Frederic Remington: A Biography by Peggy, Harold Samuels (review)

166 Western American Literature River, the Seattle City Light dams have killed as many as 239,000 young salmon in a single night when they ran a high flow until the end of the peak consumption period around 11 p.m., and then reduced the flow sharply until the next morning. Brown documents the longhistoryof abuse which has reduced the great Pacific salmon and steelhead runs to near-trickles, illustrating the practices of greedy and ignorant men who have perpetrated these abuses and, in many cases, con­ tinue to do so. We cringe for both the salmon and the citizens of Washington as arrogant WPPSS officials bulldoze through local opposition to continue a faltering nuclear power project financed by “the equivalent of a $31,000 mort­ gage on every household in the state.” Even fisheries biologists and other would-be friends of the salmon often contribute to the destructive practices: we recognize the tragic potential of good intentions asBrown explains the hazards of misguided attempts to replace the wild salmon with hatchery-reared fish. All of this sounds depressing, and it is, but the story is not without its brighter moments and admirable men. And it’s at least slightly comforting to know that we still have writers as sane, articulate, dedicated, and talented as Brown to speak for the salmon and other imperilled wildlife. His documenta­ tion of evils is objective and concise, his description vital and colorful. He recalls a survey of spawning pink salmon on the Graywolf River: I spotted a six-pound male lying between two boulders the color of rotten ice. He had a high, knife-edged hump flying like a burgundy banner above the water, hooked snout and a rainbow across his tail that caught fire as the sun cleared the opposite ridge, charging the river with color and revealing thousands of diaphanous dew-covered cobwebs on the branches of the trees. If you’re not an experienced fisheries biologist, this book will almost cer­ tainly tell you more than you ever knew before about the lives of Pacific salmon and steelhead, and about the history of their use and abuse as one of our most prized natural resources. It’s a reverently-fashioned and graceful monument to a dwindling species. ORVIS BURMASTER, Boise State University Frederic Remington: A Biography. By Peggy and Harold Samuels. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1982, 537 pages, 32 pages of illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, index, $24.95.) Many Americans have a passing acquaintance with some paintings, statues or illustrations by Frederic Remington (1861-1909). Few are aware Reviews 167 of the range and extent of Remington’s work. Even fewer have any real inkling of the difficult and complicated personality that this work expresses. Several serious studies of Remington’s career (by G. Edward White, Peter Hassrick, and myself) have appeared during the last fifteen years, but old notions die hard. The image Remington sometimes sought to create of himself during his lifetime as a slangy, genial soldier of fortune — a man “with the bark on” — is still credited too often, without much questioning about its contexts or origins. Remington’s art is still widely regarded as illustration and/or decoration. Therefore, the present volume by Peggy and Harold Samuels, shortcomings and all, is good news. The Samuels are not taken in by the P. R. scam conducted by the New York publishing house of Harper (with great success) to present Remington as a bona fide westerner. Neither are they deceived by the masks with which the artist sought to protect himself at various times and for various reasons — Yale man, English aristocrat, military expert, country squire, Indian, Indian hater, patriot, to name a few of many. They easily see through the smoke­ screens of overheated rhetoric laid down around the artist by image-making publishers, the swirling mists with which Owen Wister and others sought to drape the artist’swork for an audience that was eager for romance and excite­ ment, and even the more complex disguises that the resourceful artist came up with more or less on his own in order to show off, get his way, conceal his weaknesses, etc. However, the Remington who emerges...