Letters from the West; Containing Sketches of Scenery, Manners, and Customs; and Anecdotes Connected with the First Settlements of the Western Sections of the United States (1828) by James Hall (review)

Reviews 165 But it is the personal memories and comments of John Stands In Timber which seem to me chiefly interesting. His brief account of his mother’s death when he was 8 or 9 is realistic and moving. He tells about visits and feasts and about Cheyenne problems with whiskey and disease and changing gov­ ernmental programs. One can hardly finish the book without hoping fervently along with him that all his people will become competent at living in the twentieth century at the same time that they “never forget the heritage of the old Cheyennes.” B e n ja m in Capps, Grand Prairie, Texas Letters from the West; Containing Sketches of Scenery, Manners, and Customs; and Anecdotes Connected with the First Settlements of the Western Sections of the United States (1828). By James Hall. A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by John T. Flanagan. (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Fac­ similes & Reprints, 1967. vi + 385 pages. $10.00.) James Hall was twenty-six years old when he left Pittsburgh in the spring of 1820 and sailed down the Ohio River in a keelboat (“navigated by eight or ten of those ‘half-horse and half-alligator’ gentry”) to establish himself as a lawyer, editor, and writer in the new state of Illinois. The immediate literary result was a series of sketches based upon his experiences and im­ pressions along the way. Some he published in the Port Folio of Philadelphia and some in the Illinois Gazette, which he helped edit shortly after his arrival at Shawneetown. These sketches were the basis of what became Letters from the West, published in 1828 in London. Many years later Hall explained in his Autobiography how the book came to be published there instead of in the United States: . . . I was advised to collect them for republication in a vol. and a friend who was going to England offered to place them in the hands of a London publisher. My friend died abroad, and I heard nothing of my “copy,” for nearly a year, when a very handsome volume ap­ peared,—accompanied however by a blunder so whimsical and so sad—that I have scarcely yet got over the mortification it occasioned me. I had written a series of letters, under the assumed character of a youth, traveling for amusement and giving the rein to a lievly fancy, and indulging a vein of levity, and rather extravagant fun. The whole affair was anonymous, and was intended to be kept so. My title page, as prepared for the London edition read “Letters from the West. By a Young Gentleman of Illinois. . . .” Imagine my dismay, when the work appeared with the title “Letters from the West. By the Hon. Judge Hall.” How this came about, I have never found out. 166 Western American Literature Now, after a lapse of 140 years, Letters from the West is again in print in its first American edition, and much credit is due the publisher for making this rare item of Americana available. From the vantage point of 1968, Illinois can hardly be called a western state. Yet we must remember that West is a word with flexible meanings. Hall himself remarked: “. . . I can remember the time when Pittsburgh was considered as one of the outposts of civilized America” (pp. 4-5). The surge toward the West pushed the frontier line steadily forward. “What was then the goal,” Hall observes, “is now the starting place; Pittsburgh is the thresh­ old by which we pass into the great States of the West; and Kentucky, but lately a western frontier, is now one of the eastern boundaries of the western country” (p. 6). As much as anything, it is this sense of participating in the westward migration—of America on the move—that Hall conveys in his pages. Here, for example, is his picture of a group of New Englanders caught up in this flood tide of American history: To-day we passed two large rafts lashed together, by which simple conveyance several families from New England were transporting themselves and their property to the land of promise in the western woods. Each raft was eighty or ninety feet long, with a...