Mountain Men Research Articles

John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken by John H. Timmerman

228 Western American Literature slope of the Rockies, down the west slope. The feel of the landscape—the rivers, the valleys, the towering mountains—and the animals that inhabit it— buffalo, moose, grizzly—is compelling, and it is these items that are finally what is most memorable in this book. Not that the novelistic elements are thin or slipshod. The characters have depth, have substance, they hold the reader’s interest. There is Cecil Roop, a young man who has left his family in Massachusetts to seek a bear to train for his livelihood; Walter Sutton, a middle-aged showman from the bayous of Louisiana; Margaret, Sutton’smiddle-aged Indian lover; Lizzie, Cecil’syoung Indian lover; and Charley Biskner, the mountain man who guides the group through the high country. In the various episodes of the journey, there iscon­ siderable excitement—crossing a flood-swollen river, meeting a grizzly on foot, encountering hostile Indians—and some of the best humor that is to be found in contemporary literature; the novel is fun to read. The climax of the novel revolves around an encounter with Bigfoot, with the genres of the historical western and science fiction intersecting in a wonderful set of scenes that generates a moral dimension to the action. The portrait of man in the western landscape achieves depth with the presentation of the influences of that landscape on his character. But this climax is icing on the cake, or perhaps more appropriately, salt on the venison: the real meat in this book, what makes it an outstanding prose work, if not finally a great novel, is the physical detail—the descriptions of the landscape, the animals, the men, and the relationships among them. RONALD L. JOHNSON Northern Michigan University John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken. By John H. Timmerman. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. 314 pages, $22.50.) John Steinbeck’s development as a novelist and short story writer was unpredictable, his work shifting from pirate novel, to mysticism, to bawdy humor, to gritty proletarian realism, to war novel, to poetic fables, to irony, to epic, to social commentary and satire. In a major new full-length study of Steinbeck’s fiction, John H. Timmerman, Professor of English at Calvin Col­ lege, Michigan, provides a detailed study of each work (except for To a God Unknown, to which he makes only passing references) together with an overall perspective on the canon. Reviews 229 Finding in Steinbeck’s works “a rich and diverse legacy” matched by few American authors, Timmerman faults critics who have ignored or under­ estimated him, arguing that they have approached him with misleading pre­ conceptions. Holding his work in dubious perspective, critics have attacked him from dogmatic positions on the right and left, while others have faulted him for never doing the expected thing. Though he won both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, Steinbeck received a startling amount of what Jackson Benson calls “gratuitous nastiness” from critics. Timmerman’s approach is apolitical; he has no axe to grind. He argues, in fact, that “Steinbeck’s fiction should be seen first of all not as exposition of ideas, which is the prevailing critical view of his work, but as revelation about human nature through character.” Finding it dangerous to impose an “aesthe­ tic grid” on Steinbeck, he avoids doing so himself. Instead, he examines Steinbeck’s skill as a storyteller, his “genius for characterization,” his “hooptedoodle ,” realism, symbolism and imagery, and above all his use of language. Timmerman cannot help re-covering some ground that other critics have dealt with—group man, the phalanx theory, non-teleological thinking, and Biblical symbolism, allusions, and analogies—though he manages to provide fresh insights; his major new contribution is a detailed and perceptive study of Steinbeck’s diction, imagery, rhetorical complexity and variation. He is par­ ticularly good on relating the language to Steinbeck’s humor. Taking issue with some previous critics, Timmerman reevaluates some works; he does not care much for Cannery Row, which he finds too bleak, but he makes a case for Sweet Thursday, hitherto dismissed as a trifle, to be the most successful of the Cannery Row trilogy, through the...

Confessions of a Barbarian by Edward Abbey

242 Western American Literature Confessions of a Barbarian. By Edward Abbey. Red Knife Valley. By Jack Curtis. Vol. 7 Capra Press Back-to-Back Series. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1986. 181 pages, $7.50.) Literature can succeed as a rip-roaring good story, but to approach art it needs meaning beyond the surface details. In the seventh volume of Capra Press’s Back-to-Back Series, one story fails at both, while the other inches toward art. In Jack Curtis’sRed Knife Valley a New York teenager who calls himself Kit has murdered his mother and moved to Central Park to pursue life as a “mountain man” with his counter-personality, an Indian named Red Knife. There Kit meets Sycamore, a girl who also lives “wild,” after murdering a neighbor for cutting down trees. Finally they escape the city, killing a police­ man in the process. The characters all lack endearing qualities, or even con­ tinuity, and Red Knife shifts unbelievably from fabrication to flesh-and-blood. When the trio find their valley in the West, the reader who has endured to the end will be mainly relieved that society is rid of them. Confessions of a Barbarian is an excerpt from a “forthcoming novel” by Edward Abbey. In an unnecessary and extended “editor’s preface,” Abbey explains how a “redneck” thrust a manuscript on him in a Southwest bar one night. The haughty “Dr. Abbey” ultimately edits the work and, unable to locate the original author, publishes it under his own name. But story teller Henry H. Lightcap sounds a lot like Abbey in the preface. Painted by Abbey as an unlettered hick, Lightcap proves extremely articulate. His wife Elaine has left him and he is suffering a night of abandonment, isolation, and self-examination, reminiscing about the relationship, his infideli­ ties, and the interactions of men and women. He finds solace in baking bread and getting drunk, trying to understand what went wrong. It becomes obvious that both Henry and Elaine contributed to their incredibly bad—and terribly typical—misunderstandings. Abbey crafts vivid pictures (of a tarantula walking daintily across Henry’s face, for instance) and quotable lines (“When they say I hate to say this you know they love it”) as he examines realistically the issues and paradoxes that complicate male/female relationships. JANET L. JACOBSEN Scottsdale, Arizona Collected Stories 1948-1986. By Wright Morris. (New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 274 pages, $17.95.) “Why do you take it so personal, hon?” a character is asked in Morris’s “Country Music,” and the question becomes a metaphor running through this definitive collection of twenty-six stories. Collected Stories offers varia- ...

