Reviews 167 Rivers West. By Louis L’Amour. (New York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975. 192 pages, $6.95.) Louis L’Amour’s Rivers West is escape literature which takes five Budweisers to finish and two minutes to reflect upon. Its dust jacket is handsome and will look swell on the formica tabletops where it undoubtedly will repose. The story is set in the pre-Disney America of 1821. The manlybosomed hero of the novel, Jean Talon, is a Canadian immigrant set on foiling the dastardly lot of insurrectionists who are led by Baron Richard Torville. Talon, at story’s beginning, reveals he is hooked on a girl who has forsaken him for a merchant old enough to be his sweetheart’s analyst. Driven to near madness by grief for nearly a week, he even considers writing poetry to produce cathartic relief. But since his grammar (or L’Amour’s) is faulty, and since there still are 181 pages left in the book, Jean goes out instead to save the Louisiana Territory for the future Huey Longs of America. Does Jean succeed? Does Baron Richard Torville wind up with a deserved faceful of red-hot iron for his dirty deeds? Does Talon wind up with an incredibly desirable female of at least technical virgin status to replace the one that got away? Well, gentile reader, to find out the answer to these and other per snickety questions, you will have to plunk down seven bucks, or barter your new pork pie hat, for a copy of Rivers West. Don’t delay! You can always catch that Cher Bono Special on televi sion some other year. Why miss a book which so neatly catches the spirit and pageantry of America’s bicentennial celebration? But should your bookseller be out of Rivers West, don’t despair. Any one of L’Amour’s fifty other novels is easily available and will do just as well. HANK NUWER, Reno, Nevada The Hollywood Posse. By Diana Serra Cary. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. 268 pages, $8.95.) When the cattle empires crumbled, hundreds of working cowboys were left with no place to ride. Their way of life was anachronistic until about 1910 when one last frontier was discovered in the most unlikely place, Hollywood. Riding as movie extras in the guise of everything from Western 168 Western American Literature desperadoes to Saracen raiders, these cowboys found a reasonable facsimile of range life and a chance to use their range-bred skills. Picture riding was to them an honest job to be done well and they brought with them the values of the range — honesty, loyalty, courage, generosity. In the ego centric, cynical world of Hollywood, they were strangely out of place, a tight knit group of never more than two hundred men who rode together in front of the cameras for over forty years. Diana Serra Cary’s account of these Hollywood extras follows their up-and-down careers from the first two-reelers to the opening of Disneyland, an event which marked the end of the era of real cowboys. Disneyland, with all its technology, was a sad last stand for men who prided themselves on individual courage and skill. By the late fifties, most of the original cowboys had been replaced by “scissorbills” (riders who had never ridden the range and who, most likely, had taught themselves to ride at the local stable). This is not a book about heroes or stars, though John Wayne, Tom Mix, Cecil DeMille and others are found in its pages. The central figures though are the nameless cowboys of the Hollywood Posse — Jack Padjan, Neal Hart, Sonora, the hot-blooded young rancher, Cherokee, the cowboy with a removable glass eye, and most of all, Jack Montgomery, Mrs. Cary’s father. In large measure, The Hollywood Posse is a biography of Jack Montgomery, a working cowboy who typified the Hollywood riders and who spent the majority of his adult life in Hollywood, ultimately caught by the fantasy version of the real life he loved. Diana Serra Cary, once known as child star “Baby Peggy,” grew up in the midst of the Hollywood Posse. By the late...