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78 Western American Literature Early in his memoirs Buckskin Joe records his distaste for school. “I didn’t learn much,” he insists. “Books seemed to be out of my line.” We need not take too seriously this boyish judgment on himself. Because of the breadth of his vocabulary, his sharpness of observation, his feeling for dramatic action, and his ability to see events in historical perspective, we can believe that had he turned his talents to professional writing he could have left us an historical document perhaps more rich and varied than Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail. The editor of these memoirs, Glenn Shirley, is the author of ten books dealing with the frontier West. Also published by the University of Nebraska Press is his Pawnee Bill: A Biography of Major Gordon W. Lillie. Pawnee Bill was Joe’s friend and associate. L o y O t i s B a n k s, Colorado State University Texas Riverman, The Life and Times of Captain Andrew Smyth. By William Seale. (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1966. Bibliography, illustrations, index, map. 181 pages, $5.00.) Today, when “Texas” means TV rangers and gunmen, non-existent fertilizer tanks and Lee Harvey Oswald, Neiman-Marcus and the Astrodome, white-faced cows and oil rigs, some people may have forgotten that part of Texas is Deep South, still possessing a fading memory of magnolias and mammies, log rafts and flatboats, cotton-toting and steamboats-round-the-bend. In a well-printed, conscientiously documented, and thoroughly indexed little book, William Seale, assistant professor of history at Lamar State College of Technology, has provided a reminder of this phase of Texas heritage. His great-grandfather, Andrew F. Smyth (1817-1879), arrived in Texas from Alabama just on the eve of the revolution, and eventually settled north of Beaumont to become succesively and successfully a surveyor, planter, flatboatman , keelboatman, sawmill operator, county judge, steamboat captain and merchant, who left behind a forty-year collection of letters, mementoes, and account books. Upon these, Professor Seale has focused an apparently discern­ ing knowledge of Texas history to reconstruct a little noticed portion of his state’s background. The result is a thumbnail sketch of the Texas Revolution and how it affected the less-than-heroic newcomer, a survey of the rise of business and trade along the Neches River, a glance into the East Texas small town politics during the time of the Secession, and an outline of the growth of social life in the fast-growing post-bellum state. The book’s origin as a Master of Arts, thesis probably accounts for its several defects and its major virtues. The style is careful to the point of Reviews 79 evading emotional involvement, accurate to the extent of curbing the imagina­ tion, yet generally informative enough to avoid dullness. If Smyth’s boyhood is neglected, it is probably because the letters do not go back so far, but if the last period of his life is skimpily dealt with (compared to the years 18351850 ), it could be that the author has discovered that he has succeeded in producing an adequate thesis and needs only to wind up the lose ends. Nevertheless, the reader already has been enriched with details of everyday life in East Texas back when a planter’s big house was a double log cabin with a dog-run through the middle, when wild myrtles were planted in the yard to keep fleas respectfully distant, and when a two-storey store could be built for $250. G e o r g e W. E w in g , Abilene Christian College History of North Dakota. By Elwyn B. Robinson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1966 xi+599 pages, $7.95.) Not long ago, a weekly news magazine contained an article about a leading U. S. publisher and some phases of book publishing. A portion of the article dealt with the decline of the novel, and among possible reasons for the decline, one was, in effect, that non-fiction writers had adopted the techniques of fiction, creating exciting presentations and thus gripping their readers’ attentions. The effectiveness of this approach may be judged by the number...

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