The America We Do Not Know
Gentlemen Unafraid. By Barrett Willoughby.... (Putnam. 15s.) IN the Metropolitan Museum of New York there is one section devoted entirely to " American Art," which is full of the furniture, crockery, and other effects of the first white settlers in America. To most people it probably appears merely rather dull in contrast to the rest of the Museum, but there are some who must look at it with very different thoughts, and among these is Professor Radin. There, in the Metropolitan Museum, can be seen the artistic achievements of the men who exterminated the American Indian.
- " The Spaniards, in spite of all their cruelty and lust for gold, did not eradicate the native population so completely as; did the Anglo-Saxons. With the exception of the West Indies, Indians are to-day still living in large numbers throughout Spanish America, and although they are nominally Catholics, many of their old cultural, possessions have been incorporated in the new civilizations that have arisen there. The Spaniards and the French enslaved the natives, but they never broke their spirit. That was reserved for the Anglo-Saxons: To the latter Indian warfare was essentially a man-hunt."
Professor Radin brings this ancient civilization to life once more. " If, upon the first landing of the French in the fall of 1634 the leader of the expedition had been invited to spend a fortnight with those friendly people (one of the Indian tribes) he would have witnessed an instructive and unusual series of . . . ceremonies." Thus, in his prologue, does the author introduce us to an American village. We are shown the dance round the Totem Pole ; we learn that a son-in-law can never speak to his mother-in-law, and we find that of all offerings to the gods tobacco appeases them most.
Our journey starts from the villages of the Eskimo. These people, Says Professor Radin, are the most primitive of all the American Indians (he uses the term to include all the aborigines of America), but at the same time (perhaps because of this ?) they have also the most " persistent" civilization, so that after we have journeyed all across America and seen cities and sciences which could compare favourably with those of ancient Egypt, we come back once more to the
Eskimo.
But we do not remain long with the Eskimo, for everything points south. On we go, through the Cherokee, the Choctaw,
the Pawnee and the Pueblo Indians, on to the source of all the civilization of ancient America—the Mayas. The Mayas grew maize and cotton ; they wrought in copper ; they fashioned ornaments of cloisonné ; they - built pyramids nearly two hundred feet high. Seen from the distance many of these towns must have had something of the appearance of diminutive New Yorks with little skyscrapers towering at irregular intervals from a mass of much smaller buildings." They had a system of hieroglyphs, of which not half have yet been deciphered, and they had an accurate calendar based on the " apparent revolution of the planet Venus." These are the people who spread civilization all over North America, and were even responsible, so- Professor Radin would have us believe, for much of the old- Peruvian civilization, and it is the spread of their culture that the author describes.
It is impossible in a short review to do justice to this scholarly, and yet vivid, account of the history of ancient. America. The
book lacks only one thing—a good index. We hope that Professor Radin will remedy this defect in his next edition, for
we are certain that a book such as this will in time to come be considered as one of the classics of American history. . Miss Willoughby in Gentlemen Unafraid has for her heroes
Sandy Smith—the Trail Blazer, Scotty--King of the Arctic Trails and other " hundred per cent he-men," who helped to
make Alaska. The authoress was born and bred. in Alaska, and " I'm sure no one ever had a happier childhood than did we three small Alaskans." It certainly seems to have been an unusual one. Her father was the owner of a, little, schooner, and " I, as a little girl, used to. wake in my. reeling bunk to the scream of wind in the rigging " ; and again, when the family were marooned on an Arctic island "weescapeddeath by twenty feet ; for as we slept a tidal wave rolled in." But for all that she stayed on in Alaska, and to-day " all.our towns have electricity, telephones, steam-heated hotels, ow news- papers get the news of the world each day, over the cable, . If the mayor's -wife decides to give a dinner and dance two
weeks hence, she wires to Seattle for hothouse roses, which will "come 1,600 miles in the cooling-room of "a steamer; and arrive fresh and fragrant for her party.'.'. .
But it is not of herself or of modernized Alaska that Miss Willoughby writes, but "rather of the men who blazed the trails towards the North Pole, " the man who goes ahead -of the pioneer." She tells of Sandy Smith, who laid cut a golf course " 72 degree's and 15 minutes north and • 3,400 miles from the neatest sporting goods store ""; and of the terror of a man who thought hiS companion was going to 'leave him down a shaft' where they were digging for gold, for " up there in the north men sometimes do strange and terrible thingi to one nother when loneliness and hardships warp their brains." She tells of lakes of oil and hills of blue ice and, above all, of The King of the Arctic Trails and his dog Baldy. Up there men do not ride in two minute races.' In the All Alaska Sweepstakes they, run behind their sleighs, encouraging their dogs to fight on through a blizzard for four hundred and twenty miles. Sometimes they jump on for a few minutes but some- times too they have to go in front and lead their own dogs on through the night. Of these men and their strange life Miss Willoughby tells her readers in a style that is surely as invigorating as the climate of her native country.
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