Someday, I’m going to have a long talk with my kids about media representations of certain groups. It became clear that it was going to happen when Simon got into Underdog, because he completely sides with the cavalry on the Go-Go Gophers shorts. It didn’t occur to him that we were seeing things from the cavalry’s perspective and that it might not be completely accurate or fair. This cartoon is even worse; at least in those shorts, the Gophers have lines and personalities.

A wagon train is traveling from it doesn’t really matter; indeed, the geography is deliberately wrong, I think, inasmuch as they initially cross from “Nebrasky” into “Floridy” and then turn out to have instead been crossing into “Pensavaney.” In “Buffalo, New York,” they are spotted by “them pesky redskins,” who send a message using first smoke signals and then a paper airplane to their village. The message is “ugh,” and the Indians, led by “old Chief Rain-in-the-Face,” first have a war dance and then attack the wagon train.

I’ve said before that this is the ethnicity I have the greatest difficulty discussing, because my preference is to use the term for a group that they use for themselves, and there seems to be no consistency of use. But I think we can all agree that “Injun” and “redskin,” the terms used in this cartoon, are Not Okay. This, honestly, is the first thing I’m going to teach the kids, as I teach them about this particular aspect of racial sensitivity. That mostly when the ethnic group in question appears in pop culture, it’s in a fairly dehumanizing manner.

A minor historical nitpick is that this cartoon both ignores geography and has a fairly modern map at the end. Yes, with “old timey” pronunciations written on it, but it’s got Oregon, Washington, and the various other Western states all divided along their current lines. Which, okay, that’s fine. But by the time you get Washington under its current boundaries, it was 1863. Not only was this after the glory days of the Oregon Trail, though while it was still in some use, it was well after the Plains tribes would have been using exclusively Stone Age weaponry as is shown in the cartoon. Let’s just say that Custer wasn’t killed with an arrow.

But that just is the way we do it, isn’t it? These stories are how we show Western expansion, no matter how little association with history that has. This cartoon is from a bit before the Golden Age of the Western, the era where Westerns were inescapable—people complain about the ubiquity of superheroes, but even reality television didn’t dominate the way Westerns did in that era. (I’ve not yet found a season when you could flip between three channels and get a Western on all of them, but there are several times when you could get one on two channels at once.) But what happens in it wouldn’t be out of place on a lot of shows, at least not until you get to the completely ridiculous ending.

There are some pretty good children’s books that will help me educate the kids on this topic; help me afford them by supporting my Patreon!