Indian Camp

One of his several short stories set in Northern Michigan, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was first published in a 1924 issue of the Parisian literary magazine Transatlantic Review. The next year, “Indian Camp” was included in Hemingway’s first story collection, In Our Time. “Indian Camp” has since become one of Hemingway’s most heavily anthologized works. Based partly on Hemingway’s visits to Petoskey, Michigan, during childhood and young adulthood, “Indian Camp” follows young Nick Adams as he accompanies his physician father on a medical errand.

In addition to introducing Nick Adams, the protagonist of more than 20 other early stories, “Indian Camp” features characteristics that now define Hemingway as an author, including his “iceberg theory” of writing and themes like humanity’s relationship to nature and performances of masculinity. His expansive oeuvre includes dozens of short stories and nine novels and novellas. Works like The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms are widely taught and considered American classics. His 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, earned him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This guide refers to “Indian Camp” as included in In Our Time, the Scribner Paperback edition published in 2003.

Content Warning: This story contains a death by suicide and uses the term “Indians” and anti-Indigenous slurs to refer to Indigenous Americans. This study guide reproduces this language only in quotations; elsewhere, it refers to Indigenous people.

The story opens with young Nick and his father, Dr. Adams, setting off on a boat on Lake Michigan, accompanied by two “Indians” (the narrator does not specify their tribes). They are followed by another boat carrying an Indigenous man and Nick’s Uncle George, who smokes a cigar. The Indigenous men row the boats by themselves while Nick “lay back with his father’s arm around him” (14).

Upon arriving at the camp, Uncle George gives the two rowers cigars. The white men follow the Indigenous men through the woods and past a pack of barking dogs to the camp, where they’ve come to help a young woman who has been in labor for two days. While an older woman stays inside the shanty to help the younger woman, most of the men “sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made” (15). Only the woman’s husband stays in the tent, smoking in the top bunk with an injured foot while his wife lies laboring below. As the men enter the shanty, the woman screams in pain.

Dr. Adams gets right to work, ordering that water be boiled to sterilize his equipment while also talking to Nick about labor. The doctor scolds Nick when Nick says he understands what is happening, and he explains what labor is while the woman continues to scream. Nick asks whether they can do anything to stop her screaming, and Dr. Adams replies, “No. I haven’t any anæsthetic […] [b]ut her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important” (16). After he says this, the husband lays down in his bunk and turns away.

The doctor washes his hands thoroughly and explains to Nick that the baby is in the breech position. He asks Uncle George to pull back the quilt covering the woman, explaining that he’d “rather not touch it” (17), and he begins to work. He performs an unanesthetized caesarian section on the woman, ordering three Indigenous men and Uncle George to hold her down. The woman bites Uncle George, and he calls her a slur. The Indigenous men laugh at Uncle George, and Dr. Adams continues his work. Nick does not watch the procedure.

Finally, Dr. Adams delivers the child, a baby boy. He removes the afterbirth and begins to sew up the incision. He permits Nick to look away while he sutures the wound, and Nick gratefully does so, noting that “his curiosity has been gone for a long time” (17).

In contrast to Nick’s squeamishness, Dr. Adams is proud of his work. He boasts that he performed the procedure “with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders” (18). Uncle George rubs his wounded arm, and Dr. Adams offers to sterilize the wound. The new mother is washed out and exhausted.

When the men go to check on the baby’s father in the top bunk, they discover that he has slit his own throat. Unlike the caesarian, which is not described in detail, Nick notes that the man’s “blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk” (18). Dr. Adams hurries Nick out of the tent, but the boy has already seen everything.

Dr. Adams rows the boat back home; Uncle George stays behind. Nick asks whether childbirth is always so difficult and about suicide among men and women. Dr. Adams gives straightforward answers, saying that all these things are relatively uncommon. Nick asks if death is difficult, and Dr. Adams replies, “No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends” (19). As they row back across the lake, Nick watches the sunrise and notices a bass leap from the water. Listening to the sound of his father’s rowing, Nick feels “quite sure that he would never die” (19).