60 Western American Literature Native American, he has learned much from them, and with his keen natural ist’s eye and his gifts of style, he serves us well, in Barry Lopez’s term, as “an intermediary.” This book might be described as a wilderness Walden,following Thoreau’s cycle of the seasons in a region more akin to Ktaadn than to the pastoral outskirts of Concord. Like Thoreau, Nelson reaches down deep for the life close at hand, and the place he has chosen islessimportant, as he says, than the fact that he has chosen, and focused his life, on a particular place. But in a region of few people and forbidding climate, a place of wild ocean weather, rainy and snow-swept through most of the year, Nelson provides us with a compelling sense of a life lived close to primitive conditions. These experiences are sought out by the author as he ranges to nearby islands, forests, mountains, to watch mostly, to experience, to feel and understand, to hunt and fish, and to attempt to know the natural community which he inhabits with something of the care and respect of his Native American mentors. Nelson’s account of his own formal education conveys his sense of how natural science in the academy has abandoned this quest for what really matters in nature. Finding that contemporary biological science showed no affinity for such interests, Nelson turned to anthropology, where he has found the opportunity to follow a more meaningful path to the natural world. The Island Within is the latest of his six books. Perhaps this volume’s most significant contribution to the increasingly important genre of nature writing is in Nelson’s sense of intimacy with all aspects of the natural world, especially with animals. He provides us with a moving account of his relationships with the vibrancy of their lives, with the necessity for respect and gratitude toward them, and toward the places which nurture them, and us. GLEN A. LOVE University of Oregon Lizzie: The Letters of Elizabeth Chester Fisk, 1864-1893. Edited by Rex C. Meyers. (Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press, 1989. 176 pages, $24.95/ $12.95.) Lizzie: The Letters of Elizabeth Chester Fisk, 1864-1893, edited by Rex C. Meyers, records nearly thirty years in the life ofa Connecticut school teacher who settled in Helena, Montana, in 1867 with her husband, newspaper editor Robert E, Fisk. Meyers has selected and edited this collection from over sixhundred letters written by Lizzie to her familyto form a well-balanced viewof the life and times of a frontier woman. Not only do readers watch the growth of a rough mining town into a thriving state capital, complete with fires, lynchings and political scandals, but they also have the rare opportunity to study the maturation of a young, eastern-born wife as she adapts to the harsh realities of the frontier and Reviews 61 to life as a wife and mother. Strong and outspoken in her convictions, Lizzie reveals to her mother her attitudes towards Indians, minorities, politics, reli gion, marriage, motherhood, temperance and the sinful social life of Helena. Reading about her daily routines to her precarious travels, from an unplanned and unwanted fifth pregnancy to the installation of a coal furnace (when her husband is out of town), readers will empathize with this Montana pioneer. “I tell every one I have come expecting to remain here,” Lizzie states in 1868. “I look upon this ‘The New Northwest’asmy home and shall try to do all in my power to build up that home, and make it desirable . . .” (45). Using a traditional historical approach, Meyers summarizes the events recorded in the letters at the beginning of each chapter and supplies family and historical background to supplement the letters. These chapter introduc tions, isolated, could be read as Lizzie’sbiography. The notes at the conclusion of each chapter add significantly to the reader’s understanding of names and events mentioned in the letters. Lizzie is an important contribution in the fields of western history and women’s studies. When read with other collections, such as the journal of Mollie Dorssy Sanford, the diary of Emily French and the...