Wilderness Plots: Tales About the Settlement of the American Land by Scott R. Sanders

Abstract

156 Western American Literature psychological forms of the testimony, Ortiz’s version with the journalistic accounts reported during the trial. The main point to the final discussion in the book is that illusive cultural realities are responsible for the differences between the “facts” ; the murder discussed by these two American Indian writers typifies “life at the friction point between cultures.” This is an excellent book and belongs in the library of anyone with interest in the American Indian. Roger O. Rock’sbibliographical compilation should be admired primarily for what it is, the work of a “full-time high school English Teacher with many extracurricular duties,” who worked “on this project evenings, weekends, and what free time existed during the summer months.” The author states that the bibliography is intended to “augment rather than to compete with” other bibliographies he has listed in his Preface. The author points out that “In a very few cases only incomplete bibliographical data was obtainable . . . better a slim lead than none at all, I figured.” Because of his limited access to useful resources, the book is not too valu­ able an aid. A quick glance at the reviewer’s shelf finds titles and authors suitable for inclusion sadly lacking. Where is James Forman’s People of the Dream? Where are the writings of John Upton Terrell, Paul D. Bailey, Stanley Vestal, or Mari Sandoz? Finally, an annotated bibliography need not look like printed sheets torn from a computer; unfortunately, the publisher has presented the book in this fashion. TED N. WEISSBUCH California State Polytechnic University Wilderness Plots: Tales About the Settlement of the American Land. By Scott R. Sanders. (New York: William Morrow, 1983. 128 pages, $9.95.) Scott Sanders’ Wilderness Plots is a compact and meaty little book of imagined history about the settlement of the Ohio River Valley. The author, a professor of literature at Indiana University, explains in the foreword that “if one studies carefully the settlement of any region in America, one will dis­ cover the lineaments of our national character.” Why choose this region? Sanders admits, “I could have chosen some other place than the Ohio Valley. But my feet know that place, so that is where I dig.” The author digs in the obscure local chronicles for “the unmemorialized common folks, the carpenters and farmers, the fierce parents and moonstruck lovers, the sort of people who, in all ages, have actually made human history.” The result is a book of tales, which Sanders defines as “stories provoked by germs of fact, rather than history.” With fifty tales, it is difficult to generalize usefully about the truths Sanders wants to exemplify about our national character. The sheer number suggests Sanders’belief in the variousness of human experience, and the stories Reviews 157 themselves further suggest the strangeness of the quotidian and the random­ ness of human experience. Most significant, though, is that in almost all of the tales there is a gap between the way things are and the way one might expect them to be—ironies great and small, and often complex, govern these frontier lives and in turn charge these tales. The tales make good reading because Sanders has particularized history, and because he has reinvigorated the cliches that we hold about ourselves. Wilderness Plots is also good reading because it is masterfully written. The understated prose is terse and efficient, yet resonant; it is so, perhaps, because of Sanders’evident care for his human subjects. He cares for them not because they are good—they are not—but because they are human. Describing in his final chapter the various ways of their dying, Sanders concludes of his settlers, “such a compost of souls.” The same might be said of the book itself. PAUL LEHMBERG Northern Michigan University Women Writing in America: Voices in Collage. ByBlanche H. Gelfant (Han­ over, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1985. 278 pages, $10.95.) That’s What She Said; Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women. Edited by Rayna Green. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. 329 pages, $12.50.) In Women Writing in America, Blanche Gelfant presents the reader with a dozen essays on women writers and themes in...