Orrin Porter Rockwell; Man of God, Son of Thunder by Harold Schindler (review)

Reviews 73 I was reminded of the story of the Spanish gold as I read Mari Sandoz’s Love Song to the Plains, recently re-published in an attractive Bison Book. The mythical Spaniard appears only briefly in the book (“the Plains resisted [his] iron step” ), but he sets the tone, he and his equally legendary fellowPlainsmen — the trapper, the missionary, the soldier; the cattleman and the farmer, the “noble savage” and the “vanishing red face.” And the reader who would appreciate Love Song to the full would do well to expect the ghost rider with the real, the fanciful figure with the fact, the music of the wind with the words of the song. Though she has included an eleven-page bibliography, the author was not one to be penned up within the confines of her research. As a critic commented when the book was published in 1961, Miss Sandoz writes from personal memory as well as the historical record. Her personal memory, one should add, was stocked with the incidents and tales garnered in a life­ long love affair with her native Nebraska. (“I always come back to the Middle West. There’s a vigor here, and a broadness of horizon,” she once wrote). More important, she realized that a historian who would be true to the spirit of a region and of its people may not neglect the tales of the past or the dreams of the future, for these are as much a reality as the people who walk the land or the records they leave behind. In Love Song the tale and the myth become as real as the historical fact. Not that traditional history is neglected. The author deals with the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, the fur trade, the ever-increasing en­ croachment of the whites upon the Indian lands, the struggles between the cattlemen and the farmers — with the essential facts, and a few more. There are long pauses to talk about “her beloved Indians,” as one reviewer puts it, and as in These Were the Sioux, “an added measure of tenderness” creeps into Miss Sandoz’s writings about the American Indians. However, there is evidence to support the sympathy, evidence of conniving traders, of broken government promises, of relentless white pressure to drive the Indians from the Plains. As the book closes, the moccasin tracks have faded into the buffalo grass, and in the final paragraphs the author presents a vision of the future. She accepts the fact of scientific progress, but she insists that it must not dostroy “the depthless blue, of blazing gold and red at sunset, or the velvet of night, the stars, standing scarcely beyond the arm’s reach.” History owes Miss Sandoz its thanks for such insistence. Without it the Plains would have been a bit less real, and we would have missed a life-long love song. L. A. H a h n , Minneapolis, Minnesota Orrin Porter Rockwell; Man of God, Son of Thunder. By Harold Schindler. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1966. Bibliography, illus., index. 399 pages, $7.50.) Writing history, someone once said in effect, is climbing onto an idea and 74 Western American Literature driving it through a bog of facts. Harold Schindler, setting out to write not a general history but a specific biography, found his particular trail of facts rather narrow, however, and chose to give his subject a little broader footing in the history that surrounded him. The technique proves effective. Anyone reared in the West or interested in Western history at all is aware of Porter Rockwell. Having heard of him so often, one is astonished to learn how little still is, in fact, known about him. What Mr. Schindler does is to give (one is convinced) everything that is known, and then to develop the context whenever nothing is known about the Mormon Samson except that he was there. Fortunately the authors dilligence brought together enough facts, includ­ ing comments by those who saw the subject in action, to make the character­ ization vivid and convincing, so that when Port is placed in a context both he and the event somehow illuminate each other. To...