Western Adventure Research Articles

Where Did the Black Rough Riders Go?

The Spanish-American War was a key moment in the development of U.S. imperialism and the popular western. Its iconic figure was Roosevelt's rough rider—the Anglo-Saxon gentleman cowboy par excellence—who yoked frontier heroism to overseas militarism, in the process justifying American extra-continental expansionism and extending the ideological reach of the western. The black military presence in Cuba—and, subsequently, Puerto Rico and the Philippines—threatened that process by challenging white superiority on the western frontier and the imperial battlefield. When white myth makers suppressed this story of black heroism, they drove it deep into the western's creative fabric. By following the fortunes of black soldiers, in print and in society, we can recognize how deeply the western formula is motivated and shaped by the blackness it denies and to what different ends African-American writers yoked western adventure, military action, and meanings of manhood in the United States.

A Russian Merchant's Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov (review)

Reviewed by: A Russian Merchant's Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov Lina Bernstein (bio) David L. Ransel, A Russian Merchant's Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov, Based on his Diary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 320 pp. ISBN 978-02532-2020-2, $24.95. Despite recent endeavors of historians of Russian merchant culture to demonstrate its complexities and multifacetedness, the view has long persisted that Russian merchants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were ignorant, uncultured, illiterate, backward, greedy, and dishonest. This widespread attitude toward merchants, and not only in Russia, certainly has some basis in reality. The idea of merchant dishonesty and greed could have appeared also as a result of a misunderstanding of the nature of commerce. Thus in his article (1770s) "O vsegdashnei ravnosti v prodazhe tovarov" (About long-term consistency in the sale of goods) in the satirical journal I to i së (This and that), the Russian poet, playwright, and pamphleteer Alexander Sumarokov wrote, "Those who hike up the prices of their goods only because there is a shortage in the market are the cruelest robbers; they resemble thieves who steal during a fire, thereby deepening the misfortune of the misfortunate" (V. P. Semennikov, Russkie satiricheskie zhurnaly, 1769–1774 g.g. St. Petersburg, 1914: 19). Whatever the reason, the image of the unscrupulous, cruel, and uncultured merchant had been disseminated by Russian high literature (in contrast to folk tales and songs) since the middle of the eighteenth century. In contrast, literary caricatures of the Russian nobility, such as Fonvizin's scheming Skotinins and the gallery of good-for-nothing landowners produced by Nikolai Novikov in his satirical journals, did not translate into the condemnation of the entire class. Not so with the Russian merchant of fiction, who, according to a famous pronouncement of the nineteenth-century literary critic Dmitriĭ Pisarev, is depicted, accurately, as the willfully ignorant inhabitant of a "dark kingdom." So it is not amiss to say that a negative view of merchants has been to some extent a literary trope. [End Page 569] Unsurprisingly, this negative literary trope became even more deeply ingrained in the psyche of the Russian population under Soviet ideology. Not many historians were interested in changing this view, although some obvious historical facts have always been available for scholarly interpretation. For example, in Catherine's Legislative Committee of 1767, 206 out of 564 delegates were merchants—who acted in the public sphere, delivered public speeches, and wrote opinions on policymaking. This degree of representation alone attests to the strong presence of merchants in Russian culture and to their role in it. And what about merchant charities? Not only churches and monasteries, but also schools, theaters, and, later, museums were built with merchant sponsorship. Merchants were elected to city offices including that of mayor, even in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and as such were responsible for all citizens of the city, including the nobility. Their names can be easily discovered. Who were these merchants, and were they backward and illiterate? What was their background, and what was their professional and social milieu? One such merchant was Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov (1754–1824). A member of the first merchant guild (the highest rank), he occupied a number of offices in the town of Dmitrov, in Moscow province, including that of mayor, and although he eventually lost his capital and social standing, he was able to regain his bearings and lead a fulfilling life. Throughout his adult life, he kept a diary, which he began in 1769 and continued almost daily for over forty years (up to Napoleon's occupation of Moscow in 1812), presenting the ups and downs of his fortunes. He titled his diary The Journal or Notes on the Life and Adventures of I. A. Tolchënov, a title similar to those of Western adventure novels translated into Russian and their Russian imitations. The length of this journal, its consistency, and most importantly, the great variety of topics and records of both successes and failures make it exceptional among eighteenth-century Russian merchant diaries. In his book A Russian Merchant's Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich...

