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196 Western American Literature withdrew from men in order to return to them with greater faith in being together, as a master joins a workman, a father his sons, a husband his wife to serve together reciprocally. “In Our Great Fragile Cities” is a poem in which he describes the switchboard for telephones as a symbol of the fabric which holds speakers and listeners in contact as the process of interdepen­ dence. The poems of Haniel Long recall a poet who is being more widely read. His name is pronounced “han-eye-el” with the accent on the second syllable. The word is a Hebrew phrase meaning “Kindness of God.” It was chosen by his father, a Methodist minister, who with his wife served as a missionary in Burma at the time his son was born. Haniel’s own son, Anton or “Tony” Long, lives now at Naples, New York, near Lake Canandaigua where the family owned a farm. He has been instrumental in keeping Long’s books in print, either by publication or facsimile microfilms. May Sarton, the New Hampshire novelist, wrote the Preface for My Seasons. She speaks for all who admire the verses of Long when she calls them poetry of discovery, a discovery of democracy in spirit and a communion between friends. T. M. PEARCE, University of New Mexico Wyoming: A Bicentennial History. By T. A. Larson. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. 198 pages, illustrations, $8.95.) This new book by T. A. Larson, long-time Professor of History at the University of Wyoming and, currently, member of the state legislature, is a volume in the series of state histories published for the nation’s Bicentennial. In preparing the series, according to its general editor, “We have asked each author for a summing up — interpretive, sensitive, thoughtful, individual, even personal — of what seems significant about his or her state’s history. What distinguishes it? What has mattered about it to its own people and to the rest of the nation? What has it come to now?” The result of this freedom of approach, in the case of Larson’s Wyoming, is a fine presentation of a little understood Western state and its citizens. The author organizes his book around five major topics: the fur trade; the Oregon Trail and other routes through the state; equality, particularly as it relates to women’s rights (Wyoming being the first government in the world to grant women full rights to vote and hold office); cowboys and the cattle business; and energy resources and development. These headings provide an excellent framework for a book of this length, and the author draws in much related state history while probing his major topics in depth and with a sound sense of relationships between the state’s past and present. Reviews 197 Important to T. A. Larson’s conception of history for the work is utilization of first-hand accounts and quotations. The reader is given, for example, the reaction of missionary wives to mountain-man Jim Bridger at the Popo Agie Rendezvous of 1838:“Last night disturbed by drunkards. A large company arrived under command of Capt. Bridger. A no. of them came to salute us. One man carried the scalp of a Black-foot. The music consisted of tamborines accompanied by an inarticulate sound of the voice. They . . . fired and acted as strangely as they could.” The touch of humor provided by this understandably negative description of one of Wyoming’s famous early citizens is characteristic of the entertaining quality of the work, and also reminds us in less obvious ways than sometimes displayed by Larson’s favorite frontier humorist, Bill Nye, that Westerners have always dealt with life through understated humor as well as toughness and action. Another intriguing quality of the writing is its impartial scrutiny of those cherished historical myths accepted with little question in Wyoming and the West. Thus the author examines the various motivations for Wyoming granting women the right to vote, including the certainly unidealistic argu­ ment that passage of the bill would give favorable publicity to attract immigrants into the territory. Larson also notes that strange ambivalence of the Western cowman when he...

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