Marietta Wetherill: Reflections on Life with the Navajos in Chaco Canyon ed. by Kathryn Gabriel (review)

384 Western American Literature points out in the Afterword, is but a fraction of remembrances of her sporadic life in Taos from 1929 to 1942. Lois Palken Rudnick’sthorough and provocative Introduction provides the kind of context the memoir lacks. Rudnick argues that DeWitt’s unique per­ spective as an “ordinary person”viewing the Taos artist community from the outside “makes her book such adelightful contribution to the cultural historyof Taos.”We are tantalized by DeWitt’s cultural commentary, but her text skips from one topic to another and frustrates any attempts to follow her line of thought—let alone develop a useful history of Taos. Her family’s correspon­ dence—primarily that of her father Hutchins Hapgood and mother Neith Boyce—offers some interesting insights on Miriam’slife but she tends to give us more oftheir words than her own. DeWitt began her memoir too late, taking to the hospital notes she in­ tended to include in her recollections. Glimpses ofMabel Dodge Luhan’scircle (DeWitt stayed at Los Gallos), snatches of Pueblo and Hispanic life (how the Depression affected these cultures), tidbits of literati life (Ernest Hemingway was a Hapgood family friend), and various Taos trivia (the advent of telemark skiing) only piqued my interest. But in the end I found myself more disap­ pointed bywhat the memoir lacked than pleased bywhat it contained. BECKYJO GESTELAND University ofUtah Marietta Wetherill: Reflections on Life with theNavajos in Chaco Canyon. Edited and compiled by Kathryn Gabriel. Introductory essay by ElizabethJameson. (Boul­ der, Colorado:Johnson Books, 1992. 241 pages, $21.95.) During the 1950s,journalist Lou Blachly recorded the stories of Marietta Wetherill, wife ofthe rancherwho discovered in 1888 the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde and, eightyears later, the ruins ofPueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon. From Blachly’s tapes, Kathryn Gabriel has retrieved Wetherill’s story about the time she spent with the Navajos in Chaco Canyon. Gabriel creates order and a sense of chronology from the chaos ofvaried and sometimes repetitive recollections in Wetherill’s oral narrative. Deftly blending stories that appear in several differentversions, Gabriel meticulouslyverifies eventsand dates, cross-checking with other sources to establish accuracy as nearly as possible and providing substantive endnote citations and commentary. Wetherill’s Reflections is not meant as academic “ethnohistory,” as Gabriel quickly points out, but are offered rather as “a story about intercultural rela­ tions, the ladders from the mesa top to the grassy canyons.”Wetherill tells a compelling story about the West and the complex, often troubled encounters Reviews 385 between the Navajo and the American, focusing on the manypersonal details of daily life in Chaco Canyon—a perspective distinctly different from male writers of this time period. To be sure, the story has problems, as both ElizabethJameson and Kathryn Gabriel note in their introductory essays. ProfessorJameson describes Reflections as a “trialogue,”a narrative diffused first through Blachly’sinterview techniques and then reconstructed via Gabriel’s editing. Jameson’s essay provides a solid critical context about how we read history today and suggests how to read this narrative aswomen’shistory. Gabriel followsJameson’s essay with a succinct historical summary of the period covered in Reflectionsand a briefbackground critique ofLou Blachlyand the production of the tapes. Throughout the text, Gabriel provides the reader with caveats regarding the reliability of Wetherill’s memory and the general historicity of the narrative. The reader is reminded that the events occur at the turn of the century; it is 1953 when Wetherill recalls the events for Blachly’s interviews; and, Gabriel is shaping (compiling and editing) Wetherill’s narra­ tive with a 1990 sensibility ofwestern history. Reflectionsprovides a solid starting pointfor further research into these oral narratives ofwestern pioneers byscholars ofboth western historyand literature. MARGARET GARCÍADAVIDSON University ofCalifornia, Davis Leadville, U. S. A.: An Intimate History ofa Colorado Mining Town. By Edward B. Larsh and Robert Nichols. (Boulder, Colorado: Johnson Books, 1993. 294 pages, $22.95.) When “Colorado had been a state for only one year,” Edward B. Larsh’s paternal grandfather “came over Mosquito Pass late in the summer of 1877”to Leadville when it “was still called Oro City.”Leadville iswhere the author grew up and where he and Robert Nichols garnered the information...