Bring Me the Head of Peter Pan: A Commentary on NO LAW

This commentary was delivered on March 21, 2009, at a conference sponsored by the Duke Law School Center for the Study of the Public Domain in honor of the publication of NO LAW: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE SHADOW OF AN ABSOLUTE FIRST AMENDMENT by David L. Lange and H. Jefferson Powell. The commentary considers the converse problem of artistic creation in the shadow of an increasingly absolutist law of copyright, and notes that artists beginning with the poet we today know as Homer have achieved greatness by freely appropriating the words, images, sounds, and ideas of others. The increasingly imperial claims of copyright advanced by the United States in the global marketplace of words, images, and sounds, the essay suggests, are a direct result of the post-imperial desperation of a nation that seeks to dominate the world with only two tools -- military force and communications. It notes a comment by Professors Lange and Powell that Believing in intellectual property is like believing in Tinker Bell: we clap our hands, and it is so. The allusion to Peter Pan is apt, the essay notes, because J.M. Barrie's story of a boy who lives on a magical island where he will never grow old is a fable of the Western adventure with colonialism and cultural domination -- a domination we are now attempting to preserve in its fading years by resort to legal coercion and extravagant doctrines of intellectual ownership. But in fact the key to national survival in a multipolar world lies not in imaginary property rights to American ideas but in their syncretic vitality, for which wide freedom of appropriation is essential. The recent wave of litigation surrounding the artist Shepard Fairey serves as a metaphor for the metastasis of intellectual property concepts. Fairey is involved with a lawsuit against the Associated Press over his appropriation of an image by AP photographer Mannie Garcia of then-candidate Barack Obama. Fairey himself, however, has recently claimed ownership of the word OBEY. The current intellectual property regime, the essay concludes, resembles nothing so much as a load of politically tainted tea awaiting deposit into Boston Harbor.

The Public Library as Instrument of Colonialism: The Case of the Netherlands East Indies

Between 1918 and 1926, fully 2,500 public libraries were established by the government of the Netherlands East Indies colony, mostly in towns and villages throughout the huge archipelago that became present-day Indonesia. Though popular with newly literate local people, the material in the libraries was designed to inculcate “Western” values and further the colonial situation. I will describe the historical and literary setting of this phenomenon. My analysis includes a close reading of remarks made by one of the responsible agency’s longtime directors. Between 1918 and 1926 the colonial government of the Netherlands East Indies established the Taman Pustaka (Gardens of Reading) system, fully 2,500 public libraries in towns and villages throughout the huge archipelago that became present-day Indonesia. Their small, heavily used collections comprised magazines and almanacs, Javanese and Malay language translations of Western adventure novels, agricultural handbooks, simplified versions of stories from traditional epics and legends, and original novels in local languages. The libraries were the project of the Kantoor voor de Volkslectuur (Bureau for Popular Reading, or, in Indonesian, Balai Pustaka) under the auspices of its director, D. A. Rinkes. In fact, the bureau published every book in the libraries’ collections. Rinkes’s successor, G. W. J. Drewes, director from 1929 until Dutch rule ended with the Japanese invasion of 1942, wrote with some bewilderment about the extent of his predecessor’s achievements, accomplished in such a brief time period: I have often been asked how Rinkes, who started in 1918 with just a handful of petty clerks, managed to find the editorial staff needed for his ambitious plans. I had no answer to that question, for when I was detailed to Balai Pustaka in 1926, I found a full-fledged publishing house, a going concern, centred round a core formed by three editorial boards, for Malay, Javanese, and Sundanese, and the editors of the magazines. 1

Sir William Drummond Stewart: Aristocratic Masculinity in the American West

Sir William Drummond Stewart is known mostly as the patron of artist Alfred Jacob Miller, but he is worth examining in his own right for the ways in which his travels,collecting, and fiction reveal how western myths could resonate in contexts other than the familiar project of American nationalism. This article explores how the West served as an imaginative and literal site on which Stewart constructed his masculinity. Yet the more that Stewart tried to stabilize his identity through real and textual encounters with the West, the more this ground shifted under him. For instance, Stewart's novels depict the West as a place where gender and ethnicity were unpredictable and malleable. Thus, while discourses of western adventure have often been interpreted as a straightforward narrative of violence, Stewart's romantic tourism,although fraught with contradictions, reveals how western adventure could contain multiple meanings.

