The Grave of John Wesley Hardin: Three Essays on Grassroots History by C. L. Sonnichsen (review)

THE GRAVE OF JOHN WESLEY HARDIN: THREE ESSAYS ON GRASSROOTS HISTORY BY C. L. SONNICHSEN (College Station, Texas, and London: Texas A&M University Press, 1979. 90 pp. $6.50) Dealing with oral traditions as well as with archival materials, the grassroots historian knows that "what people have agreed to believe about the facts is a fact in itself, and sometimes it is much more influential that the reality" (p. 25). His job is riskier than the pure archival historian's not only because documents cannot take revenge on the historian but also because he is less likely to be believed than his counterpart in the library. Sonnichsen, a grassroots historian for over forty years and an indefatigable researcher, claims to have preserved what, without his energies, would have perished utterly, and he wryly implies that what he writes is only a rare distillation of the auditory impressions gathered over a lifetime. The grassroots history, Sonnichsen would say, is best gathered from the man who gathered it or from the men he gathered it from — orally in close conversation. What the first essay, "Blood on the Typewriter" claims for the grassroots historian is equal stature with the archival historian. In the second essay, "The Pattern of Texas Feuds" Sonnichsen reveals one fruit of this method — the destruction of long-held myths about feuds. The McDade feud of 1883 was a matter of factions, not families, of sophisticated townsmen, not hillbillies, of deep wounds, not trivial occurrences. Sonnichsen's analysis of the complementary impulses of duty to revenge and reticence to break taboos should be read with care by all Western historians. "The Grave of John Wesley Hardin," the culminating essay, is less an examination of the enigmatical Hardin than a scathingly ironical portrait of the ineptitude of the caretakers of relics of the past, thrown into high relief by the warmth of the descendants of Hardin. Sonnichsen recounts his Odyssean journeys to place finally a marker over the remains of Hardin. So much, Sonnichsen seems to say, for the triumph of documents — the grassroots historian had to circumvent people of all kinds to establish a reliable source for future archivists. WILSON F. ENGEL, III* ?WILSON F. ENGEL. III. received his doctorate in Renaissance English literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975. He has published on the antiquary James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. the playwright Ben Jonson. and on Renaissance theories of the faculty of memory. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW153 ...