Final Harvest: An American Tragedy by Andrew H. Malcolm (review)

92 Western American Literature Thoreau’s interest in Indians has been widely noted, so Fleck seems to use this interest only as a way of introducing what Muir wrote about the native people with whom he came in contact. Those who have written about Muir have noted that Indians do not play a significant part in the body of Muir’s writings. As a matter of fact, only in his last book, Travels in Alaska, do native people play an important role. Perhaps Muir would have elaborated an interest in Eskimos had he used his newspaper letters from aboard the Corwin in 1881 for another book, but he did not live long enough to work on such a project. This book is handsomely produced, though there are misprints, and Fleck’sresearch into Muir’s Alaska travels isincomplete: Muir’s trip to Alaska in 1890 was his fourth (not third), and the 1899 Harriman expedition was Muir’s seventh (not fifth). Also, Fleck refers to many literary works which reveal more about his own reading than about the attitudes of Thoreau and Muir. The value of this book lies in the fact that it makes available information about Muir that is not usually emphasized in writings about him. Muir’s interest in Indians is not, however, a major concern in his own writings. FRANK E. BUSKE Tucson, Arizona Final Harvest: An American Tragedy. By Andrew H. Malcolm. (New York: Times Books, 1986. 320 pages, $17.95.) Final Harvest is an account of the murder of the local bank president, Rudy Blythe, and his loan officer, Toby Thulin, on a small farm near Ruthton, Minnesota, which the bank had foreclosed from James Jenkins, and the subse­ quent suicide of James Jenkins and the trial of his son Steve. The book is a docu-drama. Sometimes the expository pattern becomes a bit forced. Every incident and every person is introduced, then followed by a description of the setting or a biographical sketch. But Malcolm is a good journalist, especially in catching the public mood of the midwest farming communities, and everything which isimportant to understanding the murder and the trial. It is a complex murder case. Newspaper accounts—and early reviews of Final Harvest—tend to cast it as a farmer/bank conflict of agrarian America. But Rudy Blythe and James Jenkins were men whose characters would have been at odds in any setting. And while the conflict resembles the agrarian revolt of the 1880s in some ways, it is clear that the troubles that led to this murder had much to do with the Cold War, the Vietnam experience, and the advent of the petro-dollar and the Euro-dollar. James Jenkins was obviously, as Malcolm says, a “loser.” He was a man not overly bright, with little education, and suffering from progressive blind­ ness. He wanted to own his own farm, tend his dairy herd, repair his aging Reviews 93 machinery. Seventy-five years ago, on the farm we can still see on the late night, two-star movie, he might have made out, with a son’s help. Rudy Blythe may not have been a loser, but he was a failure if judged in terms of his ambition. He was a man of some intelligence; he earned a degree in economics;he had a successful career in banking before he came to Ruthton. He chose to become a small-town banker “building something of his own in a cohesive small town with that warm sense of inclusion.” Thirty years ago he might have made it, but not in Ruthton in the 1980s. There is a parallel in the ambitions of these two men. There are other parallels that are almost mythic and certainly dramatic. Both the Blythes and the Jenkins left Minnesota and went to Texas to find a better living, then returned to Minnesota, each in their own way, to recover losses. