James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest by Albro Martin (review)

84 Western American Literature The winter was the worst. When snow would fall He found it hard to quiet her at all. Quiet reasonableness, the stark image of entrapment, the implied irony of situation, snatches of passing life, sexual overtone, creeping fear, obsession, madness — this domestic tragedy, with its easy, controlled, elegiac quatrains and turning couplets, has all the marks of a classic Western anthology poem. Most of the “New Land” poems, like the remarkable “Ranch in the Coulee,” sound deceptively close to common speech and have narrative structures which gradually reveal the implications of ranch life through and between the run-on lines. The desperate wife in “The Reason” one day shoots her husband because of the vast surrounding indifference. In “Deliverance” a woman who finds “no joy in waking,” a woman bored to death, heads for the river: To hear no more the flooded river’s strife, Nor noisy birds at dawn, nor cows at milk-time, Nor any voice of life. The woman in “The Stoic” meets her hard life with “rigid pride,” but when the children bring her wild flowers in springtime she breaks down and cries for “old gardens drenched with rain.” The elated mountain woman in “The Horizon” laughs and laughs when a circumscribed town wife pities her; but this ranch wife seems remote from the Montana norm exemplified by the Haste woman in “The Solitary” who, on her infrequent trips to town, strolls enviously among the cozy bungalows. The gnomic cacophanies of Gwendolen Haste’s thirteen “Later Poems” serve, at least, to heighten the captivating attributes of her early Western efforts. MARTIN BUCCO, Colorado State University James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest. By Albro Martin. (Oxford University Press; 1976. 663 pages, $19.50.) “Americans have a special gift, possibly unique,” C. P. Snow once observed, “for demonstrating the silliest and ugliest faces of their society. It always puzzles outsiders that there is surprisingly little reflection, in the high literary art of the United States, of people doing serious and disciplined work, particularly work of human concern. This lack has made for major misunderstanding in other countries.” Albro Martin’s biography of James J. Hill is one work, at least, which should correct the “misunderstanding” of which Snow complains. It offers both an intimate life and professional chronicle of one of the most truly extraordinary self-made men in American business and economic history, Reviews 85 and it does so with the kind of clear and compelling storytelling that is almost unknown in histories of this scope. Martin’s book is a particularly ingratiating example of “high literary art” — or, to be precise, of the fine art of biography. Its central inquiry is the life of a successful man; its symbolic focus is a vanished species of American Hero. Jim Hill’s “serious and disciplined work” provided the railroad (the Great Northern) that opened much of the American Northwest to explora­ tion, cultivation and settlement; Martin’s work in charting the terra incognita of Hill’s complex career is a similarly epic labor. In his book, the captains and kings of American Empire live again in all their entrepre­ neurial glory, men whose avowed lust for rights and power (and profits) did not defeat their strangely sincere and even idealistic concern for improving the lot of ordinary people. Hill, for example, was equally at home in a crowd of Norwegian farmers or in the board room of J. P. Morgan &Co. In an enviably readable narrative, Martin traces the ascent of Hill from young immigrant to aspiring businessman to supreme architect of an enterprise which evolved into an empire. Here is the American Dream shaped by the dreams of a man whose imagination spanned the American continent from heartland to ocean. It is the kind of saga which puts fiction to shame, for Martin’s book succeeds not only in capturing the gregarious, articulate and energetic individuality of this heretofore enigmatic tycoon, but the broader sweep of pioneer America surging forward in a confident epoch of Volkswanderungs. In his portrait of Jim Hill, Martin shows us the busy, likeable man who for too long has been obscured by such easy epithets as “captain...