Mody Boatright, Folklorist: A Collection of Essays by Ernest B. Speck (review)

228 Western American Literature narrative is there any doubt expressed concerning the approach of the missionaries towards Native Americans more or less compelled to bow to the dictates of their white religious and lay overlords. The practice of shoving the white man’s religion and culture down the Indians’ throats is presented as a work of unalloyed good and most beneficial to the Apache. Emerson does state Father Braun’s support of the continuation of the Apache puberty ceremony in the face of Protestant opposition and presum­ ably this incident illustrates a recognition of the value of Indian culture, but on the other hand the priest was most zealous in sponsoring and expand­ ing the “outing system” in which the children of the Apache were placed in white Christian homes outside the reservation with the goal of “integrat­ ing” them into white society. Father Braun is portrayed by the author as being the subject of undying love on the part of his Apache congregation yet Emerson does let it slip that some Native Americans viewed him as an “Indian hater,” and that the priest was a strict disciplinarian “who let the weight of his shoe be felt if necessary.” (p. 95) The Apaches as depicted in Emerson’s account are by and large shadowy figures eagerly following the dictates of the priest and his white associates but rarely if ever treated as equals by the reservation establishment. The author makes little effort to ascertain Apache views and attitudes; a serious failing especially in regard to the almost monomaniacal effort of the priest to build a huge stone church for the reservation, monopolizing the energies of the Indians that might better have gone into improving their abysmal housing facilities. Emerson’s biography in short simply will not do for the present age. There is a genuine and meaningful story in the relationship of white mis­ sionaries with their Native American congregations, but it will have to await telling by another author. NORMAN LEDERER, Menard Junior College Mody Boatright, Folklorist: A Collection of Essays. Edited by Ernest B. Speck. Forward by Wayland D. Hand. Biographical essay by Harry H. Ransom. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. xvii + 198 pages, index, $7.50) Possibly, the most impressive quality of this collection is the forceful, yet subtle illustration it makes of the range and breadth of Mody Coggin Boatright. From the opening essay, “The Genius of Pecos Bill,” to the final statement on “How Will Boatright Made Bits and Spurs,” the reader sees not only the chronological development of a scholar, but the sensitivity and Reviews 229 feeling of what one is tempted, however naively, to call a Real Westerner. At once apparent in Boatright’s writings is his pride (both personal and scholarly) in things Western. But it is a reserved pride, for to him the social Darwinism of Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and others was a noxious doctrine, the realization of which holds the myth of the West in abeyance. To Boatright, the West, its literature, development and folklore, was not a simple thing — not something that could be palmed with a set of theories. This he showed. Perhaps it might also be well to mention that Mody Boatright, as this volume adequately shows, was never defensive about the West; he didn’t have to be. To him, Western Literature, Western History and Western Folklore needed no defenses, and one sees, after reading these carefully selected essays that to see the West as somehow a joke, for Mody Boatright, would be infinitely removed from getting the West straight. Of course, that is not to say there is no humor here. From “The Art of Tall Lying,” to “Aunt Cordie’s Ax and Other Motifs in Oil,” to “The Oil Promoter as Trickster,” humor abounds — a kind of far sighted, soulsearching humor. A humor that if taken seriously and looked at hard enough becomes tragicomedy; because it is humor of the folk. One wonders, however, after reading “The Genius of Pecos Bill,” what Boatright was trying to accomplish, and where he got his information about cowboys believing in a Pecos Bill hero. In this essay he says that Pecos Bill, the open range...