The Life and Times of James Willard Schultz (Apikuni) by Warren Hanna (review)

Reviews 231 Born in Claremont, Ontario, in 1877, Thomson died in 1917 under some­ what mysterious circumstances, drowning in Canoe Lake in the Northern Ontario wilderness. Only thirty-nine, he had established his reputation as one of Canada’s leading artists in the remarkably short span of five years. He was highly respected by his fellow artists and was an inspirational force behind the founding, three years after his death, of Canada’sseminal Group of Seven. Director of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, Joan Murray is well along on a catalogue raisonne of Thomson’s work. For this present celebration, she has selected fifty-five subjects, and offers them in color plate to show his chronological development over his unfortunately abbrevi­ ated career as a painter. With one exception, they are landscapes; Thompson rarely included human figures in his scenes. “He was primarily a painter of linear distance,” wrote Northrop Frye in 1941 in an essay reprinted in this book. Murray finds “religious overtones [as] a natural concomitant to the gentleness and peace of the images he created.” This reviewer concurs whole­ heartedly in her assessment that Thompson’s gouache study for a painting titled “Northern River,” reproduced in this book, “is a lyric poem.” In the range of subject and the play of style there is something for everyone in this “Best of Tom Thomson.” WILLIAM GARDNER BELL Arlington, Virginia The Life and Times of James Willard Schultz (Apikuni). By Warren Hanna. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. 382 pages, $24.95.) This is a charming book simply because of the lucky combination of biographer and subject. The obvious pleasure of the biographer gives his story a kind of sparkle that even the most jaded reader can hardly ignore. But the biographer’s subject is also fascinating in himself. For James Willard Schultz, called Apikuni by the Blackfoot, is one of those ambiguous figures whose “life” story enchants even when one is not sure how much is true. Hanna admits the doubt, remarking that one cannot quite trust Schultz’s recounting of the adventures of his youth; and yet this is the part of Schultz’s life that one delights in. However, as Hanna goes on to suggest, Schultz created an excellent story, making his life itself into a kind of work of art. Whether he did so in actuality or on the printed page really does not matter. The book begins in the standard fashion with Schultz’s ancestry and childhood: he was born in New York in 1859—but in 1877 he got to Montana and there began his real life, among the Blackfeet (although Hanna notes that Schultz really spent little time “in the lodges of the Blackfeet.”) Schultz did marry a Blackfoot woman and have a son; later he would become a figure 232 Western American Literature in the white man’s world as writer, but his subject was always the Indian life. In such books as My Life as an Indian, he would mix tales of his and others’ adventures, including war parties, with observations on Indian culture. Yet, if the many works have their fictional elements, the moral impulses behind them are true; Schultz presented a counter-image of the Indian and so argued the Indians’case before a white world that still functioned in the old racist fashion. Hanna presents Schultz well here, although the book’s order is a bit bumpy (there are, for instance, chapters that begin as though one hadn’t read about Schultz before—and even one on Schultz’s animals). However, all told, this is a book that anyone interested in Indian-white relationships should read. L. L. LEE Western Washington University Western Series and Sequels: A Reference Guide. By Bernard A. Drew with Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. (New York: Garland Publish­ ing, 1986. 173 pages, $25.00.) That the status of the Western as an internationally popular genre is inextricably bound up with its appearance in series or sequel form might be ascribed to basically three reasons: 1) The longevity of the hero through more than one book not only guarantees steady sales, but serves the genre’s mission of propagating...