The Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace by John C. Duval (review)

Reviews 309 have been frequently baffled by the Indians and their attitudes, as his quar­ reling with his mother-in-law over the eldest child indicates. Prescott’s failures of understanding within the small circle of his family were magnified in the general relationship between whites and Indians, with consequences that were sometimes deadly. Quarrels over the meaning of treaty provisions indicate that misunderstanding was as frequent on one side as on the other. The same can be said for cupidity, though this was a vice from which Prescott himself seems to have been free. Certainly Prescott was unusually devoted to helping the Indians, as he showed by serving as superintendent of farming for the Sioux. However, neither his knowledge of the Indians nor his wide acquaint­ anceship among them prevented his being killed during the Sioux Uprising of 1862, apparently by individuals who knew him and bore him no personal grudge. According to one account he was told that he had to be shot be­ cause he was white. He was caught up in the holocaust, which was the product of the very ills that he had often tried to prevent. The manuscript that Prescott wrote about two years before his death thus becomes not only an interesting account of life in Minnesota during the period between the time of the frontier and that of Statehood but also a reminder of the consequences of misunderstanding between races. Both past and recent events argue that the lesson is still to be learned. The manuscript has been ably edited by Professor Donald Dean Parker, who made good use of secondary materials to fill in gaps. The book is at­ tractively printed and contains nine illustrations, all of them relevant. There are three maps and, while more could always be wished for, no book of this nature can supply as many as the serious reader is likely to desire. The book is to be recommended to anyone interested in the Western scene. K e n n e t h A. S p a u ld in g , University of Massachusetts The Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace. By John C. Duval. Edited by Mabel Major and Rebecca W. Smith. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. 353 pages, $1.80.) Once again the high adventure, hairbreadth escapes, and broad humor of Bigfoot Wallace, Texas’ most intriguing folk hero, are available in this paperback reprint of the Duval classic, which these same editors issued first in 1936. Twenty-year-old William Alexander Anderson Wallace left his home in Virginia for Texas when he learned of his brother’s death in the Goliad Massacre. The war was over when he arrived, but he stayed to become a 310 Western American Literature famous Texas frontiersman. A scout and Indian fighter in the Texas Re­ public, Bigfoot joined Jack Hays’ Texas Rangers in 1840, went on the Mier Expedition in 1842, was captured but survived the black bean lottery and almost two years of imprisonment in Mexico. He was with the Rangers again in the Mexican War and was a soldier in the Confederacy. Periodically he worked as a scout, mail contractor, and rancher after the war, living in south­ west Texas where he died in 1899 at the age of eighty-three; nearby is the post office called Big Foot in his honor. He returned to Virginia on visits only twice in all those years, preferring the open country and frontier ways. Ironically, Wallace, who had helped to make the Texas frontier safe for settlers, lost the land on which he had lived for thirty years to a land-shark who found a flaw in his title. His remains rest in the State Cemetery in Austin. While a member of the Texas Rangers, Bigfoot met his Boswell, John Critenden Duval, a Kentuckian his own age who had escaped the Goliad Massacre and who also preferred frontier life. In the introduction Duval says he spent several years getting Wallace’s consent to his writing the Adventures, which was published first in 1870. Major and Lee call the book “a free-hand biography” in which episodes are rearranged at the expense of chronology, dramatic dialogue and fictitious characters are...