The Great American Desert, Then and Now by W. Eugene Hollon (review)

Reviews 319 reader is not surprised to see them return to the city after their marriage. The country may have a near-monopoly on moral virtue, but the city is where the money is. Dorothy Thomas’ The Home Place is both a less ambitious and a more effective performance. Set in Nebraska, like Mrs. Aldrich’s book, it recounts what happens when the three sons of Arch Young, thrown out of work by the depression, descend upon the “home place” and live there, with wives and children, in a congestion that inevitably produces tensions. Burdened with no message, no explicit contrast between town and country, the novel tells its unpretentious story in direct fashion. There are no locked drawers, no skeletons in the family closet, scarcely a love affair in the popular sense. The two main characters have been married for at least seven years and seem perfectly content to remain so. The reprinting of these books thirty years after the second of them was published probably does not betoken a resurgence of the genre they repre­ sent, but it does suggest that the appeal of such fiction has not altogether vanished. Even with all their defects, they are useful tools in understanding our national past. Though the picture of life they present may be distorted or falsified, the fact that it was presented and apparently read tells much about our Value system. Perhaps in time of the more realistic novels of the same period and locale, such as the Grimsen trilogy of Sophus Keith Winther, will be rescued from oblivion and made available in convenient editions like these Bison Books. R o y W. M e y e h , Mankato State College The Great American Desert, Then and Now. By W. Eugene Hollon. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. 284 pages, maps, illus., index. $6.00.) As a young man living in northern Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan, I saw on many occasions the great dust storms that swept hundreds of miles out of the Southwest, darkening the sky menacingly and sifting into homes and other buildings to cover every exposed surface with red air-borne silt. That was in the early 1930s, the era of the Dust Bowl. Though we lived in humid country, the sky bore witness to man’s reckless misuse of desert land, which I would not see until I came to live in the desert many years later. Mr. Hollon, Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and President of the American History Association, knows that desert country intimately from reading about it, living on it, and traveling through it. What he has to say relates to both time and space; his treatment is not just of the desert as a geographic fact but as the setting for history. The result is a 320 Western American Literature fresh approach which uses the desert as the focal point for discussing both its past and present and the ways in which its climate and terrain have affected the life of man living on it. After defining its limits and describing what he means by the desert, Mr. Hollon devotes successive chapters to the first inhabitants, the arrival of the white man, the mysteries of the northern reaches of the desert, the explorers, the Mormons, the conflict between the Indians and their subduers, the coming of the cattlemen, the efforts to transform the desert into an agricultural area, the consequences of using and abusing the water resources of the arid West, the political complexion of the Western states, the cities that have arisen, and the challenges which the desert presents to the future. The consequence is that the book is an historical, geographical, sociological, economic, agricultural montage, with side excursions in many directions (in­ cluding the author’s trips into and around the rim of the desert). The Great American Desert, so named by Stephen H. Long after his expedition to the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in 1819-20, has been a profound fact in American life and history. It extends west from a line running north through Texas, central Oklahoma and Kansas, eastern Nebraska and South Dakota, and obliquely across North...