Reviews 363 and made possible the apple orchards for which the country would become famous. More intimate are pictures of people at work and at play: hunting, but also hauling grain; cutting ice from the river in winter, but also ice-skating; racing horses on Main Street; participating jn a local talent show; playing football or tennis — yes, tennis, for Okanogan’s first “tournament” was in 1911. There is a birthday party: a photo of twenty-one women — eight with babies on their laps — as they sit in a pasture or mountain meadow. There is Sunday morning outside the pool hall: some sixteen bachelors sitting in a row on the tie-rail — a single man on the ground in front of the boardwalk with a dog in his lap. The range of expressiveness on the faces of people is remarkable, given the state of photographic art at the time, and the circum stances. This is particularly true of Matsura’s portraits of Indians from the several tribes and bands on the Colville lands. There are children here and chiefs, cowboys, matrons, families, a medicine man, and an evangelist. Many of the pictures are formal studio work (there are even comic “studies” like “the hold-up.”) But in 1908 Matsura acquired a stamp photo camera that allowed him to take up to twelve pictures on a single plate. And on the inside cover—front and back—Roe has included a magnificent set of self-portraits of Matsura himself, caught on the same twelve-frame plate. Here is Matsura the actor, the poseur, the mimic — caught in a wide-range of expressions, many of them comic parodies. The camera’s eye was an actor’s eye, and the actor was a fine student of humor and human nature as well as historical change. MERRILL LEWIS Western Washington University Californians: Searching for the Golden State. By James D. Houston. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. 287 pages, $15.00.) Californiaphobes, do not read this book. California’s complexity will confound you and destroy your stereotype, so why put yourself through it? After all, it’s so much easier to fear your own image of the Golden State. As James D. Houston aptly observes, “California is the destination, but when they say California, as often as not they are thinking of L.A.” But Los Angeles is only one ingredient in a rich and varied geography, a geography of the spirit as much as the land. Suggests Houston: “This can be a way of looking at the place, the space called California: as a touch point, where lines of force converge.” This book is really a love story by native-son Houston, a distinguished novelist, but it is a mature love, not uncritical, one that accepts the beloved complete with warts. While Houston skillfully evokes California’s remarkably varied terrain — great mountains, vast deserts, huge valleys, large rivers — the book is in the main a series of sensitive interviews with individual residents 364 Western American Literature of the Golden State: a winemaker, an ecological activist, a psychic, a play wright, a petroleum journalist, a mayor, even the Dalai Lama. Throughout, Houston’s reportage is on the money. He finds, not surpris ingly, states within the state, value systems that seem continents apart coexist ing. California is “a region filled with paradoxes and riddles, a state which leads the nation in pornography, divorce, suicide, burglary and skateboard accidents, while simultaneously dominating it in the fields of micro-electronics, solar energy, accredited law schools, Nobel Prize winners, female mayors, Olympic medalists, library users, salad lettuce and dates, figs and nectarines.” Perhaps the most memorable of the individuals interviewed by Houston is the gifted Chicano dramatist Luis Valdez. “In a very fundamental way,” says Valdez, “we are still pioneers. East meets west here . . . and we are still pioneers at that.” Valdez also points out that the vast majority of Californians are not involved in the activities that arouse national attention, although possibilities seem much richer for everyone. “We’re all living our life here, and no single day is any more important than another, really, when you get down to it.” Valdez is one of the few...
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Jan 1, 2000
Roland A Pierloot 
Open Access