The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall The Letters, Diaries and Adventures of an Itinerant Englishman Supplemented with Other Documents and Annotations ed. by Frederick W. Nolan (review)

60 Western American Literature The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall: The Letters, Diaries and Adventures of an Itinerant Englishman Supplemented with Other Documents and Annotations. Compiled and edited by F r e d ­ e r ic k W. N o l a n . (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, xvi+480 pages, $6.00.) This book is a real addition to the literature of New Mexico’s Lincoln County War, a first-hand look into the thinking of a Vic­ torian entrepeneur, and a fine case for the Tunstall-McSween fac­ tion in the Lincoln County power struggle. Mr. Nolan, a Britisher who is a thoroughgoing scholar of the American West, admits immediately to special pleading, and lets the reader take matters from there; but though he makes some vague charges, implying, for instance, that the McSweens were not so staunch in their friendship for Tunstall as they seemed to be, he presents, in the end, a well documented case. He has also pulled together, out of letters, contemporary newspaper accounts, and government documents, an exciting story of attempted empirebuilding and power politics. The real star of the book, of course, is young John Henry Tun­ stall, both as subject and as writer. An insatiably curious young man, he saw and recorded almost everything, not merely those things that pertained to his making his fortune in the West. He was also a ruthless young man, not crooked, but hard as nails in business; though to hear Mr. Nolan tell it, the Murphy-Dolan crowd hated him only because he was such an upright, honest fellow. Nolan says Tunstall was done in, both in his murder and afterwards when the U.S. government disallowed his father’s claims, by official chicanery. Young Tunstall might have said rather that he had knowingly played for high stakes against a crooked house and lost. J o h n D e W it t M c K e e , New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology The Grizzly Bear —Portraits From Life. Edited and with an Intro­ duction by B e s s ie D o ak H a y n e s and E dgar H a y n e s (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. 386 pages, $5.00.) In Western man’s relentless drive to follow the Biblical injunc­ tion and subjugate the earth and the other animals, one of the most interesting of the latter victims has been the American grizzly bear, ...