In the development of American Indian autobiography the first two decades of the twentieth century were a turning point. In 1902 Charles Eastman published Indian Boyhood, his story of growing up in what he claimed was the vanished traditional world of the Santee Sioux. In 1906 S. M. Barrett published Geronimo's Story of His Life, the last or nearly the last of the popular dictated autobiographies of famous war chiefs. And in 1920 Paul Radin published the first autobiography written at the request of an anthropologist, The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. In between, Eastman published his second volume, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), telling of his assimilation into the white world; the Dutch businessmanethnologist William Wildschut began his interviews with Two Leggings, which would be the basis of Peter Nabokov's later volume, and various memorialists like Joseph Dixon published collections of autobiographies which were intended to be records of the end of the noble redman (The Vanishing Race, 1913).

This was, therefore, a period of significant endings and beginnings: the end of autobiographies of war chiefs dictated to journalists, the beginning of lives of supposedly ordinary or representative Indians written for anthropologists, and many stories of the “end” of traditional practices and “beginning” of new ones along “the white man's path” (as Eastman called it). Moreover, these stories coincided, as David Brumble has pointed out, with the triumph of social Darwinism as a national ideology and the implementation of the Dawes Act (148–55).