Pass of the North: Four Centuries on the Rio Grande by C. L. Sonnischen (review)

Reviews 239 is one such place. It contains two selections, one o£ which deals entirely with the environment dangers faced by the western station agent, not with his work. Earlier in the book an incident from the autobiography of James H. Kyner, contractor on the Oregon Short Line (now Union Pacific) across south­ ern Idaho is quoted. The subject is Kyner’s elaborate precautions to safely transport a large payroll. It too is an interesting and suspenseful tale, but one having more to do with banking than with railroading. Reinhardt chose a most fruitful period to probe for potential rail folklore. The Civil War had abruptly thrust modern demands for all-weather, nation­ wide common-carrier transportation upon the railroads. But human muscle still accomplished most of the work of keeping the trains running, unaided by the myriad of mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and pneumatic devices of modem times. Brakemen, for example, still stood between cars to hook their link-andpin couplings. The engineer’s whistle for brakes still sent them scurrying over the cartops to twist down the brakewheels. Death and crippling of brakemen remained indices of growth in the nation’s rail traffice until the turn of the century when the federal Railroad Safety Appliance Act of 1893 required application of air brakes and automatic couplers to all rolling stock. From the railroad’s importantrole in the nation’s economy in the late nineteenth century, and the huge labor force they employed at thetime, it might seem strange that a void should exist in American folklore insofar as rail­ roaders are concerned. But nonetheless one does. Reinhardt explains in his introduction this dearth of recorded material by pointing out that the com­ plexity of railroading requires such an extensive division of labor that in­ dividual protagonists suitable for development into folk heroes have been hard to identify. In fact, the Brave Engineer and the Ruthless Promoter are the only personages well identified in the public consciousness. The division of labor has also made it impossible for individuals with literary talent to infiltrate railroading for a season or two, as they did the mines, ranches and lumber camps, and undergo sufficiently diverse experiences to write effectively later about more than a handful of railroad occupations. Reinhardt’ssolution was an effective one: to collect the best or most representative portions from an abundance of individual memoirs and contemporary reports, and combine them into a unified whole by means of editorial comment. G. Franklin Ackerman, Tong Du Chon, Republic of Korea Pass of the North: Four Centuries on the Rio Grande. Second Edition. By C. L. Sonnischen. Edited by S. D. Myres with map and chapter headings by Jose Cisneros. (El Paso, Texas: Texas Western Press, 1969. xii + 467 pages, illustrated, biblio., notes and index.) 240 Western American Literature This big, handsome book, already in its second edition after a first print­ ing in 1968, is a kind of love letter to the place C. L. Sonnischen loves the best—El Paso, Texas, in particular and the Rio Grande valley and the Southwest in general. The book took 30 years to complete—with time out to teach at what was then Texas College of Mines and is now the University of Texas at El Paso, head the English department there for a time, and write 12 other books about the Southwest. But 30 years is little time when a person loves what he is doing as Sonnischen obviously does. Even at that, the book takes us only through the adolescence of El Paso, from 1581, when the first European arrived at Paso del Norte, until 1917, when the city was cleaned up and settled down and there was a big war to call the city’s attention away from itself. It is obvious, however, that the baker of this big, juicy pie of a book had some dough left over. He concludes his book with an Afterword in which he more or less outlines what could be Volume II, El Paso from 1917 to the present. By the time he had arrived at his Afterword, he had shown us the arrival and retreat of the Spaniard, the arrival of the American, and...