The Gift of Wisdom

The Gift of Wisdom by Ann Carter Thomas I've always had religion deep down inside me, fingering my bones and pointing me in the straight and narrow path of righteousness. I guess that's why I got to worrying about the doctor fellow and nis kids who showed up on Memorial Day at the New Jerusalem Cemetery. I remember I was spreading my rug on the ground beside my dear, departed sister and feeling my insides strung out as tight as a saw blade, just from listening for Belva Lou. Ever since she went off to Eastern Kentucky University and got engaged to a city boy, she'd been promising to bring him home to meet her brother Howard and me. I was waiting for her in full view of all the cousins from Cincinnati who drove home to Riddle Mountain to honor the dead. When Brother Wilson, the preacher at the New Jerusalem Church, brought that doctor fellow around to my rug, I couldn't help 57 noticing how he talked. His voice was low and level and kept coming at me like the busy signal on the telephone. I remember thinking he was pressing on me, holding me down with his voice. At first I wondered if he was a religious man and saw something different about me. But I knew better when I met those two younguns of his, two golden haired kids about six and eight, smelling of man-care and peering into my lard bucket like they were starving to death. "Our visitor has a Ph.D. in education," Brother Wilson said loud enough for the men nearby to hear. You could tell the preacher took a shining to the stranger. He was showing him off and getting himself pepped up for his biggest sermon of the year. Every Memorial Day was the same, with the mountain men dressed in their funeral suits and looking purely laughable with their sunburned faces. They were always restless and uneasy, not knowing how to act. The Caudle boys and Shorty Stoner kept slapping at each other and throwing Pall Mall butts all over the ground. If I wasn't kin to those boys myself, I'd shake the lot of them. The stranger talked me plumb up against my sister's stone with some gibberish about Appalachian culture till I got sick and tired of him. "I'm gonna give these younguns some ham biscuits and a fruit jar full of tea because they look mighty hungry to me," I told him, getting my words in between a long string of Scottish clans he was counting off on his fingers. Well, the kids dove into my bucket so fast that the stranger lost his place and had to stop. They even took a bowl of half-runners, something no child'll do unless he's missing greens. The stranger got behind them and herded them off to where Sheriff Piatt was warming up his quartet for some gospel music. We've got a sheriff that does a lot of free singing on Riddle Mountain around election time. I make it a point to mention this to him because I don't want him to think he's pulling the wool over my eyes. As long as I can remember, he's ridden around this county with his hand on the dash of his car, his palm turned out in a wave, just in case he missed somebody. The man's good at getting votes and strumming a guitar but not much on law enforcement. I still remember how he treated the stranger, glad-handing him and paying no mind to those two rag-a-muffin kids. "What's this man doing up here?" I hissed at my cousin Christine. She runs the local grocery store and knows just about everything that goes on in this neck of the woods. "Showed up this morning, driving that big R.V. with the California tag. You musta walked right past it on the way up. What's the matter with you today? You worrying about Bee again?" Belva Lou calls herself "Bee" at Eastern Kentucky University since the name I...

The Mountain Man Vernacular: Its Historical Roots, Its Linguistic Nature, and Its Literary Uses

The Mountain Man Vernacular: Its Historical Roots, Its Linguistic Nature, and Its Literary Uses

China: A Pandora's Box?

Nicholas Tapp is Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University, Hong Kong. The information was gathered in the course of a one-month visit to the Institute for South-East Asian Studies in Kunming, Yunnan, and the Institute of Southeast Asian History at Zhongsan University, Canton, together with three weeks in Hong Kong where he interviewed members of the Tao Fong Shan Ecumenical and other Christian groups and leaders. It forms part of a longer-term private research project, for which he has been reading for over a year and meeting missionaries in London and elsewhere. Nicholas Tapp recently finished a PhD on Hmong social organization in Northeast Thailand. 'Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his reward according to his own labour'. I. Corinthians 3. 'Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism'. Deng Xiao-Ping, 30 June 1984. Since 1978 the Christian church in China has experienced an unprecedented revival. Churches have been reopened in the towns, mass conversions have occurred in the countryside, and delegations of Chinese Christians have visited overseas. Among the new converts are many members of China's minority nationalities. When Samuel Pollard, Methodist missionary to southwest China, first came across the tribal Miao minority people in 1904, they were in a desperate economic plight following the failure of their various uprisings against the Han Chinese. For several centuries Han Chinese from the North had been colonizing their mountainous homelands in the provinces of Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan. The Gospel brought by Pollard, representative of the Western powers who were then exploiting the riches of southern China, appealed instantly to these deprived and impoverished minorities. In 1919, Pollard described the impact of the Christian message on the Miao in the following words: Some days they came in tens and twenties! Some days in sixties and seventies! Then came a hundred! Then came two hundred! Three hundred! Four hundred! At last, on one special occasion, a thousand of these mountain men came in one day! When they came, the snow was on the ground, and terrible had been the snow on the hills they crossed over. What a great crowd it was!

