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84 Western American Literature tentiously she manages to keep straight the threads of the lives of the numerous children and grandchildren of Putnam Catlin and to let the letters speak for themselves, without undue family pride. They are important letters. They are sometimes stuffy, sometimes hypocritical, but they are true glimpses of our American past. J a m e s C. A u s t in , Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville Audubon in the West. Edited by John Francis McDermott. (Norman: Uni­ versity of Oklahoma Press, 1965. 131 pages $4.95.) Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains. By Thurman Wilkins, (Norman: Uni­ versity of Oklahoma Press, 1966. 315 pages. $7.95.) Both of these works derive their importance chiefly from their contributions to the history of the West. As artists, both Audubon and Moran were major figures in depicting the natural phenomena of America in the nineteenth cen­ tury, Audubon the fauna, and Moran the landscape. Neither is remembered much today for his art, though interest in their works may be enjoying a minor revival. Audubon is revered by the conservation societies named after him, which specialize in preserving the habitat of the bird and other wildlife that he painted. Moran, though less remembered, has been called the “Father of the National Parks.” He was an indefatigable painter of the West, and his paint­ ings between 1871 and 1924 of the Yellowstone country, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the canyon country of Utah, and the Rockies were a major force in building popular appreciation for America’s western scenery. His large canvas of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was instrumental in convincing Con­ gress' that the area should be reserved as a national park. Both artists lived off the earnings of their art and were acclaimed in their lifetimes, but Audubon’s finances were precarious. Moran, however, lived so long (from 1837 to 1924) that he went into eclipse by 1879 with changing artistic fashions. Both had a consuming drive to interpret the native fauna and scenery of America to the world, though curiously their interests did not overlap. Audubon was interested only in depicting animals and had others paint in the backgrounds. As a landscape painter in the English school of Ruslan and Turner, Moran de-emphasized figures, rarely showing human beings or animals. Audubon in the West is a collection of eighteen letters that Audubon sent home on his trip up the Missouri River in the spring and summer of 1843. The account of this trip, undertaken to gather sketches for his last opus Vivi­ parous Quadrupeds of North America, is treated more competely in his journals, Reviews 85 but most of these letters have never been published before. For the specialist in Audubonia, new details are provided, as well as a final characterization. Audubon emerges, five years before his death at 63, as a tired man, preoccu­ pied with financial worries, homesick, and anxious to avoid discomfort. While he criticized the mountain men he met for being unobservant about animals other than furbearers, he seemed to have his interest fixed on animals alone. While he hoped to discover many new quadrupeds, he seems to have dis­ covered only three or four new ones on an expedition planned mainly on the basis of romantic enthusiasm for wild country. He seems to have been dis­ appointed in the country, saying “we have seen nothing of the extravagant views of the Country given in Cattlin’s book . . .”. While Audubon is scrupulous in his attempt at scientific accuracy in drawing animal specimens, he shows no scruples, as followers of Audubon do today, about having his hunters take hundreds of specimens. His only sympathetic comment occurs when he says he was glad a wolf, which was swimming the river, escaped the hunters’ guns. Without concern, he noted that piles of buffalo carcasses lined the river banks and that their numbers were the lowest in twenty years. While Moran glories in the mountain and canyon scenery of the West, little in his biography, the first done of him, reveals concern for conserving it. His life-long concentration on western scenery (though he also found favorite themes in the pastoral landscapes of Long Island and...

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