Book Reviews

Following Where the River Begins: A Personal Essay on an Encounter with the Colorado River.

By (Provo, Ut.: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 1991.vi + 95 pp. Paper, $8.95.)

Here's the picture: a castoff Trailways bus loaded with Frisbees, Hackeysacks, guitars, Walkman stereos, a chuck box full of concoctions with names like Mystery Macaroni and Scrap Salad, and a class of apathetic Colorado College nature writing students and their professors wander through three national parks along the Colorado River for a week or two while the students compile notes toward a final essay about their experience. Eventually the vortex of this journey whirls toward that lowermost level of Hell: Moab, Utah, with its macho-posturing river guides, its mountain-biking Yuppies, its rednecks in souped-up Jeeps, and its Sierra Clubbers searching for a spiritual experience on the slickrock Professor James C. Work tells the story well enough for me, but it would take a Dante or a Fellini to tell it ultimately, if only there were a Dante or a Fellini who cared.

The professors' task is pretty imposing: to orchestrate a series of circumstances in which their grown-up teeny-bopper charges can hope to experience something authentic and to get it on paper To that end, they get them up at 4 a.m. to hike to Delicate Arch by sunrise, they teach them to meditate, they force them to go off by themselves to write in their journals, and, mysteriously, they instruct them in the etymology (in Latin and Middle Dutch, no less) of the words "Landscape Arch." We are not told how the final papers turn out, but two of the professors, comparing notes during the Delicate Arch hike, agree that progress, at least to that point, is slow.

As if teaching these kids to write is not enough, there is a Den Mother self-denial aspect to the professors' job that amplifies its burden With fishing kids out of the river in Cataract Canyon, doctoring dehydration in Canyonlands, the godawful food, the godawful guitar-banging, and the ultimate deprivation—no liquor—it is obvious that writing teachers' salaries do not come easily.

What does Nature say, anyway? I do not pretend to know, but it appears to me that if it does have a message, it yields it up with considerable reluctance. Moses spent forty years in the desert; Jesus spent forty days What are these kids going to find out in forty hours, in a series of government campgrounds, in between sessions of Hackeysack kicking and guitar picking? Well, they can make a start; and perhaps that justifies programs like this one, though I suspect these organized epiphanies evoke some pretty synthetic emotions. Teaching nature writing, or any other serious subject for that matter, involves trying to build a mature way of looking at the world while starting from some pretty profound immaturity. Maybe this is an effective way of doing that, but no clear confirmation of it emerges from the book.

Work writes well, but the personal encounter with the river promised in the subtitle keeps getting submerged in encounters with students I'd like to see what he can do when he gets off by himself.

GARY TOPPING SaltLake Community College

Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians.

Edited by RICHARD W. ETULAIN (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. x + 370 pp. Cloth, $37.50; paper $17.50.)

Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890-1990.

By GERALD D NASH (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991 xii + 318 pp Cloth, $29.95; paper, $15.95.)

As western history celebrates something of a four-year long centennial with the closing of the frontier in 1890 and the delivery by Frederick Jackson Turner of his seminal speech to the American Historical Association at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago on July 12, 1893, on the significance of the frontier in American History, these two books published by the University of New Mexico Press offer an excellent summary of western historiography from Turner's time and before to the present.

Published in 1991, the two books could have been issued as a set, and both are "must reading" for serious students of western history They are the products of distinguished professors of western history at the University of New Mexico Richard Etulain, the editor of Writing Western History, dedicates his book to his ".. . colleague Gerald D Nash, historiographical pioneer," who is the author of Creating the West. The two books offer contrasting but complementary approaches to historiography. Etulain's Writing Western History is macrohistoriography as it presents essays on ten major historians and their impact on the field of western history written by eleven leading western historians of today Creatingthe West is microhistoriography as it places in an interpretative context the hundreds of historians and scholars who have written about the West.

The ten historians discussed in Writing Western History are Josiah Royce, Hubert Howe Bancroft, Frederick Jackson Turner, Frederic Logan Paxson, Walter Prescott Webb, Herbert Eugene Bolton, James C Malin, Henry Nash Smith, Ray Allen Billington, and Earl Pomeroy Etulain would like to have also included Francis Parkman, Theodore Roosevelt, Bernard DeVoto, Frederick Merk, John D Hicks, Oscar O Winther, John Caughey, Paul Gates, J. Frank Dobie, and Wallace Stegner It is too bad he could not Even though the book would have approached 700 pages in length, it would be twice as useful and valuable.

Writing Western History is one of at least four major books dealing with western historiography and published in the last decade Two of these books, Michael P. Malone's Historians and the American West published in 1983 and Roger L. Nichols's American Frontier and Western Issues: A Historiographical Review published in 1986, include essays by leading western historians on the historiography of various topics and themes in western history such as Indians, Mormons, the fur trade, mining, transportation, politics, urbanization, and ethnic groups The third book, John R Wunder's Historians of the American Frontier: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook published in 1988, includes shorter essays on fifty-seven individual historians.