Journal of a Mountain Man: James Clyman

Book Review| July 01 1985 Journal of a Mountain Man: James Clyman Journal of a Mountain Man: James Clyman, Linda M. Hasselstrom. Todd I. Berens Todd I. Berens Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utah Historical Quarterly (1985) 53 (3): 302–303. https://doi.org/10.2307/45061197 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Todd I. Berens; Journal of a Mountain Man: James Clyman. Utah Historical Quarterly 1 January 1985; 53 (3): 302–303. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/45061197 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressUtah Historical Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Copyright 1985 Utah State Historical Society1985 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: Journal of a Mountain Man, by James Clyman and Linda M. Hasselstrom

Review: <i>Journal of a Mountain Man</i>, by James Clyman and Linda M. Hasselstrom

Ammahabas by Bill Hotchkiss

Reviews 345 ing the killing over eight hundred times and reliving it in the process, until Charley (who plays the murdered Jesse on stage) is haunted to suicide. Bob makes and loses several fortunes, becomes a gambler and a brothel owner in the Rockies, and is finally gunned down in a gold rush town. Hansen provides a marvelous blend of nemesis, history, legend, and Americana. While the narrative moves along irresistibly, the author packs it with intimate details that reconstruct the era that is at once so close to us and so remote. He has what Henry James called “the sense of the past.” Though the history is meticulous, the book is very much a novel, with a deadpan sense of humor both in the narrative and dialogue to counterpoint the deadly violence. The novel is both a compelling entertainment and a serious and important work of literature. Whether Hansen will continue with his study of western outlaws or go on to other subjects, he is definitely an author to watch. ROBERT E. MORSBERGER California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Ammahabas. By Bill Hotchkiss. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983. 350 pages, $15.95.) Mountain-man buffs always welcome another serious addition to the remarkably good body of fiction about the mountain men. And the life of the mulatto trapper Jim Beckwourth is particularly rich in promise. So it is a pleasure to say that Bill Hotchkiss’sAmmahabas, the successor to his Medicine Calf, is distinguished, lyrical, spaciously conceived, and poignantly beautiful. And sad to have to add that it is also fitfully energetic, and often tedious. Medicine Calf took young Beckwourth to the mountains, saw him through some early trapping adventures, got him adopted as a Crow, and established him as a chief of that nation. Ammahabas (the Crow word for the Rocky Mountains, says Hotchkiss) takes him to a pinnacle of power as chief, to marriage with the warrior-woman Pine Leaf, and to the brink of his returning to the white-man life. Hotchkiss promises two more novels to com­ plete a tetralogy, The Crow, and The Death of Captain Jim. Like Medicine Calf, this second installment follows the loose form of the roman de fleuve, narrating Beckwourth’s life chronologically, some events being dramatized from Beckwourth’s autobiography and other sources, and some invented. As headnotes to each chapter are short poems, fashioned in supple masculine language of striking lyricism and often stunning beauty. Hotchkiss’s narrative style is not nearly as effective as his poetry. He often forsakes drama and narrative shape for a haphazard, this-is-what-happenednext quality, the principal danger of the roman de fleuve form. Though some­ times the narrative line is taut, it is as often lax. Reading is stylistically bumpy and rough, like sledding on patchy snow. The central figure is a first-rate achievement — a large, complex char­ acter grandly conceived and written. Beckwourth is larger than life in his 346 Western American Literature lusts, his boldnesses, his abilities, his willingness to be hugely and spontane­ ously himself. This is not simply a brash young trapper feeling his oats, but a man who sees the myriad, crazy possibilities of life and embraces them with an affirming, cosmic laughter. If the book’s other people run to fur-trade stereotypes, it does not matter beside the creation of such a splendid Beckwourth . Hotchkiss is quick to emphasize that his Beckwourth is fictional, and that seems to me right: Why not use the historical mulatto as a frame on which to build a character larger and more resonant than history? But other liberties with history are more dubious: Hotchkiss indicates several times that Moses Harris was a Negro, which he wasn’t; Jedediah Smith is sketched as small both physically and spiritually, a factual error com­ pounded by an interpretive one; emigrants are put into the mountains half a decade before they arrived; and other such small matters. The reshaping of history seems to me legitimate when done knowingly for large artistic purpose, but not when done out of carelessness or ignorance. And, considering Hotchkiss’s impressive ability to enter into the mind of Beckwourth, I hoped for a deeper...

The Art of the Mountain Man Novel

The Art of the Mountain Man Novel David Stouck David Stouck Simon Fraser University Footnotes The Far Western Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1956) 2. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 88–98 3. John Milton, The Novel of the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), pp. 164–65 4. Ibid., p. 70. 5. Howard O’Hagan, Tay John (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), p. 167 6. Don D. Walker in “The Mountain Man as Literary Hero,” Western American Literature 1 (Spring 1966), pp. 15–25 7. Don Berry, Moontrap (New York: Viking Press, 1962), p. 65 Glen Love, Don Berry (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1978), p. 21 9. Frederick Manfred, Lord Grizzly (New York: Signet, 1954), p. 161 10. Harvey Fergusson, Wolf Song (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), p. 202 James K. Folsom’s The American Western Novel (New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1966) 12. A. B. Guthrie, Jr., The Big Sky (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 290 13. A. B. Guthrie, Jr., The Blue Hen’s Chick (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 200 14. Vardis Fisher, Mountain Man (Boise, Idaho: Opal Laurel Holmes, 1972), pp. 348–49 15. Richard Astro, “The Big Sky and the Limits of Wilderness Fiction,” Western American Literature 9 (August 1974), pp. 105–14 16. David Remley, “Afterword” to Forrester Blake’s Johnny Christmas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), pp. 279–87 Copyright © 1985 Western Literature Association

