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82 Western American Literature the present editor, by Yale University Press — most fittingly, as Brewer was a professor at Yale for 40 years after leaving California. The second edition was issued by the University of California Press in 1949; the minor changes in the present edition are detailed in a preface. William H. Brewer nominally served as botanist of Josiah Dwight Whit­ ney’s State Geological Survey, a grandiose but ill-defined scheme for determin­ ing California’s potentialities. In practice, Brewer was the field leader, shep­ herding his small party (including young Clarence King, later a well-known figure in nature study in the West) the length and breadth of the infant state, often under the most primitive conditions. The California which comes to life in the pages of this lucidly written journal was not, of course, the El Dorado of early Gold Rush days. It was the more stable (though scarcely staid) California of Twain’s Roughing It and contemporary works. From the modem view, Brewer’s California was an odd jumble of the primitive and the comparatively sophisticated — sleeping in an armed camp to guard against mule-thieves; attending the glittering gas-lit pavilions of the State Fair; struggling up the cliffs of Yosemite Valley; observing the fireworks of Chinese New Year; being shipwrecked (in potentially dangerous circumstances) off Alcatraz Island; struggling for funds with an indigent and unreliable state administration; dickering testily with “Secessionists.” Brewer was among those resourceful and enterprising men well-equipped to combat a frontier environment, and his journal fully reflects his qualities — unrelenting alertness and curiosity, deep perception, and a basic humanity capable of showing itself in unexpected times and places. But a hint of intel­ lectual arrogance lurks in these pages, and today’s reader may choose to reserve his affections, if not his full admiration. Brewer’s attitudes toward those less cultured, educated, or fortunate than himself (the suppressed Mexicans and Indians are prime examples) were, at best, patronizing and, at worst, some­ thing considerably less admirable. Readers familiar with Francis P. Farquhar’s other publications may sus­ pect that the editor’s “heart is in the Highlands,” and so, I think, it is. However, Brewer’s visits to the Sierras and the Siskiyous were but relatively brief phases in his wanderings. This book may be highly recommended as an honest, shrewd, and undramatized appraisal of ALL of California during a critical transitional period. We may indeed be grateful that Editor Farquhar, a long-time Sierra Club stalwart, has survived the skirmishes of the conserva­ tion wars to bring us this new edition. A r t h u r H. F r ie t z s c h e , California State Polytechnic College The Letters of George Catlin and His Family: A Chronicle of the American West. By Marjorie Catlin Roehm. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. 463 pages, $8.50.) The subtitle of this book is misleading. The story takes place mostly in Reviews 83 Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, London, and Brussels. Only the Wisconsin letters give us much of a chronicle of the West. The value of the book is twofold — in the new light it throws on the artist George Catlin and in the saga of a fine American family as it lived through the nineteenth century. The 174 letters of the Catlin family lay for years “in a little old trunk, tucked away in attics.” (They are now deposited in the Bancroft Library of the University of California.) Along with the letters was a brief journal by Francis Catlin describing his visit to his brother George in Brussels in 1868. The diary and the letters fill in gaps that previous biographers have been able only to speculate about. They also give us some­ thing of a portrait of the artist — drawn by himself and his father, mother, brothers, and sisters — as a man with a calling to which he was steadfast in spite of the pulls of family affections, the shocks of family tragedies, the seductions of fame, and the crush of poverty and neglect. The Catlin family traced its ancestry to a supporter of William the Con­ queror and dated its arrival in New England at...

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