Book Reviews

The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity. BY RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON. (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1971. xi + 317 pp. $8.50.)

Few men have had an influence upon the thought and the writing of American history equal to Frederick Jackson Turner. Enunciated in 1893 his frontier thesis has enlightened, directed, motivated, and in some cases angered and frustrated three generations of American historians. Turner was creative and ingenious in his method, bold and sweeping in his presentation, effective in teaching, attractive and persuasive in personal qualities, and above all useful in what his work suggested to other scholars. Taken together these qualities have attracted many proteges and a goodly number of distinguished biographers. In the hands of the latter Turner's attributes have been added upon and extended. Included among those who have in greater or lesser scope undertaken biographical efforts on Turner are such luminaries as Carl L. Becker and Merle Curti, both of whom wrote widely heralded essays before Turner's death. More recently Wilbur Jacobs has done a book length study, and numerous honorary publications and commentaries have appeared over the years. Now, in attracting Ray A. Billington as a biographer, Turner continues to be fortunate in those who favor him with their attention and successful in extending his contributions to American history.

The dean of living historians of the American West, Billington has made Turner the object of intensive research extending back at least to 1960. His study of Turner has been productive. Numerous articles and three books have issued from Billington's fruitful quest.

In The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis, Billington has made a truly worthwhile contribution. Elements of ancestor worship are obvious in his approach and, indeed, in the very fact that he sees Turner as a fit subject for study. However, the real message of The Genesis is not one of veneration but one of recognition that the person, the method, and the thesis of Turner continue to be relevant.

In seven chapters Billington traces the emergence of the thesis in Turner's mind and its presentation in 1893 in a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The influence of Turner's boyhood in the Wisconsin village of Portage is established as are his development as a scholar at the University of Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins University and the process of articulation through study, thought, and public presentation during his years as a neophyte teacher back at Wisconsin.

Billington has faithfully followed Turner through the multitudinous files saved by the latter—who in Billington's words was "a magpie by instinct who threw nothing away" (p. 7). Collected in the main at Huntington Library, with lesser collections at Wisconsin and Harvard, Turner's papers reveal a scholar very much in touch with and responding to the great minds of his time. Especially important in molding Turner's thoughts were Professors William Francis Allen at Wisconsin, and Herbert Baxter Adams, Richard T. Ely, and W'oodrow Wilson at Johns Flopkins. A host of other historians, social scientists, and men of affairs also contributed divers geographical, biological, and methodological ideas. Indeed, little in the general climate of intellectual progress which characterized Turner's early years escaped his attention. While Turner was indebted to many for various elements in both the method and the concept of the thesis, Billington reaffirms that it was nevertheless Turner whose trademark rightly belonged on the idea that the frontier was uniquely responsible for the development of American traits and institutions.

Actually two people speak eloquently for Turner in this book. Billington is joined by Turner himself, as Billington's excuse for writing is five collections of letters in which Turner explains his own methods and his progress in the development of the thesis. Somewhat repetitious and anticlimatic after Billington's thorough commentary, the letters reveal the humanness of Turner including his need for acclaim and the admirable relationship between himself and several colleagues and former students. In order of their chronological development Billington has presented Turner's letters to William E. Dodd (1919), Constance Lindsay Skinner (1922), Carl L. Becker (1925-27), Merle Curti, (1928-31), and Luther L. Bernard (1928).

For this reader the whole comes off with a powerful effect. Billington's exegesis is a first-rate intellectual history—one that is the more impressive for what it will suggest to readers not merely about the evolution of the frontier thesis but about the general process by which man's understanding of his past is advanced. Like the works of Turner himself this book suggests points of access to various aspects of American history and will thus be useful for what it promises the future as well as what it tells about the past.