Visionaries, Mountain Men &amp; Empire Builders. They Made A Difference by Fred Lockley

Visionaries, Mountain Men &amp; Empire Builders. They Made A Difference by Fred Lockley

Corn: The Mountain Staple

^ Corn: The Mountain Staple by Richard Relham One summer day I stopped by this roadside house to make a pastoral call on a family. No one was at home but I had a pretty good idea where they might be. Accordingly I went around the house and followed a path that led upwards about a half mile to a fairly level plateau in the hills. Here I found the father, mother and four girls hoeing corn. Mountain fields were not adaptable to the use of machinery, so growing corn was a hand labor operation and ordinarily every member of the family above eight years old, male and female, were pressed into service. In this case there were no boys, only four attractive girls. I walked along beside them, moving from one member of the family to another. If there had been an extra hoe I would have helped; in fact, I offered to take the youngest girl's place but my offer was politely declined, partly perhaps, in deference to my position as a minister, but more likely for protection of their corn from a greenhorn . On my grandfather's farm in the Shenandoah Valley I had cultivated corn, sitting on a cultivator behind two horses, but this was a different kind of cultivation. Even the most basic labor requires its particular skill. I noted and admired the economy of energy that went into the hoeing. I would have lifted 11 my hoe about two feet and slashed down on a weed with an expenditure of energy that would have left me exhausted by noon, but mountain hoers had learned like blacks in slavery days how to use just the amount of energy proportionate to the accomplishment of the task, which enables the worker to end a whole day pleasantly tired but not prostrated. This experienced family barely lifted the hoe from the ground and sliced off the weeds at about a halfinch below ground level with a graceful, fluid motion that covered the maximum area with the least effort. The delight in observing the rhythm of six people hoeing was akin to that ofwatching a ballet. Ordinarily the corn is hoed out three times in a season till the corn is tall enough to survive the weeds. This was the third and last hoeing for this family and anticipation of finishing the most tedious labor of the season probably made them more lighthearted than usual and my visit was also a welcome break in the monotony ofthe task. Corn is the mountain staple. It is the only grain crop that can be grown successfully on steep slopes or in new ground between stumps, so it became the staple grain of mountain dwellers. It was necessary for both people and stock. For people it could be boiled, roasted or popped, ground for mush, but above all made into meal for cornbread. The hill people had cornbread at least once a day, sometimes at all three meals, or carried in the pocket to munch on at odd hours. The meal was coarser than the "store-boughten" variety, and was cooked in a large skillet or rectangular pan and emerged thick and crusty. It was not cut before being placed on the table, rather it was dumped on a plate and passed around so each diner could break off a hunk with a twisting motion. No one went hungry when there was plenty of cornbread around. The relish of cornbread often precluded a taste for any other bread—unless it be biscuits. More than once I have heard an expatriate mountaineer in the flatlands exclaim that the thing he missed most was homemade cornbread. Of course, he could buy meal in a store, but it was not the same as meal from a mill ground from one's own corn. The ubiquity of cornfields in the mountains—on the hillsides, or in the hollows , or between the road and the creek—has given rise to many jokes like that about the farmer who planted his corn on a steep hillside by shooting the kernels into the field with a shotgun. Another mountain man reputedly broke his leg when he fell out of...

Cowboy Life on the Texas Plains: The Photographs of Ray Rector ed. by Margaret Rector, and Last of a Breed: Portraits of Working Cowboys by Martin H. Schreiber

