The Indians of Puget Sound: The Notebooks of Myron Eells ed. by George Pierre Castile (review)

Reviews 77 of R. B. Cunningham Graham and also one by his twenty-year-old wife, Gabrielle, are fascinating reading. For example, “Three Letters on the Indian Question,” “A Chihuahueno,” and “The Waggon-Train” are sketches that reveal that Graham and his wife were keen observers of the exploitation of the American Indians, aware of the racial and religious tensions between the Mexicans and the “gringos,” and intimately involved in the joys and pains of overland travel from Texas to Mexico City. Graham’sview of mankind ishumanitarian, progressive, and enlightened. His sketches reveal a mind that goes beyond stereotypes and simple travelogue writing. Graham in his lifetime wrote over thirty collections of travel literature over a period of forty years. These sketches have been edited by ProfessorJohn Walker in order to present Graham’s youthful impressions of the borderland from 1879 to 1881. The editor’s forward, critical introduction, prefaces to each sketch, footnotes, bibliography and glossary add rich background and detail to the book. Graham’s sketches present an early and unique view of the region and presage in many ways some of the observations of later European writings such as D. H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico or B. Traven’s Land Des Fruhlings. ROBERT B. OLAFSON Eastern Washington University The Indians of Puget Sound: The Notebooks of Myron Eells. Edited with an Introduction by George Pierre Castile. (Seattle and Walla Walla: University of Washington Press and Whitman College, 1986. 496 pages, $40.00.) The publication of this book is over one hundred years late. The author (son of the Reverend Cushing Eells of Whitman Mission fame) began keeping his notebooks in 1875 and did not complete the final version until 1894. These final versions of his notebooks, along with his other papers and a number of his artifacts, were deposited in the library of Whitman College at Walla Walla, Washington, after the author’s death in 1907. Through a series of rewritings, Eells’s manuscript had grown from three hundred handwritten pages origi­ nally to almost one thousand pages by the time they were deposited at Whit­ man College. In the intervening years several attempts had been made at publication, and extracted portions appeared in several small booklets, in Washington Magazine, and in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institu­ tion for 1887. In 1976, Robert Ruby and John Brown published their popular book, Myron Eells and the Puget Sound Indians, consisting largely of some of the Eells’s drawings, a number of photographs, and a selection of quotes from Eells’s text. However, because of the flaws in this book, there is ample justification for the publication of George Castile’sedition of Eells’snotebooks at this time. 78 Western American Literature In addition to their considerable ethnographic value (even though Eells was primarily a missionary with little training in the science), the material presented has a special significance in that it is a record of American Indian peoples in the midst of radical change. The text presented here is as Myron Eells wrote it, with a minimum amount of altering on the part of the editor. Only two chapters have been omitted from the original, one on “Languages” and one entitled, “The Stone Age of Oregon.” The University of Washington Press is to be commended on the visual and physical quality of this book. It is well-designed, well-printed, and sturdily bound. The numerous photographic illustrations and the Eells line drawings that are used are all high quality reproductions, and form a valuable historical compilation in themselves. The book should be of great interest and value to all students of western Indian history, political science, and anthropologyethnography . GEORGE H. TWENEY Seattle, Washington Los Mestenos: Spanish Ranching in Texas, 1721-1821. ByJack Jackson. (Col­ lege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986. 704 pages, $34.50.) Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, in “The Evolution of the CowPuncher ” acknowledges that “our sons of Kentucky and Tennessee” when they moved to Texas took from the Mexican “his saddle, his bridle, his spurs, his rope, his methods of branding and herding—indeed, most of his customs and accoutrements.” Nevertheless, Wister calls the Mexican a “small, deceit­ ful alien” and pays...