CHARLES S. PETERSON, Associate Professor of History Utah State University

West by East: The American West in the Gilded Age. BY GENE M. GRESSLEY. Charles Redd Monographs in Western History, no. 1. (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1972. iv + 54 pp. $2.50)

Western regional history in a period of hectic change, from the 1870s to 1900, is the subject of Gene M. Gressley's study, the first contribution to appear in a newly established monograph series. That this is a beautifully written interpretive essay and not a monograph at all need not trouble us, but its excellence does pose a problem for the editors: what to do for an encore? In this fine piece, the author —a master archivist as well as a greatly admired craftsman of historical scholarship—has written an incisive analysis of social change in the West. But he also provides us with a good deal of wisdom about the literature, and in this respect his work is a bibliographer's delight, and he skillfully raises some important questions about western history seen in light of contemporary themes in social science.

The major premise of the essay is that to explain western development during the Gilded Age we must recognize, above all, its complexity. He accepts as a hard fact of the western historian's job that "we know both too little and too much" of the region's history to be "ensnared by the simplicity of an all-embracing explanation." But with that constraint given its due, he goes on to find and define "intelligible patterns" that permit at least partial explanation of the Gilded Age history. He finds these patterns by concentrating the analysis upon points of "intersection" at which various institutions, cultural traits, and environmental forces interacted, moving the society forward, holding it back, or giving it new direction.

One such intersection was that between region and nation. Gressley therefore probes the congressional measures that shaped institutions in western states and territories: he considers, with great subtlety, the phenomenon of "colonialism," which he has explored fruitfully in some earlier studies; and he considers the record made by western legislatures as they pushed up against the limiting boundaries, both of constitutional and policy content, that the national government had established.

In another illuminating section Gressley looks with fresh insight at entrepreneurial styles, but one wishes he had gone further beyond railroad leaders as exemplary types, illustrating the shift from exploitative, freeswinging innovation to more modern "managerial" style, and that he had surveyed a wider range of enterprises and their leaders. But what he does examine is suggestive enough to make historians reconsider standard categories of analysis when we study "the intersection of public and private interest." This last-mentioned point of historical interaction, or "intersection," is used as a lens through which Gressley offers important new perspectives on land development, mining, and other areas of economic activity. He portrays them in the light of the imposing reality that Americans (certainly not least westerners) subscribed to a "creed of increasing productivity." Any student who is concerned with explaining the tension between seemingly irrepressible privatism in economic affairs and the recurrent need for planning (not as a single "planning" concept, but rather planning that subsumed various competing ideas for inducing change) will now have to read Gressley side by side with David Potter, Willard Hurst, and the studies of government and the pre-1860 economy that have long been staples of the professional literature.

If we ought to celebrate Frederick Jackson Turner's landmark paper of 1893, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," as Ray Billington has said, because of the author's understanding of "a series of relationships that had escaped others," leading him to forge "a workable theory that would help explain the distinctiveness of the American historical experience," then comparison of Gressley's essay with Turner's does not seem to me extravagant. For Gressley has taken the frontier as a laboratory for the study of social change, as Turner did, and he produces "workable theory" that does full justice to diversity, deviancy, and randomness of discrete patterns, as well as to recurrence of them.

One can fault the piece for a tendency toward purple prose where a lighter color might have permitted the data to show through the surface with somewhat more clarity. And one could argue that there should have been more attention to quantitative analyses of political behavior and mobility, and also to the literature on such institutions as scientific agencies, which helped reshape and color western consciousness as to resources and resource limits. But such quarrels are inappropriate. For in this essay, Gressley has provided the editors of the Charles Redd series with a model of precisely the kind of intelligent historical generalization toward which monographs should be directed.

HARRY N. SCHEIBER, Professor of History, University of California San Diego

The Great Southwest: The Story of a Land and Its People. By ELNA BAKKER and RICHARD G. LILLARD. (Palo Alto, Calif.: The American West Publishing Company, 1972. 288 pp. $17.50.)

At times one may be tempted to dismiss such a volume as this with the not always complimentary remark, "Just another picturebook!" In this instance, at least, such a snap judgment would be a mistake; in making it a potential reader would be depriving himself of some very fine commentary accompanying the excellent illustrations, many in color, and would also be missing valuable and carefully assembled data on the Great Southwest, past and present.