Reviews 261 “hardy and self-sufficient women” she describes who “stepped out of women’s place with few regrets” (p. 270) are the stuff of hagiography not history. While the book will no doubt prove interesting to general readers, it is impor­ tant more as a compendium than as a major addition to the scholarship in the field. CAROL A. O’CONNOR, Utah State University Cowboy Life on the Texas Plains: The Photographs of Ray Rector. Edited by Margaret Rector; Introduction by John Graves. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982. 119 pages, 88 B/W photographs, $19.95.) Last of a Breed: Portraits of Working Cowboys. By Martin H. Schreiber; Introduction by Louis L’Amour. (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1982. 104 pages, 85 B/W photographs, $38.00.) Fiction and history have recorded the major debates over the fate of the cowboy. Two new collections of photographs, however, shed additional light on the subject, especially when viewed comparatively. Thumbing through either volume will erase any doubt that the cowboy’s job w'as dirty, dusty, demanding, and dangerous. Cowboy Life on the Texas Plains contains photo­ graphs taken in the 1920s and 1930s around Stamford, still home of the annual Cowboy Reunion where real cowboys, not coddled professionals, get a chance to show their skills. Part of about a thousand pictures deposited in the Texas Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin, these nearly ninety photographs prove that an artist definitely understood his work when he set out to record the cowboy life he lived and loved. In his Introduction, John Graves imparts “a few insights” on cowboys, a subject he sees as surrounded by the “quicksand” of so much “extraneous meaning and connotation” that serious writers with backgrounds in the West “shy away from them as a subject.” Graves declares that the old-time cowboy disappeared in the dust of World War II, but he admits to a “personal fond­ ness” and “an ambivalence” concerning the cowboy myth. On the other hand, one may look at many of the scenes in Martin Schreiber’s Last of a Breed without realizing these pictures were taken in 1981 and 1982 on various ranches in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. In fact, many of the more than eighty scenes presented could fit either book, even though some of the pictures reveal their contemporary date by the presence of such modern accoutrements as pickup trucks, a beer joint, Coors in cans, and a cowboy shampooing his hair in a stocktank with Head and Shoulders. Louis L’Amour’s brief introduction sets a proper tone for this attractive volume. The remarkable part about the two books is that examined side by side they reveal some of the changes in ranch life in the more than fifty years that separate the two sets of pictures. More noticeable, however, is the lack of 262 Western American Literature change depicted — cowboys are still doing many of the same things in much the same way as they did years ago. For comparison one can look at Life on the Texas Range (1952), a col­ lection of photographs by Erwin E. Smith and a text by J. Evetts Haley. The quality of the reproduction is better in these two later books, but a haunting timelessness is present in all three photographic chronicles. These books are definitely worth examining. LAWRENCE CLAYTON Hardin-Simmons University Carry The Wind. By Terry C. Johnston. (Aurora, Illinois: Caroline House Publishers, 1982. 571 pages, $13.95.) Like Miniver Cheevy, Terry Johnston loves the days of old, specifically those days in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when the fur trade flourished. Unlike Miniver, though, he doesn’t mourn his fate. He recreates the past both as a modern mountain man and as a chronicler of those times for which he was born too late. According to a friend of mine and of the author, Phil “Blue Jacket” Sanders, maker of black powder rifles and a “booshway” of the ’82 rendezvous high in the Uintas, Carry the Wind is the most authentic mountain man novel ever written. Have you ever wondered how a mountain man set his beaver traps, how he built his...

Santa Fe &amp; Taos: The Writer’s Era, 1916–1941 by Marta Weigle, Kyle Fiore

Reviews 185 Santa Fe & Taos: The Writer’sEra, 1916-1941. Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore. (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1982. 229 pages, $15.95.) Santa Fe, New Mexico, and its northern neighboring town, Taos, have long and romantic histories comprised of the interrelationships of three cul­ tures—Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo —with that special landscape seemingly perceived as “enchanting” byall those who stayed or passed through. Conquistadors, mountain men, explorers, priests, merchants, soldiers, and artists, all under various loyalties and for differing motives, have been lured to northern New Mexico. Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore give the modern reader a sustained and panoramic glimpse (but it is only a glimpse) into New Mexico in their fine book on Santa Fe and Taos as artists’ colonies between the two great wars. Although they are comprehensive in the perspective given, the authors know there is much more to say about these two old and romantic towns and the artists who reside there even today in the 1980s, not to mention centuries past. To be sure, the era Weigle and Fiore focus their attention on — namely, 19161941 — is a renaissance period in southwestern letters. The very source for the arrangement, title, and scope of their book, Van Deren Coke’s 1963 study, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist’sEnvironment, 1882-1942, is evidence that the authors are likewise fully aware that the lives of painters in these places, or today the presence of such an important cultural institution as the Santa Fe Opera, as well as the cultural and racial mixture of New Mexico’s citizenry at large, reciprocally affect the lives of writers. But there is only so much any one book can accomplish. In the three major sections of this book (i.e., “A Chronicle,” which pro­ vides a running, historical narrative of the artists in these two towns in the 1920s and 1930s; “Portraits and Self Portraits,” extracts and full-length essays about the New Mexico literary scene in those days; and in “Publications Ephemeral and Exemplary,” the section which reproduces original columns and clippings from then contemporary publishers and publications like the Rydal Press, “Laughing Horse,” “The Horse Fly,” “The New Mexico Senti­ nel,” and “New Mexico Quarterly”), the names which dominate the scene are the famous ones of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, Alice Corbin, Witter Bynner, D. H. Lawrence, and Willa Cather. To be sure, what Mabel Dodge Luhan was to Taos, Witter Bynner was to Santa Fe in their own unique, flamboyant cordiality which attracted such illustrious guests as Robinson Jeffers, Thornton Wylder, Carl van Vechten — and from the more southern regions of Albuquerque and beyond that Roswell and Alamagordo, the Fergussons (Harvey and Erna), Paul Horgan, and Eugene Manlove Rhodes. The names of lesser luminaries and their impact appear throughout in fascinating networks of acquaintanceship. As Horgan himself insists in an excerpt reprinted here, each artist must develop along his or her own lines;but there is a decided exhilaration involved in breathing the same “climate’ of one’s own kind, the air of artists mingling with each other. 186 Western American Literature One aspect of that climate is a salient feature of Weigle’s and Fiore’s triptych. And that is the number of small newspapers and literary journals, presses and bookshops, and group ventures which sprang up both before and after the depression. There were things, people, and places in abundance to write about, an exciting urge to write about them, and numerous publications in which to appear. The flowering of the literary “desert” of the West — as wide and varied as that place of mind and word is— owes much to what went on during the “writer’s era” of 1916-1941 in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Santa Fe and Taos — the same mountains which surrounding the secret of Los Alamos anticipated more ominous and profound wastelands. Thanks to Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore and their assembled glance at one small region of America’sliterary history, that at once innocent and portentous climate can still be inhaled and relived. ROBERT GISH, University of Northern Iowa Happy Hunting Grounds. By Stanley Vestal. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1981. 219 pages...

