THE AMERICAN WEST.
By Lucius Beebe and
Charles Clegg. New York: Dutton. 511 pp. $12.50.
THE SETTLERS' WEST.
By Martin F. Schmitt and
Dee Brown. New York: Scribners. 258 pp. $7.50.
THE FRONTIER YEARS.
By Mark H. Brown and
W.R. Felton. New York: Bolt. 272 pp. $10.
Once there was a wonderful time, before us, when
the nation was very young. Beyond the Mississippi
lay vast open reaches abounding in untold riches:
furs, cattle, gold, silver, lumber, wheat, land and
more land. All the stout-hearted had to do was hitch
up the horses or the oxen and go get it.
The saga men wrote in that process earned the great
new part of America a variety of names. It was the
Frontier West, the Settlers' West, the Wild
West and the Outlaw West. It was the West of the
Mountain Men and Kit Carson, the covered wagons and
the thundering herds, Crazy Horse and poor George
Custer, Billy the Kid and Jesse James and the lawmen,
too, such as Wyatt Earp (on Channel 7 nowadays) and
the dandy Mr. Hickok (Channel 4).
The book publishers found gold in them thar hills
long before the movie makers and the upstarts in TV
and they're still working the old claims. The payloads
usually come in at Christmas, which is why we are
gathered here today.
Picture books dominate the Western non-fiction shelves,
led by the oversized Beebe-Clegg production, a handsome
item dressed with 1,000 cuts and a sparse text that's
flossy but seldom too starry-eyed.
The authors start with the trappers of the '30s and
wind up with the classic Oklahoma street battle between
the Doolins and the law 'n' order men at Ingalls in
1893, last big act in the outlaw drama.
All the way stops are here, too: the victory over
Mexico and the seizure of California (by Capt. Fremont
and his 33-man "army"), the Gold Rush and the later
bonanzas in Nevada and the Black Hills, the Mormons,
the cowtowns, the homesteaders and the cattle kings
and the coming of the railroad.
Beebe and Clegg drew their illustrations from many
sources--the scant pictorial record, the works of
Remington, Graham, Zogbaum and other top-flight artists
who went West, Harper's Weekly, Leslie's and the
Police Gazette. The authors regard some of the
Gazette's sketches as "unquiet, even profane" where
they touch on the red-light aspects of frontier
culture, but none of it is calculated to damage the
minds or eyes of the young 'uns of our day (or even
the grown-ups, for that matter).
Mr. Beebe had the good fortune to do a year-end
roundup for a neighboring journal (the WT-S) and
found himself forced to hail the Beebe-Clegg work as
"the outstanding book of the Western year." We
don't know about that, but it is a pleasant, painless
excursion into the vivid American past.
* * *
In "The Settlers' West," the Schmitt-Brown team
compiled 300 photos and a brief text to cover the
story of the land rush, the sod-busters, the wagon
trains and the stage runs across tbe badlands.
There's a good chapter, too short to be anything but
superficial, on "The Myth and Its Makers." Here
Schmitt and Brown polish off the likes of Davy Crockett
(who?) and some of the other overblown Western
heroes, real or fancied.
The book suffers from much duplication between text
and picture captions but that's the worst that can
be said about it.
* * *
"The Frontier Years" celebrates the story of L.A.
Huffman, who left the comparative ease and luxury of
Iowa in the winter of '78 to go and photograph the
unfolding story of our continental conquest.
Huffman had courage and skill in abundance. Lugging
his clumsy 50-pound wet-plate camera, mounted on mule pack horse with his portable darkroom, he went
into the wilds of Montana, Wyoming and Western Dakota
and brought out an invaluable pictorial record. He
made the buffalo hunters and the cavalrymen, the
bull-whackers, the mule-skinners and even the big
Cheyenne chiefs hold still for his slow but razor-sharp
lens.
Brown and Felton used a select 125 Huffman photos
and they're worth the price of admission,
considering that they were made in the time of the
camera's infancy but stand up so well today. Beyond
that, Huffman's own writings and the Brown-Felton
researches into the times--notably their handling of
the tragic encounter between the Indian and the white
man--make it a splendid book.
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