The authors propose to tell the story of "the desert subcontinent [which] extends from the abrupt Tehachapi and San Bernardino mountains to the rolling plains east of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the red waters of the Pecos River, from the plateau country north of the Colorado River to the southern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, from below sea level at Bad Water in Death Valley to the snow-capped ridge of the Sierra [Madre] Occidental, that rugged barrier between Sonora and Chihuahua" (p. 11). Thus they let nature, not man with his artificial international boundaries, set the limits of the Great Southwest; they are to be complimented on this realistic decision, and throughout they tell a north- Mexican story as well as that of the so-called American Southwest.

Parts One and Two deal with nature in the Great Southwest, the land and its creatures, plant and animal, and the natural forces which have made it a desert. The seven chapters, presumably Bakker's prime contribution, are well done, enlightening, and thought provoking. The ecologist and his fellows will be thrilled.

Part Three, in this reader's opinion, is the least satisfactory of the total four—the quality of Part Four is definitely superior. To be sure, one has no right to expect in sixty-one pages, even of near-folio size and liberally dotted with illustrations and maps and explanatory drawings, a full history of centuries of prehistory and three of written record. Lillard, again presumably the responsible author, is somewhat better as prehistorian, anthropologist, and ethnologist, than he is as historian. One can go along with his Indianist sympathies. It is less easy to forgive the much too frequent bias which shows in narrative and judgment once the Spaniards come on the scene. He tells that segment of his story as though it were one of unrelieved atrocity, by choice of incident and adjective and adverb. Granting that there were black spots aplenty, there were also many, many brighter ones. The Spaniards did make a number of beneficial contributions.

Part Four deals, both competently and often very suggestively, with the post-1846 Southwest. The author sketches many of the problems which the Anglo invasion has created and alerts the reader to the less desirable by-products of industrialization, mechanization, and, in general, "modernization," which are in the process of robbing the Great Southwest of its natural and historical charm and distinctiveness.

JOHN FRANCIS BANNON, Professor of History Saint Louis University Saint Louis

My Canyonlands By KENT FROST. (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1971. 160 pp. $6.95.)

"Would you like to go on a little hike with me, Ruell?" Thus, did young Kent Frost and his cousin walk away from a group picnic on Blue Mountain into what became a month's adventure in southeastern Utah's rugged canyon country, climaxed by a float through Glen Canyon.

Their provisions might seem minimal: one pack, candy, dried fruit, raisins, matches, hatchet, and .38 pistol. Their course, a bit simplistic: "Earlier that day I had climbed to the nearest peak and figured out the way from Blue Mountain toward the Henrys."

But by page 61 of My Canyonlands, the reader has come to realize that an uncommon man prowls these pages, a man destined to set foot on more slickrock country than perhaps anyone since prehistoric man.

When he was a boy, Kent's family homesteaded land near Monticello. At one time they also ran a sawmill on Blue Mountain, then a flour mill in town. Kent was a part of all these endeavors but developed his own preferences. "I could have ridden a horse, but I preferred hiking. I would walk the ten miles into Monticello and back rather than catch an unwilling horse."

Any spare time he spent searching out new country from the talus slopes of the twelve-thousand-foot La Sal Mountains to the sandstone corridors of Grand Gulch, tributary to the Colorado River. His childhood idols were the men who lived with the land — the cowboys, the prospectors, the trappers. He, too, learned to live with the country, accepting it on its own terms. "I might often be without water or food for a stretch of time. It is a very unusual feeling to lack one of the common commodities of life. Suddenly, when it is found, a man feels very rich and comfortable."

But to be able to turn one's consummate interest into a livelihood is rare fortune. Kent and I have both had this privilege. His backcountry guide service enriches visitors with much of the lore and ingenuity that are the lessons of man's survival here. Through our mutual love of the country, we both came to feel that national park status should be sought for protection of the area around the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. Kent was along on the National Park Service field investigations in 1959.

Since he had donated jeep and guide service to the expedition, I insisted that he be relieved of cooking chores. He was still the first one up to build a fire before dawn. Then he would disappear to see what was over the next canyon. He would turn up at breakfast, barefoot. I asked him once if the cactus didn't bother him a bit on those hikes. He said you learned to watch out for it all right. What did bother him, was hiking after about ten o'clock in the morning in the desert. The sand began to burn through the soles of your feet.

