Reviews 261 respond to the values explicit in both the frontier experience and the frontier metaphor—“a moral order promising both human and social perfection” (p. 135). Simonson, then, is not really a student of regional or frontier literaure. He is interested primarily in the spiritual condition of American society in the Twentieth Century. He thinks the frontier experience contributed to that condition, and he thinks the metaphor of he closed frontier helps us under stand its tragic implications more fully. But the student who turns to his study with the expectation of finding an analysis of the tragic theme in frontier literature will be disappointed. While Simonson’s book indicates some pos sibilities for such an analysis, the student of tragedy will still need to know Don Walker's essay, “Freedom and Destiny in the Myth of the American West,” which appeared in the New Mexico Quarterly (Winter, 1963-64). Walker’s thesis, that “nowhere in all time and all space was man more free than he was on the Western frontier; but nowhere in all time and all space was he more lonely and more doomed to violent death,” sounds remarkably close to Simonson’s own. But Walker’s analysis of the tragic tension between freedom and destiny does not require the historical example of the closing of the frontier to give it meaning. The tragic potential of the frontier experience was in the experience itself. The actual frontier experience is rich in existen tial anthropology; there is ample evidence that man’s freedom (and his perfectability , to use the term Simonson prefers) were limited and finite. M e r r i l l L ew is, Western Washington State College Garden in the Grasslands: Boomer Literature of the Central Great Plains. By David M. Emmons. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971. 220 pages, $10.00.) If any readers of the Pentagon Papers supposed that the use of lies as instruments of public policy was a recent innovation, they would do well to read Garden in the Grasslands and learn how the truth about the agricultural limitations of the High Plains was deliberately suppressed and a myth of Edenic abundance substituted. Although private agencies, notably the rail roads, employed the techniques of misrepresentation most blatantly, depart ments of state government such as the Kansas State Board of Agriculture were not far behind. Making effective use of private papers, public documents, newspapers, and promotional “literature,” Professor Emmons illustrates the extremes to which the boomers were willing to go in their compulsive effort to make western Kansas, western Nebraska, and the adjacent parts of Colorado and Wyoming attractive to settlers. Although the deception employed to lure settlers to the Plains was less serious in its consequences than that revealed by the Pentagon Papers, the number of people victimized must have run into at least the tens of thousands. There is a certain irony in the attempt to suppress the news 262 Western American Literature that farmers were asking for drought relief in 1874, lest such reports slow down immigration— this in a region already overpopulatedl If it were not for this toll in human suffering, the promotional efforts cited by Professor Emmons would almost qualify his book for study as a con tribution to the tall-tale tradition of American humor. In the writings of one of the more infatuated believers in the rain-follows-the-plow myth, he finds that “Rain followed plows and trees, surely, but it also followed telegraph wires, railroad tracks, irrigation ditches, streams and rivers, colony town sites, roads, and fire prevention.” The author’s own gift for wry understatement brightens an occasional aside, such as “Plowing the soil, the immigrant dis covered, did not produce rain; indeed, all too often it did not produce any thing.” Garden in the Grasslands does not break much new ground. Apart from a few minor shifts of emphasis, it follows the outlines established by Henry Nash Smith a generation ago, when he showed how the Great American Desert was transformed into the Garden of the World by those whose economic in terests would be served by settlement of the Plains. It does, however, add sig nificantly to the...