Utah historians will find two essays of particular interest, Charles S. Peterson's "Hubert Howe Bancroft: First Western Regionalist" and Donald E. Worcester's "Herbert Eugene Bolton: The Making of a Western Historian." Peterson is the only Utah contributor to the volume; his essay on Bancroft describes the man and the process that produced the first history of Utah, published in 1889 Bolton is of interest because his study of the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante Expedition, the last of seventeen books he wrote, was published by the Utah State Historical Society in 1950 under the title Pageant in the Wilderness: The Story of the Escalante Expedition to the Interior Basin, Including the Diary and Itinerary of Father Escalante. Bolton, a student of Frederick Jackson Turner, was mentor for several Utah historians, including Andrew Love Neff, LeRoy R Hafen, Leland Hargrave Creer, Milton Reed Hunter, and Gregory C. Crampton, who completed Ph.D. degrees under his direction at the University of California at Berkeley.

In Creating the West Professor Nash indicates that during the past hundred years historians have considered the West from four perspectives: a frontier, a region, an urban civilization, and a mythical Utopia. The purpose of his book "is to provide a succinct interpretive synthesis of these efforts since 1890" (p viii) The four perspectives form the framework of the book with single chapters on each perspective except for the West as frontier which is covered in two chapters, 1890 to 1945 and 1945 to 1990 Each chapter is carefully organized with two major components: a chronological treatment by historians of the topics and a summary of how other scholars—notably anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, sociologists, novelists, and others—have viewed the American West.

While the purpose of the book is to describe how scholars have interpreted the West, a secondary theme is to remind us that any interpretation is based on the scholars' "own social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, their geographical location and their environment [and that] Although some in each generation believed that they had found the key to an understanding of the true dimensions of the subject, that eventually came to constitute a self-deception Essentially, they were engaged in replacing one set of myths with another—those that seemed more satisfying to their own generation" (p. 259).

Nash discusses external forces such as the agrarian experience, the urban experience, the Great Depression, war, disillusionment, environmentalism, global awareness, and their impact on each generation of scholars who have written about the American West He reminds us that historians work in the context of their personal values and beliefs, the larger community and society of which they are a part. Yet Nash also warns historians against abandoning the struggle for historical objectivity in favor of becoming relativists and social critics His call for restraint in keeping moral and political views from coloring the writing of history is an approach that is preached in the classroom but, as he points out, not always followed in writing western history.

It could be argued that Creating the West is a defense of Frederick Jackson Turner, his followers, and other disciples of the "old" western history and an attack on the "new" western history. However, those who read the book carefully will find that Professor Nash is not condemning any group or approach except those who would use the writing of history for the pursuit of other ends.

ALLAN KENT POWELL Utah State HistoricalSociety

Utah Remembers World War II.

By ALLAN KENT POWELL (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1991 xiv + 271 pp $29.95.)

As part of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II Allen Kent Powell has assembled fifty-six personal accounts by Utahns of their wartime experiences. His purpose was to capture individual recollections so that we all might better remember and commemorate individual human sacrifice and contribution to America's war effort. To accomplish this, he carefully selected accounts that are both colorful and detailed.

These reminiscences give the reader an intimate feel for various wartime experiences on the battlefield or at sea, in hospitals or at home, and from internment camps to the war industries. The diverse experiences of people from various cultural, ethnic, and occupational groups make these recollections representative of a broad cross section of Utahns and the impact of the war on their individual lives.

Naturally, given the purpose of the work and the nature of the responses, the remembrances are not all of equal interest or quality. Nevertheless, overall, the recollections contain elements of heroism, adventure, despair, sacrifice, bereavement, humor, disaster, death, destruction, man's inhumanity to his fellow man, elation at survival against all odds, and joy over personal and collective accomplishments that provide plenty of interest for the reader.

The general, broad events of the war, depicted through die eyewitness accounts of individual Utahns, are well known to the historian and probably to most readers, but the detailed involvement of individual Utahns provides a valuable personal quality to our understanding of these events Through the eyes of fellow Utahns we have a compelling testimony of what was honorable and what was terrible about World War II.

Utah Remembers World War II is an attractive volume, well conceived and presented so that it is a worthwhile addition to the personal library of Utah's lay citizens.

WAYNE K HINTON Southern Utah University

John CharlesFremont: Character asDestiny.

By ANDREW ROLLE (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. xvii + 351 pp. $29.95.)