Much later, when Canyonlands National Park became a reality, we found we would have to control four-wheeldrive erosion in Chesler Park. As we pondered alternative accesses, I was reminded of an unusual route Kent had once mentioned in passing—a crack you could walk through from Chesler Canyon into Chesler Park. I had never found it. But, in due time it was found, the Joint Trail, that unique access to a beautiful walled-in meadow.

If you are seeking a guidebook to the sandrock country, My Canyonlands will not tell you how-to-get-there-from here. If you seek to understand one man's compulsion to find what is around the next canyon bend or atop a sheer-walled mesa, Kent's matter-of-fact experiences will broaden your scope. He is the desert's answer to the Mountain Man.

BATES E. WILSON, Moab

The Gentile Comes to Utah: A Study in Religious and Social Conflict (1862-1890). By ROBERT JOSEPH DWYER. (Rev. 2nd ed,; Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1971. xii + 270 pp. $7.50.)

This reprint of Archbishop Robert Joseph Dwyer's doctoral dissertation will be welcomed by scholars and history buffs who have become interested in late nineteenth-century Utah history since the original volume, published by the Catholic University of America Press in 1941, went out of print.

One has only to review the literature of the last thirty years which touches on the role of non-Mormons in Utah Territory to appreciate the contribution of this work. Many writers— Leonard Arrington, Gustive Larson, Thomas Alexander, T. Edgar Lyon, Stewart Grow, Everett Cooley, Howard Lamar, and George Ellsworth, to mention a few—have added important elements to the story, but no synthesis on Mormon-Gentile relations has yet appeared to displace Father Dwyer's book.

While the title suggests that the emphasis is on religious and social conflict, this is primarily the story of a struggle for political power, from the advent of Colonel Patrick Edward Connor's California Volunteers in 1862 until the Woodruff Manifesto marked the end of the acute phase of the contest for control of Utah Territory a generation later. Zealous ministers (mostly Protestant), ambitious politicians, and crusading ladies move through the pages, their colorful language as well as their deeds attesting their commitment to the deliverance of Utah from the Mormon despotism.

Based primarily on newspapers and the Utah materials which were in the National Archives at the time the research was done, The Gentile Comes to Utah sees neither Mormons nor non- Mormons as villains and sees elements of virtue and villainy on both sides. It throws only a little light on the economic, social, or cultural activities and characteristics of the growing Gentile population except as they bore directly on the conflict which is its theme.

The preface of the reprint states: "Inasmuch as the cost of . . . republication precludes much in the way of textural [sic] emendation, it has been thought better to issue it substantially in its original form, with some addenda and corrigenda" (p. vi). None of the pages of the 1941 edition appear to have been reset before the photocopies for the reprint were made. Without detailed comparisons on the basis of a carefully marked copy of the first edition, the number of small corrections and modifications cannot be determined. Having read and made extensive use of a library copy of the first edition years ago, this reviewer did not now undertake that correlation.

RICHARD D. POLL, Vice-President for Administration, Western Illinois University Macomb, Illinois

The Historical Guide to Utah, Ghost Towns. By STEPHEN L. CARR (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1972. ii + 166 pp. Cloth, $7.95; paper, $4.95.)

There are many lively ghosts in Dr. Stephen L. Carr's well-written, deeply researched, and delightfully illustrated new Historical Guide to Utah Ghost Towns.

The author is a young Holladay area pediatrician whose hobby has longbeen visiting and photographing the remains of once-flourishing Utah mining, railroading, and agricultural communities.

He realized that there was no really definitive guidebook available that told the ghost town story in terms of today. So, aided by Utah State Historical Society files, he wrote his own. He traveled more than ninety-three hundred miles during 1971 and 1972, "not counting the fun trips," to update his own material, taking pictures as he drove or walked.