"Strong, and Wild, and Green": Ethel Augur's Western Adventure, 1911-1914

"Strong, and Wild, and Green": Ethel Augur's Western Adventure, 1911-1914

Legacy Bookshelf

Legacy Bookshelf Compiled by Leslie M. Hammer University of California, San Diego Below is a selected sampling of current books, articles, and dissertations relevant to the study of American women writers from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. Prices unless otherwise indicated are for hardcover editions. Individual Authors Alcott, Louisa May Rodriguez, Maria Soledad. "A Little Miss in the Land of Little Women: Louisa May Alcott and Jamaica Kincaid." Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings. Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2006. 171 pp. $42.50. Augur, Ethel Cowell, Pattie. "'Strong, and Wild, and Green'": Ethel Augur's Western Adventure, 1911–1914." Legacy 24 (2006): 93–116. Chopin, Kate Arima, Hiroko. Beyond and Alone!: The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty. Lanham: UP of America, 2006. 116 pp. $20.95. Crosby, Caresse Hamalian, Linda. The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. 304 pp. $45.00. Delaney, Lucy Gardner, Eric. "'Face to Face': Localizing Lucy Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light." Legacy 24 (2006): 50–71. [End Page 343] Dickinson, Emily Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. 160 pp. $65.00/$19.99 paper. See also the Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin. Doolittle, H. D. Christodoulides, Nephie J. "Triangulation of Desire in H. D.'s Hymen." "And Never Know the Joy": Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry. Ed. C. C. Barfoot. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 317–36. 490 pp. $61.00. Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Davidson, Adenike Marie. "Marginal Spaces, Marginal Texts: Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the African American Prose Poem." Southern Quarterly 44 (2006): 51–64. Fern, Fanny (Sara Willis Parton) Cummins, Amy. "The Inexorable Bell": Fanny Fern's Concerns with US Education." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 39.1 (2006): 14–24. Fuller, Margaret Capper, Charles. Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. 672 pp. $40.00. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Edelstein, Sari. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Yellow Newspaper." Legacy 24 (2006): 72–92. Glasgow, Ellen Campbell, Donna. "'Where Are the Ladies?': Wharton, Glasgow, and American Women Naturalists." Studies in American Naturalism 1 (2006): 152–69. Nicolaisen, Peter. "Rural Poverty and the Heroics of Farming: Elizabeth Maddox Roberts's The Time of Man and Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground." Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars, 1918–1939. Ed. Martin Crawford and Richard Godden. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006. 192–205. 264 pp. $39.95. Hurston, Zora Neale Cartwright, Keith. "'To Walk with the Storm': Oya as the Transformative 'I' of Zora Neale Hurston's Afro-Atlantic Callings." American Literature 78 (2006): 741–67. Diamond, Elin. "Deploying/Destroying the Primitivist Body in Hurston and Brecht." Against Theater: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage. Ed. Alan L. Ackerman, Jr., and Martin Puchner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 112–32. 264 pp. $85.00. [End Page 344] Park, Jungman. "From the Imagined to the Real: Zora Neale Hurston's Committing to the Folk Strategy and Its Effect in Color Struck." Journal of Modern British and American Drama 19 (2006): 5–37. ———. "Imagined Africa: Zora Neale Hurston's Searching for the Root of Black Identity in Spears." Journal of Modern British and American Drama 19 (2006): 173–201. Warnes, Andrew. "Guantánamo, Eatonville, Accompong: Barbecue and the Diaspora in the Writings of American Studies." Journal of American Studies 40 (2006): 367–89. Larsen, Nella Dawahare, Anthony. "The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing." Twentieth Century Literature 52 (2006): 22–31. Lazarus, Emma Cavitch, Max. "Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty." American Literary History 18 (2006): 1–28. Schor, Esther. Emma Lazarus. New York: Schocken, 2006. 347 pp. $21.95. Moore, Marianne Falcetta, Jennie-Rebecca. "Acts of Containment: Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure." Journal of Modern Literature 29.4 (2006): 124–44. Parker, Dorothy Middeljans, April. "On the Wire with Death and Desire: The Telephone and Lovers' Discourse in the Short Stories...

My Young Aunts Have Lunch with Cary Grant, and: Capture the Flag, and: Flood

My Young Aunts Have Lunch with Cary Grant Looking exactly as he always looks, except for the open-necked shirt, Grant pauses in mid-spoonful of iced fruit cocktail in silver dish to ask Priscilla a question. Her beautiful profile looks exactly, or almost, the same today. The year is 1947. She is twenty, wears a gardenia in her dark hair. The businessman beside her, with the natty breastpocket handkerchief, has probably arranged all this. A client of my grandfather? Behind them, at duller tables, everyone's watching the photographer, or the back of the movie star's head. Anne Marie, my younger aunt, disappears at the photograph's edge. That's all right. In about three days she'll have her own Western adventure: getting clawed on the arm when she offers a sandwich to a grizzly in Yellowstone Park. [End Page 127] Capture the Flag I don't remember the game ever ending. Just the grey morning the day camp met in the barn, chose up teams, and we became scouts, spies, generals, foot soldiers. Don't remember either side keeping that rag of red calico, just leisurely hours of shouts, hand signals, dashes across tarry beach roads and the odd safety I felt being alone for a few minutes, not shy for a change or scared, as a newcomer, just crouched on damp pine needles at my hidden post, breathing hard, listening. [End Page 128] Flood On the morning of New Year's Eve I walked halfway up Winter Street in Boston before I noticed the flood from a burst water main that was pouring down the street from the corner of Park and Tremont. I'd just been to the new Immigration Museum on Milk Street, which I hadn't liked much, because wherever your feet step in the main hall it sets off a chattering in fake Irish or fake-a Italian from a dummy sitting on a steamer trunk, or beside a birdcage. A woman's voice at the back of the hall told over and over how her ancestors were brought here in chains, in the hold of a ship. But her voice crowded in with all of the other voices, so you couldn't really grasp what she was saying. Which was a problem, I decided, as I walked through the gray-brown waters that ran down Winter Street and up over the curb. All kinds of people: shoppers, teenagers, street vendors, store clerks at opened doors, were wondering at the water. But I was disliking, also, that three-screen, multimedia film they showed, with corny Ben Franklin pushing up his spectacles and acting as guide. When I left through the main hall I'd set off all the voices again, so I hurried outside, where I heard sirens but paid no attention, until here I am on Winter Street, sloshing through strange, rising waters – to the edge of my boots, to my ankles, then higher. The full flood water, of which Winter Street was only a tributary, was hurtling down Tremont past the Common. Up ahead I saw fire engines, police cars, people gathered to watch. Everyone seemed kind of on holiday, or beginning the New Year already. The subway was shut down. We couldn't go much of anywhere else. So I watched a while, with the crowd.

