176 Western American Literature The University of Montana awarded Linderman the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in 1927 in recognition of his literary achievements. R uth Keenan William Anderson Scott, No Ordinary Man. By Clifford M. Drury. (Glendale, California: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1967. 352 pages. $6.50.) The biography fo Dr. William Anderson Scott, whose life spanned more than seven decades of the nineteenth century, is more than the story of a colorful and dynamic leader. Beginning his ministry as a “gosling” preacher who “horse pathed” more than thirty stops on a Tennessee circuit before he was old enough to shave, Scott was to occupy a number of the most important and influential pulpits in America. Recognized as the outstanding preacher of his generation on the West Coast and first moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly in that area, Dr. Scott earned an international reputation as a powerful and “painful” (conscience pricker) preacher. He participated in some of the stirring and important events of his day. He did a stint of duty as an eighteen year old chaplain in the Black Hawk War; he had an important influence on the pioneer community life of Ten nessee and Illinois; and he was involved in the pre-civil war tensions in Alabama and New Orleans. Dr. Scott was often a controversial figure. Never one to back down from a cause, he had the dubious distinction of twice being hanged in effigy by San Franciscans: first for his deep opposition to the Vigilante Committee in that frontier city and later for his expressed Southern sympathy in the sectional crises leading up to the Civil War. A chance and untimely remark about Henry Clay’s poker playing was another incident that kept political coals burning long after they should have died out. Experienced as an author, lecturer, preacher, editor, educator, church man and world traveler, Scott enjoyed the warm friendship of such leading personalities of his day as General Andrew Jackson, Wm. T. Sherman, Henry Van Dyke, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Although a much loved and re spected father of a large family, an unfortunate and somewhat pathetic family rift occurred when his son Robert chose service as a Union officer and later edited the monumental series of “War of the Rebellion Records.” Dr. Scott, the founder of two churches, a college, a religious magazine, and the San Francisco Seminary was certainly, as one reporter aptly put it, “no ordinary man.” Reviews n i Dr. Clifford M. Drury, an outstanding historian in his field, has spent many years researching the history of the Protestant missions and missionaries of the West. This, his seventeenth published book, and the first full length biography of a California Presbyterian minister, is a monument to his efforts. Drawing on a great wealth of source material as well as family memories and personal observations, Dr. Drury has produced a thoroughly informative and fascinating narrative. T aylor T . J ackm an, California State College at Long Beach The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West. By Dee Brown. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. 317 pages. $1.95.) Not enough comprehensive books about the actual women of the West and their role in westward expansion exist. Mr. Brown has thus done readers a substantial service in giving us The Gentle Tamers. And the University of Nebraska Press has done another in making this 1958 book available in a nicely legible quality Bison paperback. Not only does it help fill a gap in our general knowledge about the women who took an active part in the early West, it is also interestingly written. Although The Gentle Tamers does indeed merit these and other plaudits, one of Mr. Brown’s stylistic characteristics annoys slightly—at least to me as a woman. I refer to his adoption and repeated use of nineteenth-century terms for the feminine sex such as “females” and “schoolmarms”. There may, of course, be some justification for this practice since part of Mr. Brown’s aim is, after all, to catch the feel and flavor of nineteenth-century western women’s actual activities in time and space. To cite but one example: “Too much adoration poured...