Dr. Carr took one precaution, as publication date neared, to mitigate the possible interest his publication would stir among vandalism-prone travelers. He wrote to the sheriff of each county that has a ghost or semi ghost town and told them that the book would be printed before Christmas of 1972. He suggested they strengthen their protection of these civic remains.

In the forward of the book, he repeated his plea to respect property and historical rights, ending with the old adage, "Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints."

The book is exceptionally well organized. The ghost towns are arranged by section—single county or multicounty—and the guide includes clear maps on how to get to each of the 160 described in the main section of the publication.

Dr. Carr also established a novel, helpful system of ghost town classification. He lists the type—mining, agricultural, railroad, or miscellaneous— and then puts each in a class.

Class 1 covers towns which have completely disappeared with no trace. Class 7 towns are the lively ghosts— still fairly well inhabited (such as Corinne) but full of deserted buildings and relics.

Appendix 1 lists the towns by types and Appendix 2 by classification—both handy for those who want to specialize in a particular style of ghosts. Appendix 3 lists—in bare bones manner, to use a ghostly term—twenty "unresearched ghost towns" about which little is available.

References are well detailed, covering two full pages, numbered for checking with a brief notation for each town. And the index is complete and easy to use.

As a native of a town that is a lively ghost in its own right (Virginia City, Nev.), I found Stephen Carr's Utah Ghost Towns most interesting reading. Whetted my appetite to see more of our own state, too. And there were many things about the past—and present—of the 180 communities discussed that left me thinking, "Gee, that's good to know."

Serious historians should find this publication helpful in providing a wellrounded picture of this phase of Utah's past. Should be a blessing to students, as well, and to tourists—natives or non- Utahns—who have an urge to go and see something different.

Dr. Carr, I'm confident, will welcome suggestions from readers for inclusion in future editions, particularly on the past of ghost towns that were so ghostly their full history didn't appear to his eye or in references.

The photographs—Dr. Carr's of the towns as they are today and Utah State Historical Society pictures of them in their glory years—are generous in quantity and well selected. The photos on the covers—of Grafton on the front and Park City on the back—are in color, the others black and white.

MURRAY M. MOLER, Associate Editor Ogden Standard-Examiner, Ogden

Journal of the Southern Indian Mission: Diary of Thomas D. Brown. Edited by JUANITA BROOKS. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1972. xx + 175 pp. $3.00.)

Juanita Brooks has written and edited many works on Utah and the W r est, and this, her latest effort, is generally executed in the same tradition of excellence. Her edition of the Journal of the Southern Indian Mission: Diary of Thomas D. Brown is carefully and fully edited. Copious notes usually identify places and persons mentioned.

Mrs. Brooks had first become interested in this journal in 1936, but events conspired to make it thirty-six years before her edited version appeared in print. It contains many interesting descriptions of Mormon life as well as the Indians of southern Utah and and southern Nevada. It comprises a diary kept by Thomas D. Brown, a Scottish convert to Mormonism, who was sent as "clerk and recorder" on this mission from April 1854 to April 1856. The Mormons had been interested in converting the Indians ever since the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830.

Many interesting and important characters in western history appear in the pages of Brown's account as sweaty, hard-toiling figures whose earnest efforts met with both success and failure. These characters vary from members of the Mormon hierarchy, such as Brigham Young, to the buckskin apostle, Jacob Hamblin. Other clearly delineated figures are the desperate Porter Rockwell and the controversial John D. Lee. Incidentally, Brown never liked Lee, and as a result he does not come off well in the pages of Brown's journal. Other prominent Mormon leaders such as Parley P. Pratt. Heber C. Kimball, and George M. Bean come alive in the diary.

In addition, Indians as prominent as Chief Walker (Walkara) as well as many historically obscure Utes and Paiutes appear vividly in these pages. There is a particularly graphic description of an Indian doctor's attempts to cure an Indian woman's chest pains.

Brown briefly visited the then-new mission of Las Vegas in June 1855. He simply but effectively describes both the refreshing springs of that oasis as well as the cruel, unrelenting heat endured by these missionaries.