The fat admirer

This paper describes a neglected social phenomenon: men who are erotically and romantically attracted to fat women in part because they are obese. Fifteen formal interviews were held with “fat admirers,” as well as numerous informal interviews with many more. In addition, the authors have been participants in a “fat” civil rights organization (the National Association to Aid Fat Americans), which serves as a site for fat admirers and obese women to meet and socialize with one another. At least three dimensions distinguish different types of fat admirers—closet” versus “overt,” “exclusive” versus “preferential,” and “mountain men” versus “middle‐of‐the‐roaders. The authors also explore the impact of stigma emanating from conventional society on the sexual life of the fat admirer and the fat woman. Lastly, the role that exchange and social bargaining‐following some basic tenets of exchange theory—play in the sexual exploitation of some fat women is elaborated.

Orthodoxy, Enlightenment and Religious Revival

Everyone has his favourite squibs to illuminate the animosity of the devotees of the Christian application of modern knowledge towards the partisans of religious revival. R. B. Aspland, the unitarian, summed them all up succinctly in the early nineteenth century in his case against Wesleyanism. ‘Wine’, he declared, ‘is the beverage of the gentleman, spirits of the herd. So with religion’. Something of this edge had been there from the beginning, long before attitudes had been struck and the French Revolution had become a divider of spirits everywhere. Much of the fascination of the Turretini correspondence is provided by the conscious sense of intellectual superiority of the Swiss fathers of rational orthodoxy. ‘We are here much occupied with the scandalous affairs of Toggenburg’, writes Jean Gaspard Escher with an almost audible turn of the nose. ‘These are mountain people rather like Vaudois, Miquelets or Camisards’, and their murderous politics were of the Ulster variety. Neither the Toggenburgers, nor the Vaudois or Camisards were part of the history of religious revival, but they were very like Protestant minorities from Central Europe who were; the Salzburgers, for example. ‘The majority of these men’, writes Escher of the latter, ‘can neither read nor write; their fundamental doctrine is that worship is due to God alone and that salvation is by Jesus Christ. This doctrine fills them with a horror of popery: . . . they are ill-instructed in the other articles of religion. They know by heart some fine passages of scripture and some Lutheran hymns to which they hold’. Pastorally, if not confessionally, the mountain men were a different cup of tea from the practitioners of polite learning; but as late as 1800 it was possible to turn American methodists and baptists out in droves to vote for the deist Jefferson, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the fate of the revivalist and that of the men of enlightenment was more closely linked at an early stage than the text-book categories usually suggest.

Melvin Isaacs

MELVIN ISAACS by Loyal Jones 1 Mountain boy, he knew as much through senses as intellect, could tell at an instant chinquapin, mountain tea, boneset or elusive ginseng. He roamed the hills exploring each cove and hollow over aggregations of leaves that kept the secret of his and all passings. Though he was scarcely remembered in that place, each contour and substance was ever a part of him. 2 Once he heard geese in the night and saw them black against full moon, going far beyond the world he knew. Once another year, he woke to honking in a far cornfield, and with fluttering chest he stalked them on knees and belly, saw them rise all in an instant, felt his own trembling as he fired, saw one spiral to earth, a lesser thing. At once he mourned the fowl and the death of innocence and tried to imagine the place of the goose's going. 65 3 The gifts from generations before bore down on him, ballad and tale and adage, fact and myth inextricably woven into blood and character. He was heir to it all, his mind heavy, holding at once Jesus and Jack the Giant Killer, Lord Lovell and the haughty Barbry Allen. Truth and myth converged attesting to poetic and religious necessities, without which he knew he would flounder as with glandular imbalance. He lived in two worlds, a foot in each, walking as if in buckets at once too broad and too short, a bad fit he was aware. He hoped he was in one of those dreams of cumbersome and inadequate locomotion in the face of imminent peril and that he would wake up in hushpuppies—of two different styles perhaps but comfortable and swift. He knew though that it would take longer than a dream. Note: Melvin Isaacs is a fictional mountain man, who, like many of us, has gone forth to do what he does. These poems reflect his notions and ideas about himself and the two worlds in which he lives. 66 5 One talent he had was a defense against fads. It was really just his annoyance with change. He liked most of life as it was, even liked himself and he silently detested those who styled and invented, was furious to be told by shopkeepers that what he sought was out of fashion. He sneered and set his mind against those bearing good news of breakthroughs in human potential and efficiency. It was these meddlers with his comfortable feelings about human nature that he abhorred. He didn't count himself a Calvinist but careful observation had brought no hope of perfection that the faddists proclaimed. He just didn't have time for it all. 6 His companion is the child of himself who gambols, darts and lingers, while he walks sedately, thinking of dignity. Or perhaps he is ever the child and his comrade the stranger. He covertly studies others his age who appear mature and sensible, not given to foolishness like skipping and gleeful song or pranks at solemn moments. Yet once he saw such a model gentleman leap from sidewalk to rock wall in childish compulsion although quickly dismounting with sheepish composure. Now and then he vows to put behind him these juvenile ways and rivet himself to maturity, but eventually he is overcome by boredom. 67 7 "The house my grandfather built was by those parked cars," he said, "And the meadow sloped there to a pond. Woolworth's does business over the barn's foundations. I plowed the garden under Rexall's and horses ran where that department store squats. Progress had to come, they all said. We must be served with transistors and doubleknits. They're dearer to us now, you know, than dew on a meadow, wind through a horse's mane or green things sprouting from tended earth. Progress is a fickle bitch," he said toward the blue mountains. 8 Women's liberation sneaked up on him while he was enjoying a somewhat remote affair with them. He was partial to women over men and admitted his longings were a factor. He resisted, not always successfully, furtive glances over bosom and loin...

