Brief Mention of Reprints

Reviews 187 Brief Mention of Reprints Desert Wildlife. By Edmund C. Jaeger. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965, 1968. 308 pages, illus., $2.95, paper; $5.95, cloth.) First published in 1950 as Our Desert Neighbors, this book has much of the quality of Thoreau’s “Brute Neighbors” and Journal accounts of animals carefully observed in their natural habitats till familiarity becomes affinity. Mr. Jaeger is a veteran western naturalist, and the quality of his writings for the past thirty years at least that I am aware of (The California Deserts, 1938) entitles him to a place with Muir, Dobie, the Muries, Leopold, and Krutch. The photographs and drawings for the forty-two chapters effectively enhance description and anecdotes about kit fox, coyote, antelope, ring-tailed cat, and numerous other forms of animal life. The River and I. By John G. Neihardt. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. 325 pages, photographs; Bison Book, $1.95.) Mr. Neihardt first saw the Missouri River when he was a child of six, and his fascination then with its size and power and mystery grew into a life-long love affair with the river and its region. Several of his books are epics celebrating the men such as Hugh Glass whose exploits are for Neihardt in no way inferior to those of Homer’s heroes. Going to the headwaters of navigation on the Missouri at Fort Benton in 1908, he built a boat and traveled all the way down its course. It is an exhilarating adventure story; but it is also a significant description of life in the region as it was sixty years ago, enlivened by humor, social criticism, and philosophic speculation. The original fifty-one full-page photographs of the 1910 edition are an im­ portant feature of the book. The Great Buffalo Hunt. By Wayne Gard. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968. 324 + xii pages, bibliography, index, and illus.; Bison Book, $1.95.) The point of view of Mr. Gard’s book (first published in 1959 by Knopf) is that the buffalo hunters were mighty men— like the New England whalers. Though he includes related chapters on the Indian’s use of buffalo and various 188 Western American Literature dude sportsmen, foreign and domestic, who enjoyed forays into buffalo country, he is primarily concerned to depict what he calls “the hide hunters”— who from 1871-1883 virtually exterminated the buffalo from Texas to Montana. Entrepreneurs and adventurers, they went about their systematic slaughter unaware of the role they were playing in the westward expansion. Mr. Gard calls them “rugged pioneers” who with missionaries, explorers, and mountain men before and cowmen and settlers afterward “tamed the West”— they starved the Indians into submission to the whites. Parkman’s preface to the 1892 edition of The Oregon Trail makes very interesting reading in relation to this book as do the two novels: Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams and The Last Hunt by Milton Lott. Navaho Witchcraft. By Clyde Kluckholn. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. xxii + 254 pages, $1.95.) The late Dr. Clyde Kluckhohn had what he called “an obsessive fascina­ tion” for the Navaho country of New Mexico and Arizona. He spent about thirty-seven years studying Navaho culture, spoke Navaho fluently, and was known affectionately by hundreds of Navahos as “Hasteen Clyde.” He defined witchcraft as “the influencing of events by supernatural techniques that are socially disapproved;” and, since for him anthropology was closely linked to sociology, linguistics, archaeology, history, and philosophy, what he has to say in this classic monograph about Navaho witchcraft relates to many other societies as well. This work was first published in 1944 as a folio monograph by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, and the present edition is complete in every major detail. It also contains two important additions: “A Key to the Phonetic Spelling of Navaho Words” by D. H. Landar and an obituary article on Dr. Kluckhohn by Talcott Parsons and Evon Z. Vogt. There are extensive appendices, bibliography, and notes. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. By Owen Wister. Edited with an Introduction by Philip Durham. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968. xv + 304 pages, $1.50.) Mr. Durham observes...