Yet Brown's narrative often rambles, and it is doubtful if any casual reader would be willing to plod through many pages of commonplace happenings and repetitious religious fervor to glean the most rewarding parts of the book. The western history expert will certainly find this journal of use in his research, and this edition makes the work generally available for the first time.

The index, unfortunately, is not as all-inclusive as it might have been, and a map or maps would have helped make some of the missionaries' wanderings more easily followed.

Included in this work are nine appendices of documents which vary from relatively trivial to greatly significant

in their importance. However, these shortcomings are minor compared to the advantage of having Brown's Journal of the Southern Indian Mission easily and inexpensively available.

RALPH J. ROSKE, Professor of History, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Southern Ute Lands, 1848-1899; The Creation of a Reservation. By GREGORY COYNE THOMPSON. Occasional Papers of the Center of Southwest Studies, no. 1. (Durango, Colo.: Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, 1972. v + 62 pp. $2.00.)

It is unfortunate that historians have so far failed to develop a thorough and scholarly history of either the Southern Utes or the Ute people as a whole. However, numerous articles and several useful theses and dissertations have appeared on select aspects of Ute history and culture, and Gregory C. Thompson's master's thesis on Southern Ute lands, which has just been published by the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College, is an example of such recent scholarship. Utilizing Bureau of Indian Affairs and army records, congressional documents, and records of the Indian Rights Association, Thompson has prepared a chronological history of government policy regarding the land of the Southern Utes from 1848 to 1899. It is primarily a legislative history, for Thompson has described and evaluated the treaties, agreements, bills, laws, and other proposals relating to the subject and has described, where possible, the motives of the proponents of these measures. The story is that of the great reduction of the land base of the Utes and has many parallels in the histories of other tribes. Anglo miners and farmers demanded Ute land for exploitation, and the government, bowing to such pressure, gradually acquired Indian land. However, Coloradans failed in their efforts to secure the removal of the Southern Utes from the state because of opposition from Utah, the activity of the Indian Rights Association, and opposition from the Southern Utes.

The Southern Utes by James Jefferson, Robert Delaney, and Gregory Thompson is much broader in scope, is less technical, and is intended as a text for the schools serving the children of the tribe. It is also the result of cooperation by the Southern Ute tribe and the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Project at the University of Utah and is similar to The Ute People, a history of the people on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah. The first half of the book is a history of the tribe to 1900 by Thompson of the Duke Project and Robert Delaney, director of the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis. The second section is by James Jefferson, a member of the tribe who was selected for the task by the tribal council, and includes material on government, economy, religion, and other aspects of Southern Ute life and society. Unfortunately, the brevity of the text prevented anything more than a cursory survey and did not permit the authors to utilize the vast amount of oral and documentary records collected by the tribe and the Duke Project. However, the photographs, maps, bibliography, and a chronology of Ute history enhance the value of the book for classroom use. Perhaps the authors will now devote their energies to a full-scale history of the Ute people.

RICHARD N. ELLIS, Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico Albuquerque

The Ponca Chiefs: An Account of the Trial of Standing Bear. By THOMAS HENRY TIBBLES. Edited by KAY GRABER. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. xiii + 143 pp. Paper, $2.25; cloth, $5.50.)

The bureaucratic maze of government has often plagued the Native American. The removal of the Ponca Indians tragically supports this generalization. The Ponca Chiefs not only exposes the failings of late nineteenth century Indian policy, but also reveals the dangers of big, distant, and impersonal government when administering the affairs of human beings.

In 1887, in direct violation of an earlier treaty, the peaceful Poncas were forcibly removed from the Dakotas to Indian Territory, since their land had been ceded inadvertently to their traditional enemies the Sioux. Many deaths resulted because of the long trek, the lack of promised food and shelter, and exposure to disease. Chief Standing Bear, after most of his family had died in the removal, decided to return to the Dakota homeland. He escaped to Omaha where he was arrested. Consequently, Thomas Henry Tibbies— former militant abolitionist with John Brown in Kansas, soldier, scout, pullman car conductor, itinerant Methodist preacher, newspaperman, husband of the famous Susette La Flesche [Bright Eyes], and Populist vice-presidential candidate in 1904—took up the cause of the Poncas.

