Westering Man: The Life of Joseph Walker, Master of the Frontier by Bil Gilbert (review)

162 Western American Literature was indeed able to “collapse time and space and live in an eternity of creative freedom.” The knothole in her otherwise sound framework lies in the questions which such methodological pigeonholing generally raise, questions regarding the selection of evidence and the inevitable distortions which arise through such selection. Not only does her thesis raise questions about the reasons for the fragmented and uneven quality of uncited work from Twain’s last period of supposed “creative freedom,” but also about the state of reconciliation allegedly achieved by the narrators she selects — the Sieur Le Conte, August Feldner, Hank Morgan, and Huck Finn. One wonders if Harris has not too readily overlooked the unhappy realities of their supposedly unified and recon­ ciled states, surrounded as those narrators are by inquisitions, torture, horrible deaths, bloody and senseless battle, and wicked hypocrites and scoundrels. Nonetheless, Harris, obviously a respectable scholar, has crafted well. Her lengthy footnotes, full of appreciative summaries of scholarly positions as well as gentle demurrers and wholehearted approvals, are interesting and helpful — which cannot often be said of scholarly paraphernalia. In short, though the frame creaks a bit, it stands and serves, and Harris’s study is one to be reckoned with, a solid contribution to Twain scholarship, and especially to the study of the general dissolution which marked Twain’s last years. RICHARD H. CRACROFT Brigham Young University Westering Man: The Life of Joseph Walker, Master of the Frontier. By Bil Gilbert. (New York: Atheneum, 1983. 339 pages, $17.95.) As a Mountain Man who spent most of his life on the cutting edge of the frontier, and as an explorer who found the Yosemite region and Walker Pass, Joseph Walker is deserving of a full length biography. Gilbert’s research has turned up a considerable amount of fugitive material that helps to round out the story of Walker’s life without changing the main outline of its events, which has long been known. Most interesting is the contention that Walker’s middle name was Rutherford rather than Reddeford, which appears entirely convincing even though the Library of Congress card in the book still identifies him as Joseph Reddeford Walker. It is rather amusing that Gilbert deplores “purplish Fremont-style prose” (p. 12) when his own violet verbiage rivals anything written by Fremont, who was no more partial to the French than Gilbert is to the Scotch-Irish. It is less amusing to read (p. 9) that Kit Carson was among those “who served their frontier apprenticeships” under Walker. Carson’s first trapping took him to California and back under Ewing Young before Walker went there. Gilbert’s system of notes is imprecise, referring only to pages in the text, not to specific statements. By this device, he cites me as authority for material relating to Carson (p. 93). But I never wrote (because I do not Reviews 163 believe) that Walker met Carson in Independence in 1826 and thereafter “took an avuncular interest” in him. Gilbert defends Walker for having ordered his men to fire upon the Digger Indians in 1833, when these Indians had never seen guns before. Thirty-nine of them were killed. All the trappers believed in and acted upon the principle of retaliation, but only Walker acted on the principle of “the preventive strike” and most people then and now find this principle hard to justify. It is not true that Lucien Fontenelle committed suicide at Fort Laramie in 1838 while drunk, nor that Gantt and Blackwell went broke in 1831, and it is distressing to find these old mistakes repeated here, as well as to find Marcellin St. Vrain’s name changed to Marcellus. The author located Bent’s Old Fort “near the present Kansas-Colorado line” (p. 10) and “on the head­ waters of the Arkansas River” (p. 156). Neither is anywhere close to the correct location. Tecumseh did not go “down to his final defeat in Michigan” nor did this “shatter his coalition” (p. 53), which had been shattered by the battle of Tippecanoe. St. Clair’s defeat occurred on the Wabash River, not the Maumee, and the battle lasted three or four hours instead of two days...