It is fitting that the sesquicentennial of Fremont's first western expedition (1842) should so nearly coincide with the publication of Rolle's biography. Public awareness of Fremont's role in the history of the West is usually restricted to some knowledge of his three expeditions under government sponsorship. Professor Rolle provides an excellent overview of these journeys as well as Fremont's subsequent privately funded explorations, his role in obtaining California for the United States, his early opposition to slavery and emergence as the first presidential candidate of the newly founded Republican party, his role as commander of the western army in the Civil War and as governor of Arizona Territory, and his successes and failures as a mining, land, and railroad promoter. Intertwined with these major historic events is the life of Fremont and his wife Jessie. In fact, the examination ofJessie's role in Fremont's writing, political activity, and financial activities is one of the most interesting aspects of the volume.

Well organized and written, the book is especially useful for its discussion of the repeated controversies that dogged Fremont's career both during his life and thereafter Accusations of incompetence, insubordination, ineffectual leadership, and braggadocio are examined, but the reader is ultimately left with an unclear idea of the relative truth of the accusations. The author treats Fremont's life "with a cautious psychiatric approach" (to quote the dust jacket blurb), but his "cautions approach" includes a strong presumption of its utility in explaining history (see p. 325 n.12, for example) The author concludes that many of Fremont's actions were the result of his illegitimate birth and fatherless youth that left him a perpetual adolescent, seeking adult male mentors (among whom his wife's father, Sen Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, was most important) but constantly rebelling against them.

The book would be stronger had the author worried less about explaining Fremont's actions with Freudian concepts and provided more analysis of the milieu in which they occurred and their subsequent impact. Conclusions that "had it not been for the character flaws that Fremont so clearly demonstrated" (p 106) or that "lack of judgment became compulsive, an imprudence that he could not alter" (p 123) are interesting and may shed some light on the repeated controversies of his life, but they do little to explain the importance of his actual role in the exploration and settlement of the West. A greater discussion of Fremont's contribution to the American infatuation with the West (and particularly California) and his contributions to understanding the geography of the region (whether original or a collation of others' knowledge) is needed.

The book's physical appearance is attractive, with clear and highly readable type The page numbering scheme is a minor distraction as the editors have chosen to paginate only alternate pages and to place no pagination on introductory sections or chapter openers, resulting in several consecutive pages with no numbers. The lack of a single map is a glaring oversight in a book that deals so extensively with exploration and travel.

The author's choice of adjectives to describe Jessie may offend some "General Jessie," "mid-life obesity," "gaunt visage," or "weary, wrinkled and shriveled" are some examples. Examination of the pictures upon which the author bases his assessment of Jessie suggests that his descriptions reflect his own perception and are meant to support his conclusion that the "character flaws" of Fremont resulted in a life of hardship for the strong-willed Jessie.

In spite of these criticisms, Rolle's biography is an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in the West. While not resolving the question of Fremont's actual contributions, it does provide an excellent overview of his life and times. Those unfamiliar with Fremont's fifty-year involvement with American exploration, war, and politics will be pleasantly rewarded by this eminently readable book, but serious students of Fremont may conclude that we still need more research if we are to fully understand John Charles Fremont.

H JACKSON Brigham Young University

Eyewitness at Wounded Knee.

By RICHARD E.JENSEN, R. ELI PAUL, and JOHN E. CARTER (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991,xii + 210 pp. $37.50.)

The battle between the Sioux Indians and the United States Cavalry at Wounded Knee in 1890 is a subject that has invited interpretation and speculation from many quarters over the years. The controversy surrounding this event is almost legend, and the name 'Wounded Knee" is perhaps one of the best recognized symbols of American Indian Rights activism in modern times Eyewitness at Wounded Knee brings to this arena an unusually clear, unbiased account of the confrontation The strength of this book, and indeed, much of its charm, lies in die willingness of its authors to do what photo-historians do best—let the pictures speak for themselves.

The battle at Wounded Knee occurred on December 29, 1890, when the Seventh Cavalry attempted to disarm a Sioux Indian village on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota An increasing climate of suspicion had developed between the cavalry and the Sioux, fueled by the initiation of the Ghost Dance, a prayer dance that celebrated the coming of a Messiah from the West to aid the Indians in their plight Many of the Sioux felt that this dance would provide protection to the tribe and rid them of the white man's interference The nearby white settlers and Indian agents mistakenly believed this to be an offensive rather than defensive posture on the part of the Sioux Within this environment of mutual distrust, the firing of a single Indian gun triggered the wholesale slaughter of Indian men, women, and children, with associated casualties on the side of the cavalry.

The guns at Wounded Knee have been silent for over a hundred years, but the controversy still continues In this excellent book three historians combine their efforts to give a balanced look at the conflict, based on painstaking research into original source material.

The initial chapter by Richard Jensen, "Another Look at Wounded Knee," gives a clear picture of the In- dian perspective of the conflict. This account uses many primary sources of information to piece together the social and economic factors leading up to the conflict and corrects many factual errors of prior interpretive accounts of the battle. Jensen provides a compassionate view of this event, portraying it as a desperate attempt by the Sioux to preserve the last vestiges of their religious and social freedom.

