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362 Western American Literature matters worse for Nebraska Indians. The book also shows how Quaker paci­ fism, though noble in theory, rendered Quaker officials absolutely helpless to prevent other Indians (especially Sioux) from raiding those tribes under government control in eastern Nebraska. The terrible event known as Mas­ sacre Canyon, where over fifty Pawnees (including a majority of women and children) were killed by raiding Oglalas in 1873, serves as the most obvious evidence of this problem. Milner’s book does not deal in any manner with western American litera­ ture. But it does portray the disturbing context of Indian-white affairs within which much western literature is set. The fact of “good intentions,” much the same as those which would produce the Dawes Act in 1887, rather than Custer-like military conflict, suggests the extent of the irony here. WILLIAM BLOODWORTH East Carolina University Frank Matsura, Frontier Photographer. By JoAnn Roe. Introduction by Murray Morgan. (Seattle: Madrona Publishers, 1981. 144 pages, $27.50.) Frank Matsura arrived in the small town of Conconully in north-central Washington in 1903. He died of tuberculosis ten years later — June 16, 1913 — in the neighboring town of Okanogan. He arrived a Stranger, according to Murray Morgan, the first Japanese in town — lured by an advertisement for a job as a cook’s helper and laundryman. But he arrived also wearing a suit, white shirt, tie, and hat, and sporting a camera. He was well-educated and spoke English with only a trace of an accent. Though his past remained — and still remains — a mystery, Matsura did not remain an Outsider. He made his living when and as he could with his camera, and his camera brought him friends and respect. By 1906 the local paper reported he was the best photographer in the region; several years later J. A. McCormick, official photographer for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposi­ tion, commended his photographs of the Okanogan Country as the very best submitted for the Exposition. In 1911 the Great Northern Railway Company, busy building a line north from Wenatchee, selected forty of his photographs to help publicize the Okanogan Valley. Matsura traveled widely and con­ stantly and seemingly took pictures of everything and everyone there was to see. The town honored him at his death with the largest funeral yet held in the community. Murray Morgan calls Matsura’s photographs (the plates were stored and almost forgotten for forty-one years) “windows on the Okanogan frontier.” But if they are, it is the eye of the artist and not this particular frontier that makes them memorable. JoAnn Roe’s collection contains a few landscapes, and there are a larger number of pictures that catch the activities of empirebuilding : a mine, a lumber-camp, installing the waterworks in the town of Omak in 1910, or construction of the Reclamation Project that brought water Reviews 363 and made possible the apple orchards for which the country would become famous. More intimate are pictures of people at work and at play: hunting, but also hauling grain; cutting ice from the river in winter, but also ice-skating; racing horses on Main Street; participating jn a local talent show; playing football or tennis — yes, tennis, for Okanogan’s first “tournament” was in 1911. There is a birthday party: a photo of twenty-one women — eight with babies on their laps — as they sit in a pasture or mountain meadow. There is Sunday morning outside the pool hall: some sixteen bachelors sitting in a row on the tie-rail — a single man on the ground in front of the boardwalk with a dog in his lap. The range of expressiveness on the faces of people is remarkable, given the state of photographic art at the time, and the circum­ stances. This is particularly true of Matsura’s portraits of Indians from the several tribes and bands on the Colville lands. There are children here and chiefs, cowboys, matrons, families, a medicine man, and an evangelist. Many of the pictures are formal studio work (there are even comic “studies” like “the hold-up.”) But in 1908 Matsura acquired a stamp photo camera that allowed him to take up to twelve...

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