River Runners of the Grand Canyon by David Lavender (review)

Reviews 85 Art in New Mexico, 1900-1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe. By Charles C. Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William T. Truettner. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986. 227 pages, $45.00.) The physical format is coffee-table art book; the authors, who have written individual essay-chapters, are staff members of the Smithsonian. Art in New Mexico, 1900-1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe speaks from the meta-authority of form (over half of the 200 illustrations are in representative color tones) ; and of content (the essay-chapters draw from impressive crossdisciplinary sources of archaeology, literature, and popular culture). The first and last essay headings—“Beyond the Picturesque” to “The Faraway Nearby” —intimate the metaphorical range of the study because above all, this book is about the most elemental of the western American consciousness—space. Dur­ ing this time and in the places of Taos and Santa Fe, something original occurred that since 1945 has not been duplicated with the same intensity and purity of purpose. The relationship of the New Mexico space to all that occurred within, or as a part of it from without, is the study’s inviting argument. During these forty-five years, New Mexico represented a united cultural effort of scholars and artists who struggled on paper and on canvas to maintain the unity of the subject-object question: the Pueblo Indians and myth, the Hispanics and Catholicism, religion and sentiment, the unity of modern man with primeval space, the fragmentation of space with modernism. This study, published for a 1986-87 touring exhibition by the same name, is itself “Beyond the Picturesque” by bringing into perspective, if not view, “The Faraway Nearby” of a land where artists and scholars, before World War II, meted cultural understanding with the clarity of vision of a land whose dignity was found in its geometry, in its awesome expanse of space, and in its diverse people. These people, in New Mexico, had a meeting of minds under the auspices of earth and sky. The many voices of this study’s authority speak clearly and poetically, merging scholarship and art into one informative rhetorical medium. PAMELA R. HOWELL Midland College River Runners of the Grand Canyon. By David Lavender. (Tucson: Grand Canyon Natural History Association and University of Arizona Press, 1986. 147 pages, $27.50.) The next best thing to being in the Grand Canyon is to read David Lavender’s finely researched book on the men and women who floated, rowed, bashed, capsized, white-knuckled and caroomed their way from Cataract Canyon to Diamond Creek. 86 Western American Literature Lavender’s words saunter. He is an easy writer with a command of the language and a charm of narration that is at once readable and authoritative. A fine historian and a thorough researcher, one can only envy him his research —several trips down the Canyon. Each chapter deals with, in chronological order, a pioneer river runner. Lavender has a knack for delineating character and river runners are char­ acters to begin with, from the steely Geòrgie White to the foolish Stanton and the generous Stone. Lavender gets you involved with the crazy single-minded people who were determined, if they couldn’t beat the river, to join it. Perhaps that was the key: once they’d done it, they had a choice : leave the river, stop being a damned fool and die of boredom ; or keep going for it again and again. That most of these people did it again speaks both to their character and the challenge of the river. Straight history this book purports to be, but there is a great deal more in it, such as the character of a wild river and how it called those who listened to the sound of a rapid roaring in the night. There weren’t many who responded to that call, but those who did tell us something about listening to the wild places. Few of them were articulate, and many would not have had the objectivity to put what they did in context with others, with the spirit of exploration. Lavender does. The superb text is enhanced by a center section of well...