Sometimes he shacks up with a "squaw " the fact that he uses the term "squaw" for a white woman is one of multiple indications that the narrator is living an idealized version of the lifestyle supposedly enjoyed by the people of the North American continent before the arrival of Europeans. The narrator of "Where the Buffalo Roam" is an illiterate ignoramus, a white man who lives in a teepee and hunts buffalo with rifles and ammo he gets from nomadic traders who explore ruined cities. (Remember when we read Palmer's fanciful 1945 satire King of the Dinosaurs? Now there was a painful experience!) The editorial introduction to "Where the Buffalo Roam" in Other Worlds warns us that Bloch's tale is a specimen of two sub-genres that have been subject to widespread critical disparagement, the "transplanted western" and the "after the atomic war story," but Palmer and/or Mahaffey assures us that Bloch will make editors and readers sick of such stories reconsider their "harsh words." Let's hope so! "Where the Buffalo Roam" was a cover story for Other Worlds Science Stories, a magazine edited by Raymond Palmer and Bea Mahaffey.
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