Wild West
Across the Wide Missouri. By Bernard De Voto. Illustrated with Paintings by Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Bodmer and George Catlin, with an Account of the Discovery of the Miller Collection by Mae Reed Porter. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 50s.)
IN the spring, of 1833 Captain William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish laird and a veteran of Waterloo, started west from St. Louis to explore the Great American Desert and the Stony Moun- tains, an area at that time known only to a few hundred trappers and to the Indians. He was a gentleman sportsman driven perhaps by the malaise of the ex-cavalryman trying to re-capture the intensity of the battle experience which had conditioned him. He was tough, and rapidly drew the respect of the mountain men as a brigade leader of trappers. But he was also a self-conscious adventurer. He re- turned to write romantic, if unreadable, novels about the West. More important, he took with him on his second trip a young American artist, Alfred Jacob Miller, much as a modern writer might take along a " candid " photographer. He commissioned Miller to record in water-colour the scenery, the game, the Indians and the trappers with a view to painting some monumental oils for his Highland castle. These water-colours, which were recently rescued from obscurity by Mrs. Mae Reed Porter, are one of the two good reasons for Mr. De Voto's exciting new book about the American West in the 183os. Together with some representative illustrations by George Catlin and Charles Bodmer, they provide a collection of plates of • surpassing richness which are alone worth the price of the book. Mrs. Porter, who contributes an account of the Miller collection, deserves our gratitude for preserving these superb examples of American romantic painting.
The second good reason for the book is Mr. De Voto's text. This consists of an exhaustive and scholarly account of the Rocky Moun- tain fur-trade in the 183os before the unfashionableness of the beaver hat caused its decline. It contains all the 'detail a scholar could want: the lethal competition among Mr. Astor's trust, the inde- pendents and the Hudson Bay Company ; the techniques of opera- tion—trapping brigades, supply lines, finance and the fantastic annual fair high up in the mountain wilderness.
But the book is more than this. The life the author describes is the true experience behind the familiar romance of the American West. Here are the battles betviieen rangers and Indians ; the accounts of death from exposure or accident, from grizzlies or rabid wolves ; the hunt for buffalo ; the feasts on succulent buffalo steak 'and raw alcohol alternating with weeks of survival on pemmican or one's own moccasins or worse. There are authoritative accounts of great trappers like Bridger, Fitzpatrick or Carson and of scores of the less known: ruthless fighters although not without chivalry, Illiterate but superb technicians of their mountain craft. There are also subtly drawn vignettes of missionaries crazed and uncom- promising and of capitalists to whom bankruptcy seems to matter less than the blazing of a new trail. Mr. De Voto has steeped himself in his subject, and his stories have the tang of the mountain air. He writes with zest, and succeeds by main force in communicating his enthusiasm for the West and all it signifies in American life.
He has a fine sense of the importance of an event in the stream of time ; he contrives to make his trappers, missionaries and naturalists represent the great pressures which were shaping America's destiny. The book is epic in scale and design. The multitudinous incidents of eight crowded years are knit into an ingenious pattern which keeps the reader in suspense at the slow pace of time and mountain travel. The pattern is sometimes too detailed for easy reading. The author has a habit of sliding sideways into his subject and of so absorbing the reader in a particular incident that he finds difficulty in keeping his bearings. Like a greenhorn one is lost for long stretches in the western wilderness without benefit of compass. The writing is also sometimes obscure. One tends to trip over the rhythm or the sense of sentences, and it is a relief when the intrinsic interest of the narrative carries one forward for several paragraphs at a time without pause. But these are faults which cannot be said to mar seriously the quality of this splendid book. It well merits its Pulitzer
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