Sacagawea's Child: The Life and Times of Jean-Baptiste (Pomp) Charbonneau by Susan M. Colby

bynon-Indians areallpartof thesame story. This textdoes a good job highlighting miscommuni cation on both sides.These misunderstandings ultimatelyhad amuch more deleterious impact on theSalish than theAmericans. After themain text, the authors provide an extensive biographical section discussing tribalelderswho contributed to theproject and a helpful guide to theSalish language.The tribe took twomajor risks in publishing thisbook: they identifiedplaces of historical and cultural significance to the tribe and they shared some Coyote creation stories.The risksof thefirstare well-described; such acknowledgement of im portant places inthepast has led to their destruc tionby non-Indians. They hope thatthis will be different ? that these revelationsmay lead to non-Indian neighbors having greaterrespectfor the significanceof theseplaces. The inclusion of Coyote stories includes thiscautionary aside: "As readersdiscuss thisbook,we ask thattheCoyote stories mentioned inthesepages be repeatedonly in thewinter" (p. 7). The apparent importance of thisrequest deserves better explanation, per haps ofwhy this isa taboo andwhat constitutes repeating the stories; that is,towhat extent can theybe discussed inother seasons? This would be helpful informationforteachers tryingtouse the material respectfully. In addition to teachers, thiswork will be valuable to those interestedin thehistoryof the west, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the Salish. This is an attractive coffee-table book because of the beautiful paintings, historical photographs, landscape photographs, and readable text.The book should be useful to academics as a source of primary source mate rial relating to one tribe's recollections of the impact of theLewis and Clark expedition. Since the interviewsare not accessible to thegeneral public, this work isall themore valuable. End notes let readers know the sources ofmaterials and ideas presented, although in several cases theydeserve better copy-editing. This book should also be of interestto other tribesas amodel for writing tribalhistory, blend ing togethera visual experience of a place and people and a textualexplanation of theirown cul turalhistory.Perhaps the most importantreason theauthorswere able towrite such a compelling narrative is the threedecades of culturalpreser vationwork, includingextensive interviews with tribalelders thathave been recordedand stored in the tribalcommunity.This trulybeautiful book is a community-based project. DAVID R.M. BECK University of Montana, Missoula SACAGAWEA'S CHILD: THE LIFE AND TIMESOF JEAN-BAPTISTE (POMP) CHARBONNEAU by Susan M. Colby. Arthur H. Clark, Spokane, Washington, 2005. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 203 pages. $28.50 cloth. JEAN-BAPTISTE CHARBONNEAU is chiefly remembered as the infantson of Sacagawea who went west with Lewis and Clark. Later, he was schooled inSt.Louis atClark's expense; he spent years inGermany at thecourtof a duke; and after many years in the West he died at age sixty-one while travelingthroughsoutheastOregon. He left no writings except for two or three signatures, though thereare brief passages about him as a traveler, mountain man, guide, interpreter, petty official,and prospector in the journals of other western adventurers. Taken together, his life re cordswould hardly filltwentyprinted pages. Recently (OHQ 102:3,290-315), I argued that currentwritings about him are forced to treat a symbolic figure ? a blessed babe, an object of roughmen's affections,a favored prot?g?, a hearty and heroic outdoorsman?by indulging in embellishment and sheer speculation. This full-length book (volume 33of the West ern Frontiersmen Series) countersmy skepti cism, sometimes veryemphatically.Susan Colby claims descent from two lines ofCharbonneau ancestors, and she works to present the career of a "unique American m?tis," an outstanding figure in the exploration of the West by people 150 OHQ vol. 107, no. 1 of French and Indian ancestry (p. 10-11). She quotes with approval a remark that "the stan dard label for the Lewis and Clark expedition might withmore fairnessbe expanded to 'Lewis and Clark and Verendrye and Drouillard and Charbonneau'" (p. 24ns). This is a freshand worthwhile approach to earlywestern history,and Colby seems tohave gathered everythingwritten on her particular subject. She traces theCharbonneaus through generations inQuebec. She quotes dozens of passages about Sacagawea, Toussaint Char bonneau, and their son. She tries to challenge prejudices by looking at thesefigures"in terms of theirown cultures and the realities of their own times" (p. 11). She thus creates themost extensive, amply illustratedbiography anyone is likelytowrite. Yet, a close readerwill find thisbook frus tratingwhen it relies on secondary sources ratherthanprimarydocuments.Many passages...