The Ponca Chiefs is Tibbles's brief aimed at arousing the American people to reevaluate Indian policy. It is an account of the legal battles to free Standing Bear which resulted in the precedent-setting federal court decision recognizing the Indian as a person within the meaning of the laws of the United States and his inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Standing Bear v. Crook, 1879). Ponca publicity generated by Tibbles's writings and his speaking tours with Standing Bear and Bright Eyes in the first caravan "Trial of Broken Treaties" inspired Helen Hunt Jackson to write A Century of Dishonor and gave impetus to the reformation of Indian policy culminating in the Dawes Act of 1887.

This new and inexpensive edition contains an illuminating introduction and epilogue written by Kay Graber who draws upon the recent scholarship of Robert Mardock and James King and complements the research of Norma Kidd Green on the LaFlesche family. Graber admirably puts the reformers' interest in the Ponca tragedy into broader historical perspective by comparing it with the new concern over Indian policy. The Ponca Chiefs exposes the intransigence of administrators, especially Commissioner E. A. Hayt, in refusing to admit and correct their mistakes and reveals their too often accepted "pass-the-buck" attitude. The lesson to be learned from the Ponca disaster was eloquently expressed by Chief White Eagle: "You [people of United States] cannot bring our dead back to life, but you can yet save the living" (p. 120).

The Ponca Chiefs uncovers a major problem of Indian policy whether it be 1880 or 1973: "white tape." It would seem well-suited for use in a course on the history of Indian-white relations. Although a minor point, the inclusion of a map would have added substantially to the value of this new edition.

LAURENCE M. HAUPTMAN, Assistant Professor of History State University College, New Paltz, New York

City in the Sun: The Japanese Concentration Camp at Poston, Arizona. By PAUL BAILEY. (LOS Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1971. 222 pp. $7.95.)

Paul Bailey's City in the Sun describes the tragic evacuation of one hundred ten thousand U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast into concentration camps during the hysteria preceding World War II. As one of the internees of these camps, I found that the book brought back numerous memories during my early years.

The author recounts the shocking uprooting of families stripped of their possessions and birthright and the ensuing scavenging of property left in its wake. Reception centers were the first stop in this ordeal, many being race tracks and horse stalls. I remember the awful stench and flimsy bedsheets that were hung to separate families forced into these animal quarters.

The book is well illustrated with photographs and vividly portrays life in the camps. One photo in particular portrays a W^orld War I veteran in full uniform being interrogated, stripped of his possessions, and shipped off to a camp—made a prisoner of war in reverse.

Herded into buses and trains, the citizens were then shipped to more permanent relocation centers spread throughout Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Arkansas. Mr. Bailey's account deals mainly with the camp located in Poston, Arizona.

All of the camps were similar, row upon row of thin-walled, black tarpapered barracks. Most were located in remote, arid climates where the sun became unbearable during summer and the temperature deathly chilling during winter. Barbed wire fences and guard towers with armed guards were commonplace. During the early months, military surveillance was high, but this was relaxed considerably later on as the insanity of the project became apparent. Not one act of espionage was ever detected.

The author goes to great lengths in describing the attitudes, feelings, and emotions of the people. At times the selections seem harsh but for the most part are factual. Much of the material came from the collection of Dr. Edward Spicer, Poston's community analyst for the War Relocation Authority, and from interviews with the people themselves.

The camps were divided into blocks comprised of approximately three hundred people. Each block had its own community mess hall, laundry, block office, restrooms, showers, and tree. I can remember the joy when our block received its first and only fully grown tree, a twenty-five foot elm. Insects, especially scorpions, were always a problem. One had to be careful in the showers where the moisture seemed to attract them.

The formation of the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team is told by the author. He recounts how anxious the citizens were to prove their loyalty and jump at the opportunity to volunteer for military service. The 442nd, comprised of Japanese American boys, went on to become the most decorated combat team in World War II but paid dearly for it in lives lost.

