Part 12 (1/2)

BILLINGTON, RAY ALLEN. _Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier_, Macmillan, New York, 1949. This Alpha to Omega treatise concludes with a seventy-five-page, double-column, fine-print bibliography which not only lists but comments upon most books and articles of any consequence that have been published on frontier history.

BOURKE, JOHN G. _On the Border with Crook_, New York, 1891. Now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Bourke had an eager, disciplined mind, at once scientific and humanistic; he had imagination and loyalty to truth and justice; he had a strong body and joyed in frontier exploring. He was a captain in the army but had nothing of the littleness of the army mind exhibited by Generals Nelson Miles and O. O. Howard in their egocentric reminiscences. I rank his book as the meatiest and richest of all books dealing with campaigns against Indians. In its amplitude it includes the whole frontier.

General George Crook was a wise, generous, and n.o.ble man, but his _Autobiography_ (edited by Martin F. Schmitt; University of Oklahoma Press) lacks that power in writing necessary to turn the best subject on earth into a good book and capable also, as Darwin demonstrated, of turning earthworms into a cla.s.sic.

BURNHAM, FREDERICK RUSSELL. _Scouting on Two Continents_, New York, 1926; reprinted, Los Angeles, 1942. A brave book of enthralling interest. The technique of scouting in the Apache Country is illuminated by that of South Africa in the Boer War. Hunting for life, Major Burnham carried it with him. OP.

DEVOTO, BERNARD. _The Year of Decision 1846_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1943. Critical interpretation as well as depiction. The Mexican War, New Mexico, California, Mountain Men, etc. DeVoto's _Across the Wide Missouri_ is wider in spirit, less bound to political complexities. See under ”Mountain Men.”

EMORY, LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM H. _Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California, including Part of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers_, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1848. Emory's own vivid report is only one item in _Executive Doc.u.ment No. 41_, 30th Congress, 1st Session, with which it is bound. Lieutenant J. W. Albert's _Journal_ and additional _Report on New Mexico_, St.

George Cooke's Odyssey of his march from Santa Fe to San Diego, another _Journal_ by Captain A. R. Johnson, the Torrey-Englemann report on botany, ill.u.s.trated with engravings, all go to make this one of the meatiest of a number of meaty government publications. The Emory part of it has been reprinted by the University of New Mexico Press, under t.i.tle of _Lieutenant Emory Reports_, Introduction and Notes by Ross Calvin, Albuquerque, 1951.

Emory's great two-volume _Report on United States and Mexican Boundary Survey_, Was.h.i.+ngton 1857 and 1859, is, aside from descriptions of borderlands and their inhabitants, a veritable encyclopedia, wonderfully ill.u.s.trated, on western flora and fauna. United States Commissioner on this Boundary Survey (following the Mexican War) was John Russell Bartlett. While exploring from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and far down into Mexico, he wrote _Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and Chihuahua_.

published in two volumes, New York, 1854. For me very little rewritten history has the freshness and fascination of these strong, firsthand personal narratives, though I recognize many of them as being the stuff of literature rather than literature itself.

FOWLER, JACOB. _The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 1821-1822_, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. Hardly another chronicle of the West is so Defoe-like in homemade realism, whether on Indians and Indian horses or Negro Paul's experience with the Mexican ”Lady” at San Fernando de Taos. Should be reprinted.

GAMBRELL, HERBERT. _Anson Jones: The Last President of Texas_, Garden City, New York, 1948; now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, Texas. Anson Jones was more surged over than surgent.

Infused with a larger comprehension than that behind many a world figure, this biography of a provincial figure is perhaps the most artfully written that Texas has produced. It goes into the soul of the man.

HOBBS, JAMES. _Wild Life in the Far West_, Hartford, 1872. Hobbs saw just about all the elephants and heard just about all the owls to be seen and heard in the Far West including western Mexico. Should be reprinted.

HULBERT, ARCHER BUTLER. _Forty-Niners: The Chronicle of the California Trail_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1931. Hulbert read exhaustively in the exhausting literature by and about the gold hunters rus.h.i.+ng to California. Then he wove into a synthetic diary the most interesting and illuminating records on happenings, characters, ambitions, talk, singing, the whole life of the emigrants.

IRVING, WAs.h.i.+NGTON. Irving made his ride into what is now Oklahoma in 1832. He had recently returned from a seventeen-year stay in Europe and was a mature literary man--as mature as a conforming romanticist could become Prairie life refreshed him. A _Tour on the Prairies_, published in 1835, remains refres.h.i.+ng. It is illuminated by _Was.h.i.+ngton Irving on the Prairie; or, A Narrative of the Southwest in the Year 1832_, by Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (who accompanied Irving), edited by Stanley T. Williams and Barbara D. Simison, New York, 1937; by _The Western Journals of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving_, excellently edited by John Francis McDermott, Norman, Oklahoma, 1944; and by Charles J. Latrobe's _The Rambler in North America, 1832-1833_, New York, 1835.

JAMES, MARQUIS. _The Raven_, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1929. Graphic life of Sam Houston.

KURZ, RUDOLPH FRIEDERICH. _Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz: ... His Experiences among Fur Traders and American Indians on the Mississippi and Upper Missouri Rivers, during the Years of 1846-1852_, U.S. Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 115, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1937. The public has not had a chance at this book, which was printed rather than published. Kurz both saw and recorded with remarkable vitality. He was an artist and the volume contains many reproductions of his paintings and drawings. One of the most readable and illuminating of western journals.

LEWIS, OSCAR. _The Big Four_, New York, 1938. Railroad magnates.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, California, 1928.

Fresh sketches of representative men. The book deserves to be better known than it is. OP.

LYMAN, GEORGE D. _John Marsh Pioneer_, New York, 1930. Prime biography and prime romance. Laid mostly in California. This book almost heads the list of all biographies of western men. OP.

PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1849. Parkman knew how to write but some other penetrators of the West put down about as much. School a.s.signments have made his book a recognized cla.s.sic.

PATTIE, JAMES O. _Personal Narrative_, Cincinnati, 1831; reprinted, but OP. Positively gripping chronicle of life in New Mexico and the Californias during Mexican days.

PIKE, ZEBULON M. _The Southwestern Expedition of Zebulon M. Pike_, Philadelphia, 1810. The 1895 edition edited by Elliott Coues is the most useful to students. No edition is in print. Pike's explorations of the Southwest (1806-7) began while the great Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-6) was ending. His journal is nothing like so informative as theirs but is just as readable. _The Lost Pathfinder_ is a biography of Pike by W. Eugene Hollon, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_, 1872. Mark Twain was a man who wrote and not merely a writer in man-form. He was frontier American in all his fibers.

He was drunk with western life at a time when both he and it were standing on tiptoe watching the sun rise over the misty mountain tops, and he wrote of what he had seen and lived before he became too sober.

_Roughing It_ comes nearer catching the energy, the youthfulness, the blooming optimism, the recklessness, the l.u.s.t for the illimitable in western life than any other book. It deals largely with mining life, but the surging vitality of this life as reflected by Mark Twain has been the chief common denominator of all American frontiers and was as characteristic of Texas ”cattle kings” when gra.s.s was free as of Virginia City ”nabobs” in bonanza.

21. Range Life: Cowboys, Cattle, Sheep