Staging Methods, Cinematic Technique, and Spatial Politics

Spatial Politics. Toward the middle of The Girl of the Golden West (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915), the Girl enters a restaurant, buys food, goes home and, with the help of her Indian maid, prepares to entertain Ramerrez, the outlaw whom she takes to be a gentleman. The film cuts between this narrative and various outdoor locations: Ramerrez's Mexican outlaws, the sheriff's men reaching the Girl's saloon, Ramerrez arriving at the Girl's cabin. Such crosscutting is not confusing or disruptive, but it is nonetheless obtrusive enough to be noticeable; and because the causality among the different locales remains obscure, there is no tension among them. Crosscutting here does not juxtapose, produce alterity, and encourage the spectator to draw a moral conclusion, as Griffith's Biograph films often did, but instead assembles different spaces and allows the spectator to travel leisurely among them.' And since the Girl is not confined to her domestic space but acts as a consumer, the film does not juxtapose outside and inside spaces, casting female domesticity against male outdoor heroism, but instead seems to combine domestic melodrama and western adventure without conflict. The lack of moral juxtaposition and conflict, indeed the relative lack of danger, all allow for a spectatorial mobility that may well be read in social terms. Crosscutting here enables a social space in which different genders, ethnicities, moral outlooks, ways of living can come together without impinging on each other. The spectator is free to engage in some or all of them, yet never has to feel threatened. Another reading would stress how this sequence epitomizes what we may call the fundamental contradiction of crosscutting: that it always seems to be in the service of narrative while simultaneously also defying it. David Bordwell has argued that crosscutting constitutes a discreet narration [that] oversees time, making it subordinate to causality, while the spectator follows the causal thread. Rick Altman, on the other hand, contends that crosscutting is a legacy from stage melodramas and defies classical narrative in that it produces episodic construction. Tom Gunning, who sees crosscutting as a crucial aesthetic component that helped stabilize the emerging film industry and woo a middle-class audience, asserts that crosscutting nonetheless moves both toward the invisible editing of

Caroline Lockhart: Her Life and Legacy

Writer Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962) lived a life as colorfully picaresque and as successful as any of her bestselling Western adventure novels or her widely quoted newspaper column. Her popular novels, championing the region and the Old West culture of which she became a part, were compared favorably to those of Owen Wister, and one, The Fighting Shepherdess, was made into a movie. She also attracted national attention as the owner-editor of the Cody Enterprise. H. L. Mencken praised her outspokenness as an investigative reporter and as a critic of Prohibition, and Christopher Morley borrowed her witticisms verbatim for his column in the New York Post. Lockhart's devilishly honest humor, he said, could make the human lung crow like Chanticleer. Although her writings are little known today, Lockhart left a body of work that reveals her to be a first-class interpreter of the West in a time of economic and social transition. Necah Stewart Furman's informative and compelling literary biography intersperses a lively chronicling of Lockhart's life with an objective and probing analysis of her books, short stories, and articles. Furman has made thorough and judicious use of newspapers, interviews, and manuscripts, including personal correspondence and diaries, to detail the western sojourns, the civic controversies, the love affairs, and the real-life adventures that honed Lockhart's point of view and formed the basis of her fiction. From her Kansas childhood, to her early success as a reporter in Boston and Philadelphia, to the excitement of making it big as a writer-journalist, civic leader, and rancher based mainly in Cody, Wyoming, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman who brokeconventions and made her own mark not only in a frontier setting but in a primarily masculine literary genre.

Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman by Julie Roy Jeffrey

Reviews 247 Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman. By Julie Roy Jeffrey. (Norman, Oklahoma: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. 256 pages, $24.95.) Converting the West narrates the life of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman (18081847 ). In mid-March, 1836, Narcissa and her husband Marcus left Pittsburgh with a mission party, led by Marcus, headed to the Oregon Territory. After a decade’s Presbyterian missionary work with the Cayuse Indian tribe in the pacific Northwest, Marcus and Narcissa were murdered in the Indian massacre at their station, at Waiilatpu. Narcissa proved the only woman in the community slain during this massacre. Her life “back East” is adequately sketched by Professor Jeffrey, but the biography really becomes interesting once the party crosses the mid-continent. As a female missionary, asJeffreyjustly observes, Narcissa understood “she had become a public figure of sorts and that her correspondence would not be private.”In analyzing these letters,Julie Royjeffrey has done admirable work in plumbing the seeming meanings of the omissions, as well as the inclusions. In this vein, the author provides keen insights into the relationship be­ tween Narcissa and Marcus. Analogously, the hardships and illnesses alluded to and the hesitations and doubts hinted at in Narcissa’s letters ProfessorJeffrey “fleshes out” sensibly and convincingly. In conveying a sense of the western adventure portion of Narcissa’stoo-brief existence, the author presents another admirably strong and sensitive American woman of the kind hitherto pre­ sented, in epistolary format, by Lydia S. Lane in I Married a Soldier [(1893). University of New Mexico Press, 1987] and by Elinore Pruitt Stewart in Letters of a Woman Homesteader [(1914). Houghton Mifflin, 1982]. When Narcissa’s only child dies, she “takes in” and helps raise the orphan children of the Sager family, one of many good deeds performed by the Whitmans for the commu­ nity—“whites” and Indians alike—for which they evidently received, at best, scant gratitude. The build-up to and the aftermath of the massacre Jeffrey presents with especial skill— multum in parvo. Concerning these incidents, she makes efficient use of the understandably meager sources to present the drama in aptly muted tones. The selection of maps and photographs adds tang and interest to this quietly moving biographical narrative. JAMES KIRSCHKE Villanova University ...

Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America: High Noon to Midnight (review)

Reviewed by: Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America: High Noon to Midnight Larry D. Harred Cynthia S. Hamilton . Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America: High Noon to Midnight. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1987. 200 pp. $21.00. Cynthia Hamilton's goal in Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction is to analyze the "dynamics of one generic tradition, the American adventure formula." More particularly, it is a study of the development and change of two subgenres, the Western and the hard-boiled detective novels. She claims that both are variants of the basic formula, which is "built around the testing and confirmation of key American values, especially individualism, and are closely tied to the myth of the American dream." The formula has five elements: setting, hero, plot, style, and theme. There are two crucial elements in the basic formula for the subgenres under discussion: "lawlessness and the maximum opportunity for personal enrichment." Hamilton quite rightly calls for an end to the hierarchical notion of culture and the correlative belief that different methodologies should exist for studying high and popular art. In a demonstration of such an approach, she divides the discussion into two parts. Part One (three chapters) describes the types of "relationships" essential to her method. Chapter One places the formula within an historical framework. Chapter Two (the least convincing) attempts to explain how a "layering process" is used to superimpose different generic patterns and results in "richness" or "tension." Chapter Three discusses the important connection between the marketplace and variations in the formula. Part Two includes four chapters that focus on the biographies, thematic concerns, and stylistic characteristics of four writers—Zane Grey, Frederick Faust, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Evaluating this study presents certain problems. My first reaction to Hamilton's work was to reject it because it attempted to link two genres that seemed separate and unconnected. After more consideration, I began to see certain linkages in structure, characterization, and theme. It is true that all four writers do depend on a "typically American" sense of individuality and the lawlessness that seems inherent in the American character. In the same vein, Hamilton's discussion of the connections between the closing of the frontier and the popularity of adventure fiction in the late nineteenth century are insightful. Her discussion of the sources of the Western's popularity seems rather truncated because she fails to mention Smith's Virgin Land, which explores the popularity of the Western adventure in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The individual chapters in Part Two are thorough, full of scholarly and critical insights; however, I wondered about the lack of any discussion to establish connections between the four writers' biographies, themes, and styles. This work desperately needs a concluding chapter and perhaps some mention of other writers who wrote adventures, like the prolific and popular Louis L'Amour. Ultimately, Hamilton's study must be called successful because it does provoke serious consideration of works that seem utterly unconnected. My serious consideration leads me to make two suggestions to broaden the discussion further: 1) Hamilton's analysis would be more useful if she considered authors closer in relative popularity and output. Comparing Grey (fifty novels) to Hammett (five novels) seems strange. It might be more useful, in terms of discussing popular literature, to consider more prolific or widely popular detective writers like Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane along with Grey and Faust. 2) Hamilton's [End Page 667] discussion of a particular brand of American individualism should be broadened to include the possibility of moral examination of action that seems to distinguish Hammett and Chandler from Grey and Faust. Along with lawlessness, there is also inherent in American individualism a strain of self-examination and self-development. Larry D. Harred University of Wisconsin, River Falls Copyright © 1988 Purdue Research Foundation

Moreton Frewen's Western Adventures

Journal Article Moreton Frewen's Western Adventures Get access Moreton Frewen's Western Adventures. By Woods L. Milton. (Boulder: Roberts Rinehart, Inc., 1986. viii + 213 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00.) R. A. Burchell R. A. Burchell University of Manchester, England Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 19, Issue 1, January 1988, Pages 78–79, https://doi.org/10.2307/969813 Published: 01 January 1988

Western Adventures of Two Theatrical Dudes, Out of Place

To present interviews with James Roy and Guy Sprung in an issue on Prairie theatre might indeed seem “out of place.” Although Roy is currently the artistic director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre, he is better known for his previous appointments as the artistic director of Ontario’s Blyth Summer Festival, which he founded in 1975, and the artistic director of Victoria’s Belfry Theatre, a position that he held from 1980 until his move to Winnipeg last April. And Guy Sprung? What’s the artistic director of the Toronto Free Theatre doing in an issue on the Prairies? And why is he paired with James Roy?

