reasons never explored, taken to living like Native Americans. (That the two tribes are not Indians is made clear by ERB's introduction of real, dark-complected people called "In-Juns," more on whom later.) The social organization of the Kalkars is not very well explained. They're not parasites like the old Kalkars, but just unrelenting brutes who treat their women like slaves. Though the line of Orthis was originally allied to the Kalkars, now the Or-Tis tribe has separated from their former patrons, though the Or-Tis and the Julians harbor more hate toward one another than they do for their giant-sized enemies.

What makes all this "Fake Indian" business fascinating is that ERB ends up pursuing the exact opposite theme from that of MOON MEN, in that Julian-Hawk becomes the fulcrum of a movement TOWARD assimilation between the Or-Tis and the Julians. Hawk is actually a fairly chauvinistic hero at the start. Then he's captured by the Or-Tis, whose leader offers the possibility of a peace between them. When Hawk refuses, he's imprisoned with a renegade Or-Tis man. This prisoner claims that the current leader is an impostor, and that there's a real direct scion of the original Orthis out there somewhere, who wants a real peace with the Julians. In actuality, the unnamed man really is this true valid leader, though he barely figures in the main plot, except in that he's the brother of the obligatory Burroughsian heroine.

After escaping the Or-Tis tribe, Hawk falls in with a curious tribe of pygmy-sized people who live in very small teepees and who call themselves "Nipons," after their ancestor, the normal-sized "Mik-do." These Japanese pygmies, whose small stature goes unexplained, are also enemies of the brutal Kalkars, and the Nipons' greatest enemy is a nine-foot giant named Raban. Hawk, being chauvinistic again, thinks Raban is just a superstitious fantasy. But upon leaving the Nipons, Hawk encounters a Kalkar man with a female prisoner, and he nobly kills the Kalkar raider even though he assumes his prisoner is Kalkar too. 

The woman Bethelda is a little more contentious than a lot of ERB heroines. Though grateful for her rescue, she withholds her true secret: that though she's not a Kalkar, she is an Or-Tis. Bethelda eventually reveals all and criticizes the warrior for holding her people responsible for the sins of an ancestor long dead. By this time, they've fallen hard for each other, so this leads to the usual ERB trope of the female being captured and the male rescuing her. And her captor is none other than the mythical Raban, who is also the nine-foot-tall armored guy on the cover. After Raban's inevitable conquest the human tribes are united, in part through the wedding of Hawk and Bethelda, and the Kalkars are at last driven to the sea.

If this wasn't already such a long post I'd linger over a lot of Burroughs' character beats here. ERB was a formula writer but he worked in a good range of dramatic and comic scenes here, far more than he has in MOON MAID and MOON MEN combined. Once he even came back to previous themes, for after dropping the matter of cannibalism that occupied a few MOON MAID chapters, the topic arises again in Raban, who purports to eat his victims. And since ERB never gives a reason for his Japanese pygmies, maybe he was just playing with Nordic myth-images, giving readers a world with both "giants" and "dwarfs."

But since I have to wrap up with something, I'll discourse on the Fake Indian thing. On one level, it's tied into Caucasian fantasies about being a nature-dwelling savage outside the bounds of civilization, like the 1984 film RED DAWN. But there's a little more to it.

Burroughs actually had been a ranch-cowboy for a time in his youth, and served with the Seventh Cavalry for a year before his health got him discharged. During his army hitch he claimed he rode with troopers seeking out the Apache Kid, as seen in this post on the FRONTIER PARTISANS blog. So though he didn't interact with the Apaches on a personal basis that we know of, he had some acquaintance with real Native Americans. It's often been noted that the Mars books place John Carter in the middle of conflicts between tribes of "good alien Indians" and "bad alien Indians," and though ERB didn't write a lot of westerns, I think it's evident that he worked a lot of Western archetypes into his books. Thus, even though the real "In-Juns" in RED HAWK have no agency in the novel, one of ERB's most unique lines in all of his stories is spoken to Red Hawk by an old Indian woman, who didn't get the standard message on the Vanishing American:

Like the coyote, the deer and the mountains, we have been here always. We belong to the land, we are the land-- when the last of our rulers has passed away, we shall still be here, as we were in the beginning, unchanged. They come and mix their blood with ours, but in a few generations the last traces of it have disappeared, swallowed up by the slow, unchanging flow of ours. You will come and go, leaving no trace, but after you are forgotten we will still be here.