Reviews 73 Poems will allow readers to appreciate his contribution to understanding the beauty and significance of the world he has known. T. M. PEARCE, University of New Mexico The Mountainway of the Navajo. By Leland C. Wyman, with a myth of the Female Branch recorded and translated by Father Berard Haile, OFM. (Tucson, Arizona: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1975. xv + 271 pages, illustra tions, tables, bibliography, and index. $14.50.) Navajo singers Yucca Patch Man and River Junction Curley told the myths which form the center of this book to Fr. Haile in the early 1930’s. After Haile’s death his notes were preserved through the special efforts of Drs. Fred Eggan (Univ. of Chicago) and Bernard Fontana (Univ. of Arizona) ; and, as Wyman prepared the materials for publication, Professor David P. McAllester (Wesleyan Univ.) revised Haile’s translations of many of the songs of Mountainway. The book, then, represents a strikingly cooperative enterprise. That Leland Wyman should bring it to completion is appropriate and predictable. Long the outstanding non-Navajo authority on Navajo ceremonialism, this is his fifth book-length study of a Navajo chantway, and he approaches the task with practiced method. Following a brief discussion of Navajo people and the larger design of their ceremonial system, Wyman treats in successive chapters the varieties of Mountainway and their uses, the ceremonial procedure of the chant, its major and minor mythic motifs, and, what is clearly his central interest, the sandpaintings of Mountainway. These chapters will delight and inform students of anthropology and folklore for their economy and precision, but students of literature will no doubt want to turn first to the songs and myths themselves. Washington Matthews estimated that over one hundred and fifty “songs of sequence” might be sung on the last night alone of a nine day Mountain way ceremony. Thus, the nineteen songs included in this book are but a small fraction of those sung at a performance of the ceremony. But they are tantalizing examples — all the more so because they are presented with Fr. Haile’s notes to help us aliens make connections among their litanies of deities and symbols. Making connections in the songs will take readers inevitably beyond Haile’s notes to the myths of Mountainway. Most of our favorite definitions suggest that the land was and remains the catalyst in the formation of western American literature, and we have come increasingly to speak of the western American writer’s “sense of place” in both descriptive and evaluative terms. The myth of Female MountainTop -Way as told by Yucca Patch Man is by that criterion western American 74 Western American Literature literature par excellence. The narrative is as Wyman describes it a “sus pense filled tale of flight and pursuit, of ‘wandering in the dust’ among the mountains surrounding the four corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico.” It is a classic example of the hero quest, and it is peopled with characters familiar to us in derivative connections. Bear Man, and Snake Man, and malevolent Changing Bear Maiden (Esdza shash nadle) from House Made of Dawn; Coyote now from seemingly everywhere. But it is the land, the cultural landscape formed by generations of such telling and wandering, which forms the center of interest — for protagonists and readers — in the eighty-six pages of the myth. Such a display of a broad and culturally deep knowledge of a particular landscape is sobering stuff for those of us who presume to make our own connections with the land in a generation or, through our grandparents, a century. There is some solace, I suppose, in the anthropological assurance that Navajos have been in the Four Comers area a scant five centuries. LAWRENCE J. EVERS, University of Arizona The Massacre at Fall Creek. By Jessamyn West. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. 373 pages, $8.95.) Twenty years ago, while reading in Smith’s Early Indiana Trials, Jessamyn West first encountered the “massacre at Fall Creek,” an 1824 slaughter of nine Senecas by Indiana settlers. In her “Valedictory,” she notes that only scanty, unofficial, and often contradictory versions have survived a century and a half, and that the event had no...