Mr. American by George MacDonald Fraser

190 Western American Literature Nightwind. By Roberta Jean Mountjoy. (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981. 356 pages, $13.95.) This novel is a half-breed, sometimes the heaving bosom of genre romance, then the blood and dust of a western adventure. What is supposed to be the tie that binds these two disparate styles is the author’s wellresearched and highly impressive knowledge of California’s rugged growth and the simultaneous downfall of Indian life and lore, about which Ms. Mountjoy writes with considerable authority. Unfortunately, all this research serves merely as background to an unconvincing story. Twin brothers come from England to find gold in the streams of northern California. Marc Opalgate is kind, good and under­ standing. His brother, Richard, is base, profligate and drinks too much. So much, in fact, that by the fourth page of the text he has raped a sleek, sixteen-year-old Indian of the Chalanui tribe whom he has come across in the woods. By page five, young Richard is dead. From this point forward we witness the metamorphosis of the young squaw into Nightwind, feminist and leader of her people. Simultaneously, the dead man’s kindly brother grows into a pioneer of entrepreneurial capitalism, taming the wilds of the redwood country and overseeing their conversion into so many board feet of lumber. As we follow the hero and heroine along their respective paths we are introduced to a pyromaniac, a kindly old drunken doctor, the hero’s cata­ tonic bride, and a priest suffering from the delusion that he is Father Junípero Serra. And, least convincingly, Nightwind and Marc Opalgate eventually become passionate, surreptitious lovers— the “savage” and the civilized man —■ with neither qualm nor even reference made to Nightwind’s unfortunate episode with Marc’s brother. Beneath all these unlikely goings-on, there is an elemental truth to this novel: that the growth of the white man’s influence in the American West begat the demise of Indian culture, not because it was pre-destined but because of carelessness, misunderstanding and an escalation of hostilities fomented in the name of government and God. One wishes only that Ms. Mountjoy had directed her considerable narrative skill and her devotion to history to a more serious examination of that sad fact. SUSAN LUKAS, Grandview, New York Mr. American. By George MacDonald Fraser. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 557 pages, $16.95.) Perhaps a more appropriate title for George MacDonald Fraser’s “Mr. American” might be “Mr. Stereotype.” Fraser’s theme of the cowboy abroad is closer to “Gary Cooper meets colorful English character types.” Reviews 191 But that is not all bad, as the reader follows Fraser’s newly rich, ex-gunman protagonist, Mark Franklin, through a smorgasbord of experiences in English society. And it is this variety which is the book’s strength as a casual entertainment, time spent with old, familiar character types entwined in neat, albeit heavy-handed plots. This novel serves up the conflict of traditional American (read: fron­ tier) values with traditional English (read: upper class) values; the disparity between the upper and lower English classes; traditional male and female roles versus the feminist argument; a gunfight between Mark Franklin and his old nemesis, Kid Curry; the rivalry of the newly arrived American with the local, titled, young landowner over the hand of a beautiful young woman whose father’s estate is having financial trouble; a presentation of the Irish issue from a royalist perspective; a tense courtroom drama with idealism and righteousness fighting tradition and realpolitik; a criminal investigation which reveals the American’s hidden outlaw past, a past kept from all those around him including his wife but not including his very competent gentle­ man’s man (read: sidekick) ; and marriage strife complete with adultery and false suspicions. Mr. Fraser is the author of the “Flashman” books; and indeed, Sir Harry Flashman, now in his nineties, adds considerable flavor and zest to this novel whenever he appears. This is in great contrast to the American Mark Franklin, an ex-member of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang and ex-miner who struck it rich in the Tonopah silver lode and “retired” back to...

Schoolboy, Cowboy, Mexican Spy by Jay Monaghan

286 Western American Literature disposal of the contention that historians create a truer picture of the cowboy than fiction writers do supports his thesis that dissatisfaction with western literature arises from literary, not historical, criteria. Jack Brenner’s complementary essay pointing out problems and dilemmas for the western writer explains the West as a West of words, part of the “struggle toward consciousness” we realize through the “style and gesture” of language. The collection is actually a study in paradoxes and ironies, words that recur in most of the essays. The ironies of myth and fact appear, for example, in Jack Davis’s study of the Indian Oakatibbe and the inability of white men to appreciate the “advanced social techniques” of a culture in harmony with the environment. Martin Bucco’s ingenious analysis of east-west movement in Dreiser’sAn American Tragedy asks how far we have actually travelled, and George M. Armstrong’s skepticism about our learn­ ing from the past in his study of Beulah Land ends by suggesting that progress is a myth. Other essays, including studies of travel literature, also note the need to reassess the frontier myths. The paradox is balanced by repeated suggestions that westering was a unique experience, not to be ignored in American studies. The ironies focus ultimately in the western hero as delineated in various essays: the Virginian, Billy the Kid, Canadian Jesuits, the anti-heroes of Edward Abbey, the Mexican pachuco. Dick Harrison’s tragic hero, isolated by the violence that enabled him to establish order, points a basic irony, balanced by Max Westbrook’s competently drawn hero of commanding presence who reminds that “virtue in a democracy is voluntary.” The weaknesses of the collection noted by the editors — the neglect of women and blacks— are outweighed by the strengths. The wide range of views presented offers the reader a rich and fascinating account of the “lovely ironies” John Ditsky, in his thought-provoking epilog, calls “the glory of American writing.” This work is indispensable for serious writers and critics of western American literature. LUCILE F. ALY, University of Oregon Schoolboy, Cowboy, Mexican Spy. ByJay Monaghan. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. 246 pages, $10.95.) Though it covers only a few teen-age years, this is a pleasant and surprising autobiography. One might expect that a historian’s intellectual development would begin in the dust of old books and then mature on a steady diet of esoteric documents. That is not the case here. Rather, the reader is caught up into a narrative that on the one hand would satisfy the most uncritical Saturday matinee westerner, and yet on the other hand Reviews 287 reminds us of significant challenges that are inherent in dealing with the Western experience. Even those who have never heard of Jay Monaghan will enjoy reading this book. It is a narrative of adventure that will hold its own against the best selling popular pulp. Cowpunching, freighting, mule skinning, fighting, crossing back and forth between revolutionary armies, confronting desper­ adoes, renegade Indians, and stampeding cattle — this remarkable man presents us with a string of adventures, narrow escapes, and remarkable experiences that are at once wonderful and credible. This book is in some ways everybody’s dream of Western adventures suddenly come true. It is the West of Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, and Frederick Remington validated by individual experience. It is a book that one smiles over often, finding a personal satisfaction that one’s own favorite heroes are not just fictions on a page, but flesh and blood people. For instance, writing in the third person, Monaghan reports of himself, “The boy looked at Dee’s lean frame and haggard cheeks. His mustache, a mere black line, hooked down at the comers of his mouth. This face reminded the boy of the Specimen Jones drawn by Frederick Remington in Owen Wister’s Red Men and White. Dee’s helper, named Charlie, appeared much younger and fuller­ bodied, more like one of the western characters W. H. D. Koemer painted. The boy admired the drawings of both artists, and he set to work with a will helping these two models of men he knew very well...

