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76 Western American Literature Greenville M. Dodge: Soldier, Politician, Railroad Pioneer, By Stanley P. Hirshson. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967. 334 pages. $10.00.) The legendary Dodge materially aided Grant and Sherman in their cam­ paigns, was honorably wounded, personally persuaded Lincoln to authorize the Union Pacific, built that railroad, meanwhile fighting off Indians, discovering passage over the Rockies, and founding towns along the route. He also built the Texas Pacific, amassed a fortune, and retired, the friend of powerful and famous men, truly an American in deed and fortune. It is such sweeping heroics that the historian must view with an impartial and skeptical eye. Professor Hirshson at the outset justifies his work by pro­ testing that Jacob Perkins, practically the sole previous biographer of Dodge (1929), while creating a demigod out of a fearless, acquisitive, ambitious individual, failed to capture Dodge’s spirit.” Dodge was not exactly a spirited man. Yet Perkins, an inferior historian, did place General Dodge in the milieu in which he moved, an era which gave admiration to action, results, and financial shrewdness, an era in which a man like Dodge could win the friendship of men like Grant, Senator Allison, Jay Gould, and Teddy Roosevelt. This is one of the problems of history: a man writing within a given milieu may not satisfy the careful historian, but how would he know that milieu without the earlier writer? There is no question of the superiority of Hirshson’s book over Perkins’. Hirshson is much more thoroughly documented, and ranges far more widely over the general’s activities and contacts. Hirshson throws almost too many names at us for an easy reading and counts perhaps too much on the reader’s familiarity with, for example, the details of the railroad acts of 1862 and 1864 and their significance for the opening of the West, or the relationship between eastern high finance and western settlement. Yet he does put General Dodge in a truer perspective, as a man of genuine directive talents, an effective organizer of labor for railroad construction, and an able worker behind the scenes to win political and financial support for such westward expansion. It was these talents that won for Dodge the respect of certain eminent con­ temporaries: he protected investments by sound construction and an attention to details. In time, as one of the few surviving generals of the Civil War, he be­ came something of a legend, a prominence embellished by his own accumulat­ ing reminiscences. The Dodge papers and memoirs today must give the histo­ rian pause. His very virtues made for a conservatism and an acceptance of the milieu, that pleased his admirers; and his efforts to record himself for pos­ terity showed a willingness to gloss over the vaguer spot in his career. Hence the historian’s problem. Yet there was a solid reality behind the Dodge story, one that calls for Reviews 77 neither debunking nor magnification, but a realistic evaluation within the time and place of its events. Professor Hirshson’s book is the best we have or are likely to have for some time. W ils o n O. C lo u g h , University of Wyoming Buckskin Joe, The Memories of Edward Jonathan Hoyt. Edited by Glenn Shirley. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. 185 pages, $5.50.) The subject of these memoirs, drawn from E. J. Hoyt’s own penciled notes, Wild West show and circus ledgers, from a bulky scrapbook and a box of old photographs, is one man’s adventure on the American frontier. The adventure begins in 1841 with the one-year-old child being carried out of a Canadian cabin in the mouth of a wild hog and ends sixty-one years later with the same adventurer, wounded, riding a bull out of tke jungles of revo­ lutionary Honduras. In between these events we have the drama of a man who hunted and trapped the Quebec woods, fought in so many Civil War battles he “lost track of them,” performed on the high wire in a half-dozen circuses, pioneered a settlement in southern Kansas, mined silver in Leadville, organized a militia to fight the Cheyenne, Comanches and...

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