Montana Adventure, The Recollections of Frank B. Linderman ed. by Harold G. Merriam (review)

174 Western American Literature a penetrating critic or profound thinker. He was a “utopian primitivist,” a man who sought “to re-create a very old world that never existed.” Miller’s prose bears the recognizable brands of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. When he deals with his western experiences, Miller writes well, but too often his stories are sentimental and melodramatic. And his last prose works are mere propaganda for the Indian. In the late 1870s Miller turned to writing drama, and his efforts were rewarded, for his The Danites in the Sierras was a popular stage success in New York and London and made for its author a small fortune. His plays were fast-moving and suspenseful, but they hold little interest for modern readers. Miller’s last literary effort was a series of journalistic articles describing his experiences in the Yukon. These pieces were graphic and entertaining and found a ready market in the Hearst newspapers. It is evident that Frost does not have a high regard for the literary artistry of Joaquin Miller. Of the latter’s poetic abilities he says: Miller “is a moralist who lacks precision, subtlety, and originality . . . . he is no thinker, no philosopher; and he is, therefore, in the most elevated conception of the word—no poet.” Those things for which he praises Miller—his immediacy in newspaper accounts of Indian conflicts, his championing of the Indian cause earlier than most other writers, and his promoting of frontier legends in an era of adventure—seems lame and ineffectual in comparison to the weaknesses that he details on nearly every page. If these negative critical comments are the more persuasive (and they are), one wonders if Miller merits book-length attention. It is unfortunate that the Poet of the Sierras lacked sufficient talent to tap the rare experiences of the American West. Had he been able to do so, he might have been a poet of Whitman’s rank; instead he deserves the third-rate category into which Frost places him. R ichard W. Etula in, Northwest Nazarene College Montana Adventure, The Recollections of Frank B. Linderman. Edited by Harold G. Merriam. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. 224 pages, illus. $5.95.) Five years before Montana became a state, Frank Bird Linderman built a tiny log cabin in the Flathead Lake country on the western slope of the Rockies, and began a pioneering experience which lasted from 1885 until his death in 1938. As a sixteen-year-old Ohio boy who chose to live far from civilization, Linderman left home and parents to become a trapper in a wilderness that contained few white settlers. At heart he was to remain a Reviews 175 pioneer all his life, participating in Montana’s becoming a state, establishing law and order, founding industries and services for a swelling population. His experiences as trapper, assayer, legislator, newspaper publisher, insurance agent, hotel manager, builder, writer, friend to Indians and whites furnished Linderman the material which became the literary product of his life, more than a dozen books. Montana Adventure, the Recollections of Frank B. Linderman, is the account of Linderman’s life to 1930. The main bulk of Linderman’s work reflects his close association with various Indian tribes of the Northwest. He learned Plains Indian culture as few men knew it. Indian myths and legends retold in his books such as Indian Why Stories, Indian Lodge-Fire Stories, Old-Man Coyote, Kootenai Why Stories all came to him from the old fullbloods whom he trusted. “In their presence,” he said, “especially when they are telling me of old customs, or speaking solemnly of their religious beliefs, I feel nearly as they do.” Linderman was one of the first writers in the West to present the Indian in terms of his own culture rather than in the savage or romantic stereotype found in most western literature of his time. “It is only the discovered good in man that builds humanity,” he wrote; and in referring to the conquered Indians, “From them we might have learned needed lessons, if we had tried.” Three of Linderman’s early books were illustrated by his lifelong friend, Charley Russell, of whom he...