Belief, Salience, Media Exposure, and Summation Theory

This is a report of two studies which reexamine Fishbein's Summation Theory of attitude change with particular focus on the correlation between belief salience and belief strength. To test the possibility that earlier studies may have been concept bound, a partial replication of the Kaplan-Fishbein [3] study was conducted with the concept, “American Indian.” No statistically significant correlations were obtained. Examination of individual responses led to the second study which tested that possibility that weak beliefs may be salient and strong ones not salient depending upon the media sources of information about the concept. When subjects were asked to recall the media sources of their information, it was found that weakly held salient beliefs were attributed to old fashioned “western adventure” entertainment sources with significantly more frequency than strongly held salient beliefs. Implications for Summation Theory and for attitude change theories are discussed. New lines of research are suggested.

The Novel of Western Adventure in Nineteenth-Century Germany

D. L. A S H L I M A N University of Pittsburgh The Novel of Western Adventure in Nineteenth-Century Germany The earliest known reference to the New World in German literature was made only two years after Columbus made his epoch making discovery, and by 1800 nearly 900 works about America had been published in Germany.1 Germany’s principal interest in the New World throughout these three centuries had been the confrontation of European civilization with the unspoiled savage. The accelerated westward thrust of civilization and the rapidly in­ creasing German emigration to the United States during the nine­ teenth century renewed Germany’s long time interest in the New World and focused it on the plains and mountains of North America. Given Germany's long standing fascination with the New World and with the concept of noble savagery, it is only natural that Chateaubriand’s sentimental depictions of the American In­ dian, especially his first novella Atala (1801), would find exceptional popular reception east of the Rhine. Cooper’s novels, with their appearance of realism and authenticity, were even more popular. There is much evidence to support Wilhelm Hauff’s statement made in 1826, the same year that Cooper was introduced to Ger­ many: “The sources of the Susquehanna . . . are . . . also here on every tongue.”2 Cooper’s popularity has endured until the present day; he remains the most translated American novelist in Germany.3 ^Lawrence Marsden Price, The Reception of United States Literature in Germany (Chapel Hill, 1966), p. 6. *Werke (Munich, [1963]), II, 567-568. 8Price, p. 89. Indicative of Germany's continued interest in Western literature is the list of American novelists who follow Cooper in popularity: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Pearl Buck, Bret Harte, Washington Irving, and Zane Grey. 134 Western American Literature Germany was not dependent upon foreign writers for fictional depictions of America. An anthology of German-language poems written about the American West and its native inhabitants would include selections by Chamisso, Dehmel, Freiligrath, Geliert, Gessner , Goethe, Grün, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Lenau, Schiller, Schubart, and Seume, in addition to many lesser talents. There is, to my knowledge, only one drama set in the American wilderness written by a significant German writer, Detlev von Liliencron’s Pokahontas (1904). There are numerous examples of nineteenth-century German novels set in America, most of which take place on or near the frontier. Sophie von La Roche’s Erscheinungen am See Oneida (1798) tells the story of two refugees from the French Revolution, a husband and wife, who establish themselves on an island in Lake Oneida. Fanny Lewald has the title heroine of her Diogena (1847) carry her search for the Ideal Man to the Indian country of North America. Johannes Scherr, a well known literary critic and his­ torian, uses King Philip’s War as a background for his historical novel Die Pilger der Wildnis (1853). Other historical novels about the colonization of America include Heinrich Zschokke’s Die Gründung von Maryland (1820) and Friedrich Spielhagen’s Deutsche Pioniere (1871). A German work that corresponds closely to the American part of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844) is Ferd­ inand Kürnberger’s Der Amerika-Müde (1855), a fictional account of poet Nikolaus Lenau’s trip to Ohio in 1832-1833. An important episode in Wilhelm Raabe’s Die Leute aus dem Walde (1863) takes place en route to the gold fields of California, and the second half of Theodor Fontane’s Quitt (1891) is set in the Indian Territory of what is now Oklahoma. Even those of nineteenth-century Ger­ many’s American novels that are not set in the West frequently contain allusions to the wilderness of the New World. Thus the refugee heroes in Therese Robinson’s Die Auswanderer (1852) plan to build a new life “in the sacred virgin forests of the Far West.”4 (But their plans are frustrated when he is killed in a senseless duel and she dies of a broken heart.) There are also a number of Western characters in nineteenthcentury German literary works set in Europe. It has been shown ^Leipzig, 1852, I, 31. Robinson wrote...