By this time W 7 ar Department authorities had slowly come to unanimous agreement that the evacuation was unnecessary and was proving to be a tragic blunder. Shortly thereafter, Dillon Myer, head of the War Relocation Authority, announced that all relocation centers would be phased out during 1944.

The book concludes by describing the awkward dispersal of one hundred ten thousand people with no immediate place to go. Deprived of their birthright and of all material possessions, they were like their pioneer parents who arrived in this country a half-century earlier. The book ends rather abruptly at this point and does not cover the difficulties encountered in reestablishing families, businesses, and self-respect in the years following.

Paul Bailey's volume does offer the reader a vivid description into this dark chapter of American history.

TED NAGATA, Salt Lake City

Jim Beckwourth: Black Mountain Man and War Chief of the Crows. By ELINOR WILSON. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. xvi + 248 pp. $8.95.)

Few men in the annals of history worked as hard to achieve renown and yet had to wait so long to receive it as James P. Beckwourth. Long a source of American fur trade history, his memoirs have been frequently cited in historical works but always with a tongue-in-cheek attitude due to questions of their veracity. Scholars like Parkman, Chittenden, and De Voto have continually relegated him to the ranks of mythmaker, so that unlike contemporaries such as Bridger, Carson, Ashley, Smith, and Sublette, he has been relatively unknown. Now, thanks to the interest of current scholars like Elinor Wilson, Beckwourth is finally receiving the recognition he so desired. In fact, modern works on western America are careful not to leave out mention of his name and to include his picture. Not only is he important as a representative of a racial minority previously ignored in Western American history, but much of his autobiography has now been exonerated, allowing him the position he deserves as one of the fur trade's most colorful chroniclers.

Building on the research of her predecessors, Elinor Wilson, a professional writer in California, here gives us a complete and extremely well researched view of Beckwourth's life and adventures. Drawing as well on a great amount of new material that she has patiently dredged from archives in Virginia, Washington, D.C, Colorado, Missouri, and California, she carefully fills many gaps in the mulatto Mountain Man's history and disproves most of his questioners. This scholarly and well balanced biography had long been needed and certainly helps place Beckwourth in a better perspective and more proper place in American history.

The author chooses first of all to present an almost mathematically balanced account of Beckwourth's life which paradoxically is both a strength and weakness. The strength of such a presentation is perhaps most obvious, the weakness lies in the relatively brief coverage given to the chapters on Beckwourth's fur trade experience and life with the Crows compared to the amount of material available. Specific events such as the Ashley expeditions, the descriptions of Indian customs and raids, etc., that were uniquely pictured and participated in by Beckwourth seem too quickly glossed over or ignored. Perhaps this is due to the author's assumption that the readers will not be novices to American fur trade history or Beckwourth's memoirs.

Although there is no question whose side of the story is favored in this biography, Jim's life is presented in a very objective "warts and all" manner. Wiiile the author attempts repeatedly to exonerate Beckwourth she still feels no compunction in mentioning his faults and weaknesses. Although she does not discuss his supposed connections with the notorious Peg-leg Smith and the Ute chief Walkara and their horse-stealing ventures into California, she does mention, however, that he participated in similar dealings at other times.

The numerous journeys of Beckwourth back and forth across the American continent are documented in exacting detail, and new proof is given to substantiate his brief excursion against the Seminoles in the Florida W 7 ar and his part in the apprehension of those responsible for the Reed family massacre at Mission San Miguel. There are also excellent chapters providing new insights in the lives of his father, Jennings Beckwith, and the itinerant writer Thomas D. Bonner who wrote down the original memoirs in 1855 (although there is no mention of Philip Stoner who attempted this earlier). One of the most exciting elements of this work, however, is an essay listed under Appendix A entitled "The Language of Beckwourth." This short piece opens an entirely new area of renown for the Mountain Man to conquer—that of a literary representative of W ,r estern Americana.

All things considered, the strengths of this work far outnumber any weaknesses, and with its publication Beckwourth's renown seems much closer to being insured—too bad it is 107 years too late.

DELMONT R. OSWALD, Assistant to the Dean College of Social Sciences,

Brigham Young University