Red Dog
President of the Indians' club above a Petoskey stable — a man with the manners of an English clubman and an automatic in his pocket.
To keep the club respectable. He apologises for his bartender's laughing, explains away the two men shooting pool in the corner as visitors from the woods, and worries aloud about scandal.
The book
At a glance
- President of the Indians' club in Petoskey, Michigan
- Up a ladder and through a trap-door, above a stable on a side street
- The wigwam — his own coinage, and he says so
- Signed photographs of Jim Thorpe, General Custer, D. H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge; an oil painting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- An automatic
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeRed Dog is a character in The Torrents of Spring, the 1926 comic novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. He runs the private club that Yogi Johnson is taken to in chapter twelve, reached by a ladder and a trap-door above a stable on a Petoskey side street. Every member is an Indian, and Red Dog does the introductions.
The room is furnished as an English gentlemen's club: a bar with a brass rail, easy chairs, magazines on sticks, a small plunge bath, and a committee room hung with signed photographs of Jim Thorpe, General Custer, D. H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge. Red Dog's own manner matches the furniture exactly. The joke is aimed at the fashionable enthusiasm of the 1920s for Indian authenticity, which was one of the things Hemingway was mocking in Sherwood Anderson.
How the book draws them
- The way he talksEntirely in the English of an English club room. He describes his own premises as a comfortable little hole to pop into when the evenings are dull, calls his bartender a corking bartender and a good-hearted chap, and says a mistake over membership would have meant no end of scandal.
- What he calls the club"We call it the wigwam, you know. That's a little conceit of my own."
- The introductionsHe presents Mr. Sitting Bull, who says at once that he is not one of those Sitting Bulls; Mr. Poisoned Buffalo; and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards, whose great-grandfather is said to have sold the whole island of Manhattan for a few strings of wampum, and who hands Yogi one or two beads to keep.
- The drink he ordersDog's Head ale, two of them, called for by name so that the bartender can laugh at the coincidence. Red Dog tells him his mirth is a little ill-timed.
- The membership ruleHe offers to put Yogi up for the club and asks what tribe he is. Told that Yogi's parents came from Sweden, he says he would have sworn the man looked a bit on the white side, pushes an automatic into his stomach, and tells him to collect his hat, say a polite good-night to anyone who speaks to him, and never come back.