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig

324 Western American Literature Indian novels, there are Mountain Man novels, railroad novels, and mining novels, to name just a few. But a reviewer should not, I think, quibble too much with a title, especially since this is such a carefully selected, wellorganized anthology of criticism. Folsom has given a great deal of thought to this one, and we will all profit from it. DELBERT E. WYLDER, Murray State University This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind. By Ivan Doig. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. 314 pages, $9.95.) Ivan Doig looks back upon his family’s past in order, as he suggests, to know “how, now, my single outline meets the time-swept air that knew theirs.” This House of Sky is not so much an autobiography as an interpreta­ tion of the lives of Doig’s father, Charlie, and his grandmother, Bessie Ringer, and the hard Montana country they lived in. The true focus is the writer’s father, Charlie. If there is an authentic westerner, Charlie Doig is that man. He seems bounded, the westerner in his place. Not in any sense a traveler, Charlie is ever restless away from Montana where he is bom and toils his life away. What are the traits of this man of the mountain West? Fundamentally he is a man of work. No self pity. Little self indulgence. Work is what he does with his time from before dawn until after dark seven days a week. Fun is a couple of beers in town every other Saturday night. Rest is the daily break at noon for dinner (evening meal is supper on the ranch and farm). Noon for Charlie Doig meant “the controlled curve of the day from morning into afternoon, where the beginning of labor crossed into the lessening of labor.” Also fundamentally Charlie Doig is a wizard of survival. Ivan remembers his father as a man with a “cocked grin of wryness at having survived one time more.” Flooded and windblown, busted by disease and storm, burned by squirrelly landlords, stomped by rank horses, Charlie Doig bounces with a wry grin and tries again. “But I always healed fast,” Ivan recalls his father’s always saying. Much of the survival stuff is in these people’s making accommodations; they make do with what they have at hand, seldom worry about appearances. Ivan is raised by his father and maternal grandmother. He ponders the relationship of these two who move in together to parent a growing boy, neither of whom had reflected upon his role in life, but either capable of the most hazardous one. Finally, skill at handling men and animals is fine honed in Charlie Doig. He reminds me of the old cowmen in Larry McMurtry’s books. “Ranch Reviews 325 crews were a hard commodity, a gravel mix of drifters, drinkers, gripers, not a few mental cripples, and an occasional steady worker. . . . It was a mark of Dad’s crews that they generally went out of the bunkhouse to the school section and the creek fence and a dozen other jobs just as if the work had been their own idea all along.” Perhaps the finest thing about this book is the writing itself, the richness of thought and image and phrasing. In this it is like two other interpretive books about the West — Stegner’s Wolf Willow and Graves’ Goodbye to a River. Line after line reads fresh as Montana morning. Driving across a northern prairie at night, “Dad puzzled through the darkness along fainter and fainter scuffs of prairie road. . . . notched his chin ahead another full inch and choked the steering wheel as if it had betrayed him.” Or, of a home sheepcamp high on a mountain ridgeline: “Alone here on our abrupt tiny shelf, the three of us eased through May and the first twenty-six days of June secure as hawks with wind under our wings. Once a week, the camptender from the home ranch would come the dozen miles of trail to us. The blaze-faced sorrel he rode and the packhorse haltered behind would plod in from the shadows which pooled in our valley under the shouldering slopes...

Review: The Adventures of Alexander Barclay, Mountain Man: A Narrative of His Career, 1810 to 1855; His Memorandum Diary, 1845 to 1850, by George P. Hammond

Review: <i>The Adventures of Alexander Barclay, Mountain Man: A Narrative of His Career, 1810 to 1855; His Memorandum Diary, 1845 to 1850</i>, by George P. Hammond