R. Eli Paul's chapter, "Your Country is Surrounded," re-examines the changing role of the military with the advent of the dual technologies of the railroad and telegraph While giving an accurate picture of historical events from the white man's viewpoint, this chapter also shows how the new speed and mobility provided by the telegraph and railroad altered both Indian and U.S military strategy. The final written chapter, "Making Pictures for a News-Hungry Nation," by John Carter, gives a fascinating look at the photographers who documented the Wounded Knee tragedy and its aftermath. Surprising stories are related of photographs stolen from other photographers, deliberately mislabeled, and in some cases posed or even faked in order to increase sales The entrepreneurial aspects of photo-journalism in the late 1800s are here beautifully described and documented This chapter also relates similar stories of newspaper reporters and relic hunters at the scene.

Fully two-thirds of the book is taken up with beautifully reproduced photographs retrieved from many collections across the United States. Most of the photographs have detailed captions, many with additional anecdotes that blend well with the textual material Numerous footnotes and references add to the value of this book as a source for those interested in further study of the subject.

Despite being written by three different authors, the book holds together surprisingly well with minimal repetition or contradiction. The combination of written text and photographs provides a very readable, balanced account of Wounded Knee And, despite its strict adherence to primary source material and extensive footnotes, this book would be easily understood by both the experienced historian and the casual reader without prior knowledge of the events of Wounded Knee. It is this blend of facts, photographs, and historical perspective that makes this book worthy of a place on the shelves of any student interested in the history of the Old West or its photographers.

BRAD W RICHARDS Ogden

The Mormon Presence in Canada.

Edited by BRIGHAM Y. CARD et al. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1990. xxvi + 382 pp. $30.00.)

This handsome volume is the result of an interdisciplinary conference held in Edmonton at the University of Alberta in 1987 to commemorate the arrival of Mormon settlers in western Canada in 1887. Seventeen of the "key papers," as selected by an editorial committee of sociologists and historians, are included The editors are of course aware that the Mormon presence in Canada did not in fact begin in 1887 and that there are several "presences" and several histories Not the least of these is the history of Mormon beginnings in eastern Canada in the 1830s—according to Richard Bennett, a story of "plucking not planting." Converts were encouraged to gather with the Saints in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and, finally, in the Great Basin However, as Gordon Pollock has shown in a forthcoming study, Mormon communities in the Maritimes flourished a decade longer than suggested by Bennett—so much so that in Nova Scotia the Strangites thought it worth their while to make an appeal to Mormon congregations Bennett's suggestion "that the seeds of future and spectacular growth in the church in the British Isles were sown in the Canadian missionary work" (p 31) needs to be pursued further, as does the early history of Mormonism in the Maritimes and Upper Canada, which is underrepresented in this volume.

That is not to deny, of course, that the arrival of the Cache Valley pioneers in southern Alberta in 1887 was a story of major significance for the Mormon presence in Canada In the popular mind that migration was occasioned primarily by the need of polygamists to escape persecution by the United States government. While there is much truth in that argument, Leonard Arrington also points out the growing population pressure in the Mormon heartland, informing his readers that between 1876-79 more than a hundred new Mormon settlements were established beyond the boundaries of Utah As for polygamy (explored in excellent essays by Jessie Embry and Carmon Hardy), Mormon settlers in Alberta quickly learned that the Canadian government—unlike the Mexican government—was not about to turn a blind eye to marriage practices that were as much against the law in Canada as in the United States Nevertheless, in the long run, Mormon settlements in Canada proved more successful than in Mexico, partly because of greater cultural affinity between English-speaking western Canadians and Mormons, partly because of government policy that strongly encouraged settlement by experienced agriculturalists, and partly because of a policy of multiculturalism that extended to other groups—points ably made in the essays by A. A. den Otter, Brigham Y Card, and Anthony Rasporich. In a sensitive essay, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher points to the contribution of Mormon pioneer women as another major reason for success.

Dean Louder explores the limits of cultural diversity, observing that English-speaking Mormons in Canada, unlike their Francophone co-religionists, have an identity problem because church headquarters sees them as similar to Americans—a perception resented by Canadian Mormons Finally, differing cultural perceptions are illustrated by Armand Maus, an American scholar, who questions the applicability of the concept of ethnicity to Mormon culture, and Keith Parry, a Canadian, who sees it as useful for illuminating aspects of Canadian Mormonism.

By way of summing up, this book represents an auspicious beginning for the study of Mormon culture in Canada. At the same time, by highlighting the multifaceted and complex nature of the subject, this volume points to the need for further study before scholars can attempt an authoritative synthesis.

KLAUS J. HANSEN Queen's University Kingston, Canada