With Women’s Eyes: Visitors to the New World, 1775–1918 ed. by Marion Tinling (review)

186 WesternAmerican Literature women have periodically travelled it, making maps, taking pictures and identify­ ing historic spots. The WPA did a book in the 1930s. This year a wagon train journeyed from western Wyoming to western Oregon. On The Oregon Trailis superior to anything I have read commemorating the 150th anniversary of the first wagon train. It captures both the setting and the spirit of the trail. There are over a hundred photographs. Each is identified by location and by the number of miles from Independence, Missouri, and each has a quotation from a diary orjournal that catches a bit of trail life. Each place has been photographed at the time ofyear the wagons would have passed there. From these photographs we can understand something ofwhat it meant to keep a schedule ofJuly and August in semi-desert Wyoming and southern Idaho and late autumn in the Cascades. The last photographs are of an Edenesque Willamette Valley and the first homes. In both quality and appropriateness, the photographs remind one ofthe illustrations in TheAmerican Westmagazine in its early, best years. There are twelve one-page thematic essays, each with a contemporary painting. From these essays we learn a great deal about the romance of the trail—“a romance of the commonplace.”Jonathan Nichols does a great deal with simple, often surprising, facts. There were, for instance, few big Conestoga wagons; most families packed everything into a narrow, high-wheeled wagon of 2000 pounds gross, about the size and weight of today’s family station wagon. More men were killed by accidental gunshots than by Indians, in the earlyyears. Cholera and river-crossings were the most deadly hazards ofthe road. There was romantic dalliance along the way; one man noted in hisjournal that the tailor had been with his wife again. The Army served the pioneer more as nurturer (food, medicine, surgery) than as Indian fighter. The Oregon Trail, except for the last hundred miles or so, was never plotted or constructed: it was simply worn into the land by the wheels of emigrants who had neither time nor reason to build a road. Yet today fifteen percent of it still remains clearly visible, where it has not been covered by dams, highways or towns, or other works of humans. The restwe have to reconstruct by careful imagination, as this book does. For anyone who appreciates superior photography and thoughtful text, this book would be a fine gift. ROSCOE L. BUCKLAND Western Washington University With Women’sEyes: Visitors totheNew World, 1775-1918. Edited by Marion Tinling. (Hamden, Connecticut: The Shoe String Press, 1993. 207 pages, $27.50.) Twenty-six brave and astute European women disclose their insights into America (primarily the current U. S.) from the Revolutionary War to World Reviews 187 War I in this unique collection offirst-person narratives. They came for diverse reasons (e.g., health, politics, curiosity), some staying for months and some for years. They take us by horseback, canoe, mail-stage, private railroad car, and automobile through cities, villages, valleys, and mountain ranges. Seeing things we could not or would not, they tell us about ourselves as well as themselves. They learned—and teach us—about Indians, Mormons, cowboys, prostitutes, presidents, peasants, working girls, and suffragists. They observed slavery not just ofAfro-Americans but also ofwives. They confronted harsh landscapes not just in the mountains and deserts but also in themselves. These women’s adventures and analyses inspire the reader to delve into the full volumes from which these brief excerpts are taken. Indeed, the first-person voices and views are thejewels of With Women'sEyes. Unfortunately, Tinling’s Introduction is disappointing. “Frontiersmen” are credited with developing the American West. Female travelers are attributed with special interests in and privy to domestic details, but the excerpts tell few. And here is a bookful of evidence that European visitors beginning in 1775 viewed the New World as both curious and unique, yetTinling states that “1918 is a fitting place to close . . . [because the United States’] people were no longer regarded as Europeans transplanted to a New World, but as Americans. Still diverse, the country had acquired a distinctive and recognizable American culture.”The text informs us...