Those Days: An American Album by Richard Critchfield (review)

188 Western American Literature Although Apaches is the story of the last Indian outbreak, it is mostly Lieutenant Pat Cutler’s story. Attractive to women, too outspoken for most politicians and B.I.A. agents, Cutler has been charged by the General Crook figure to see that Caballito, the Geronimo figure, stays put on the Bosque Alto. Beginning with Cutler’s group of Apache scouts fighting and foxing their way out of an ambush set by Caballito, the story moves swiftly to the political underpinnings of frontier society. Cutler’swarm relationships with the wife of a territorial lawyer, with the cowboy who becomes an outlaw, and with the beautiful spoiled daughter of a Chihuahuan haciendado, balance the harsh and cruel action scenes. Oakley Hall has woven history and invention into a complete and absorbing, not entirely predictable, fast-paced, adventure. NANCY KIRKPATRICK WRIGHT Yavapai College Those Days: An American Album. By Richard Critchfield. (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1986. 419 pages, $19.95.) The author’sstyle of writing in this book isone of its best features. He lets various people in a North Dakota/Iowa family tell the story of “those days” past, and the method gives the reader a biographical/fictional viewpoint. Hadwen (an Iowa country doctor) and Jessie (a rural North Dakota school­ teacher) Williams are the first of the family to come to this midwestern farm country, and their grandchildren reflect upon their experience. A daughter, Anna Louise (the author’s mother), tells much of the story, but Critchfield includes letters, newspaper stories and the actual first-person accounts of other family members and neighbors. The time is between1880 and 1940 in the semi-rural heartland at a time when cultural and industrial change was reaching into that countryside. Complementing intimate family views (“My impression of Father, I see now, was colored by a boy’s idea of heroism”) are state and world views of World War I, the great depression and prohibition. What really keeps the reader’s attention are the details: “One hot August day during a dry spell” the whole town went to a fire that started in the German Baptist church (268) ; or, “Many men in Fessenden had affairs” (302) ; or, “That year Mom was in Iowa was a terrible year for me. That blonde floozy hung around” (359). The author’s mother lived to be ninety-five, and much of the author’s story was recorded by a series of daily interviews with her when she was seventy-three. Critchfield has received various awards, including those of the Ford and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of Villages, Shahhat, The Long Charade and The Golden Bowl Be Broken. He currently writes for journals and newspapers. DORYS CROW GROVER East Texas State University ...