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262 Western American Literature that farmers were asking for drought relief in 1874, lest such reports slow down immigration— this in a region already overpopulatedl If it were not for this toll in human suffering, the promotional efforts cited by Professor Emmons would almost qualify his book for study as a con­ tribution to the tall-tale tradition of American humor. In the writings of one of the more infatuated believers in the rain-follows-the-plow myth, he finds that “Rain followed plows and trees, surely, but it also followed telegraph wires, railroad tracks, irrigation ditches, streams and rivers, colony town sites, roads, and fire prevention.” The author’s own gift for wry understatement brightens an occasional aside, such as “Plowing the soil, the immigrant dis­ covered, did not produce rain; indeed, all too often it did not produce any­ thing.” Garden in the Grasslands does not break much new ground. Apart from a few minor shifts of emphasis, it follows the outlines established by Henry Nash Smith a generation ago, when he showed how the Great American Desert was transformed into the Garden of the World by those whose economic in­ terests would be served by settlement of the Plains. It does, however, add sig­ nificantly to the body of evidence supporting Smith’s thesis. Like Smith, Emmons sees the urge to transform a desert into a garden by incantation as more than a matter of simple greed. The agrarian dream, by 1860 a fundamental tenet of the American secular faith, had to be preserved intact, even if to do so meant denying that semiarid lands were semiarid. By a process best described as autohypnosis, the promoters of the seventies and eighties were able to do just that. Professor Emmons’ contribution is to show, with ample documentation, exactly how they did it. Despite some annoying departures from chronological sequence, which at times have the reader jump­ ing back and forth between the seventies and the nineties, he has done a gen­ erally commendable job. R o y W . M ey e r , Mankato State College Alberta Homestead, a Chronicle of a Pioneer Family. By Sarah Ellen Roberts, edited by Lathrop E. Roberts. (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1971, 272 pages, $7.50.) This book was first privately published in Saskatchewan in 1968 as Us and the Oxen (which seems the more intriguing title), but it certainly deserves the wider distribution the University of Texas Press can give it. Al­ though not written ‘on the spot’ while the homestead was being built, it comes as close as that may have been possible under pioneer conditions; the first (and longest) winter account is based on Mrs. Robert’s daily diary and the whole was completed by 1915, barely three years after the family homesteading ended. The family seems to have been very different from what is usually thought of as the 'typical’ prairie homesteader in Canada, and that may be the reason Mrs. Roberts had as much time to write as she did. Reviews 263 The Roberts had lived in the United States for at least three generations when the five in the chronicle decided to treat the Canadian West as so many Britishers had treated the colonies: go there, work hard, make a quick fortune and return home, in this case Illinois. C. B. Roberts, the father, was a medical doctor who through sickness had lost his practice; he was handy with tools and machinery. He was 58, his wife 54 when they decided to break sod in Alberta in 1906. Not surprisingly it was the boys: Frank, 20, Lathrope (present editor of the book), 18, and Brockway, 14, who work on the rail­ road and teach school, that establish the homestead on a survival level. The former two also file for themselves, so that the farm they work is 480 acres. Remembering well some of my own homestead life, it appears to me that Mrs. Roberts must have been more than a small cross for her men to bear; though they bore it with evident good will. She was a worrier; she suf­ fered from migranes that kept her flat in bed three and four days...

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