Many Strange Characters: Montana Frontier Tales by James Willard Schultz (review)

266 Western American Literature Many Strange Characters: Montana Frontier Tales. By James Willard Schultz. Edited by Eugene Lee Silliman. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 1982. 143 pages, $10.95.) “In a sense, this volume completes a trilogy,” writes Eugene Lee Silliman in his introduction. The trilogy is tales by James Willard Schultz which Silliman unearthed from old periodicals and has brought to light in Why Gone Those Times (1974), Floating on the Missouri (1979), both also published by the University of Oklahoma Press, and now Many Strange Characters. This time out Silliman has collected not Schultz’s tales of Indians, for which he isnoted, but his portraits of white frontiersmen. Here are wolfers on the trail of a bad bear, a sheriff trying to feather his nest with dubious taxes, soldiers at the Nez Perce retreat, crazy escapes from Indians and grizzlies, woodcutters coming to tragedy. Schultz, an Anglo who came west in 1877 for adventure and stayed to marry a Blackfoot woman and develop particular sympathy with the Blackfeet, sketches all these characters authentically, color­ fully, and with a sharp ear for frontier dialogue. Though nothing here is new, the reader will find some good detail work for the collaborative effort on the gigantic painting called the history of the Old West. WINFRED BLEVINS, Thermopolis, Wyoming A Family Likeness. By Janis Stout. (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, Inc., 1982. 165 pages, $11.95.) In announcing A Family Likeness as winner of the 1982 Frank Wardlow Prize, Texas Monthly Press describes the novel as about “three generations of women whose roots are tied to the harsh, unyielding East Texas soil.” Although it embraces the lives of three McCall women, the prefatory eulogy for Florence McCall, the grandmother, suggests that the novel is primarily her story, or at least the story of her influence on the family. The first section is set in rural northeast Texas, in the general area of William Humphreys’ Home From the Hill, and Likeness can be added to the collection of what Paul Foreman has called “Red-Dirt Texas Fiction.” The East Texas tone of strident morality and “Southern gothic” enigma combined with the populist background of the 30s puts Stout in company with George Sessions Perry and his contemporaries. Stout creates in Florence McCall a heroine who thinks of herself as doing only what has to be done, who suffers setbacks and losses which she has no control over, and who has an unromantic death, viewed at the end by most of her family as a burden or, at the least, an anachronistic embarrassment. Her granddaughter Lori yearns to see her as a hero, although the tobacco juice stains on Florence’s chin are a reminder of her rural, uneducated background. Lori grows up in Ft. Worth, where the middle section of the novel is set, and so feeds on secondhand knowledge of her maternal heritage. ...