The Mountain Woman: In Fact and Fiction of the Early Twentieth Centry

The Mountain Woman IN FACT AND FICTION OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTRY by Danny Miller Parti THE STEREOTYPE "I've got a girl at the head of a hollow, Hay, didyum, didyum dum day, She won't come, and I won't follow. Hay, didyum, didyum dum day. Old man, old man, I want your daughter, Hay, didyum, didyum dum day, To bake me bread and carry me water. Hay, didyum, didyum dum day."l The mountaineer of the Southern Appalachian region, known in earlier days as the "Southern Highlander," has interested the sociologist, historian and writer of fiction for over a century now. Since his first fully-dramatized treatment in the postCivil War short stories of Mary Noailles Murfree, and his subsequent interest to the sociologist and historian, the mountaineer had probably had one of the most notorious and degraded careers, as well as one of the most misunderstood, of any class or type of American in both fact and fiction, although many writers about the region, including Miss Murfree, tried to show him objectively and sympathetically. Yet, "of all places in America," as Robert J. Higgs writes, "none is more enveloped in misty myths than that region of the South known as Southern Appalachia .... Those who know anything at all about the area know that there are now and have always been a wide diversity of peoples and cultures within this region, but mythologizers of all stripes have either implicitly or explicitly lumped its inhabitants into stereotypes."^ It was unquestionably the mountain man who first captured the public imagination and was first mythologized and stereotyped; he has been dealt with extensively in writing. But the mountain woman was and is as interesting a subject, and she underwent the same process of typing. Even though "many of the myths and stereotypes 48 about . . . women in our society have been discredited in recent years as a result of both a critical re-examination of the underlying assumptions of earlier studies and in-depth scholarly research," as Stephen L. Fisher says, ^ the mountain woman has found it hard to shake some of the myths which surround her; she has two strikes against her: she is a woman, and she is a mountain woman. The socio-historical essays and books which began about the turn of the century to attempt an analysis of the highland culture and its people, the first and most wellknown ones written mostly by "observers" from outside the area, did much to strengthen the prevailing notions of what the mountaineer's life was like. All of these articles presented the mountain woman in a typical, stock way: she was pretty but ignorant, married young, bore a houseful of "youngens," led a life of endless drudgery often tinged with "unaccountable" or "unconscious" melancholy, became old at thirty-five, and ended her life sitting on the front porch of her cabin with a corncob pipe in her mouth and a black sunbonnet on her head. In a paper of this length 't would be impossible to cite all of the comments pertaining to the mountain woman found in these early essays, but a selective sample of statements from some of these treatises will suffice to illustrate the stereotype. William Goodell Frost, at that time president of Berea College, wrote one of the first definitive statements about the mountaineer in 1899. In his article, entitled "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains," Frost stated: A word deserves to be said of the native refinement of many of the mountain women. The staid combination of a black sunbonnet and a cob pipe is not unusual, and the shrill voice that betokens desperation in life's struggles may be heard .... Yet there is withal a real kindliness and a certain shy modesty, and often a passionate eagerness to note points of superiority which may be imitated. Frost's "word" on the mountain woman pointed out several of the traits which were then and afterwards typically associated with her: the sunbonnet and pipe, the modesty and shyness, the "passionate eagerness" to improve her state (or at least to imitate "points of superiority"), and the desperation of her "life's struggles." This description changed little...

The Coyote: Defiant Songdog of the West by Francois Leydet

Reviews 199 “the restless sea,” “a sparkling stream”; in “Anything Is Possible” we read, “White, white, those sails unfurled by bold and dusky men!” The subject of nearly half these poems is the poet or the writing of poems. The author might well have been less self-consciously aware of the poet, have spent less time writing about the writing of poems, and more time doing the actual hard work of creating one, of concentrating, of finding the exact and specific image, of organizing the presentation which is the poem. ROBERT F. RICHARDS, Denver, Colorado The Coyote: Defiant Songdog of the West. By Francois Leydet. (San Fran­ cisco: Chronicle Books, 1977. 222 pages, $7.95.) Of all the native wild animals of the West, perhaps the most “western” are the plains buffalo and the coyote. The buffalo — big, powerful, foul tempered, stupid — survives in zoos, reserves, and private herds. The coyote — small, adaptable, humorous, smart — still prospers in the wild. Anyone in the West away from the cities can see coyotes and hear them sing the same songs heard by mountain men, early explorers, and settlers, giving us continuity with the old, unsettled land. The Coyote, unlike Leydet’s earlier books, Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon, and The Last Redwoods, is not a “picture” book. In the others, published by the Sierra Club, Leydet’s text is accompanied by numerous excellent photographs. The Coyote contains drawings by Lewis E. Jones, but they supplement and illustrate the text. They never overwhelm it as photographs often do in Sierra Club editions. This is a loosely constructed book of appreciation, interpretation, advocacy. Although well written, it does not have the unity of effect one might expect from Krutch or Eiseley. Nevertheless, it offers information, folklore, modem western attitudes, and personal experiences concerning the coyote in relation to that other predator, man. At the outset Leydet deromanticizes the coyote by acknowledging that he is a killer whose victims suffer and die. Although the coyote often kills swiftly, he is sometimes clumsy and unintentionally cruel. Even this Leydet puts into perspective, reminding us that “a predator is any animal that kills another for food, and the ladybug is as lethal a killer as the leopard.” Leydet gives us a series of viewpoints, beginning with the coyote itself. After presenting two generations of a mythical coyote family history, Leydet takes us on his search for information. He shows us the coyote through the eyes of American Indians, wildlife biologists, government trappers, cattlemen, sheepmen, government bureaucrats, sporting varmint hunters, and finally 200 Western American Literature himself, a conservationist seeking an ethical but realistic relationship with nature that recognizes human needs but acknowledges rights for other creatures. The result is a book concerned with more than the coyote. It is about our need for a sense of stewardship of the earth, a sense that recognizes the complexity of ecological systems, lest we destroy ourselves in unthinking determination to destroy competitors. The coyote, he concludes, may be a much less endangered species than we are. Thus this book is many things. Presenting information both about the coyote and about various groups of people in their relationship with the coyote, it includes myth, legend, religion, biological facts, tall tales, and, in the process, an overview of writings about the coyote, from Twain through Dobie to contemporary biologists. No one can know the western landscape without knowing the coyote. For the greenhorn just making that acquaintance, this book can speed the process and deepen experience with understanding. For the westerner already a friend — or enemy — of the coyote, this book provides fresh insights into our relationship with the “defiant songdog of the West.” PAUL T. BRYANT, Colorado State University Frost in the Orchard. By Donald R. Marshall. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1977. 175 pages, $4.95.) The Blue Door & Other Stories. By Lawrence P. Spingam. (Van Nuys, California: Perivale Press, 1977. 60 pages, $4.00.) One of the fascinations of short fiction is the endless variation allowed by its ostensibly limited form. Happily for most readers, the short story, like the novel, is not as easily compartmentalized and “known” as classroom and critical definition might suggest. And besides...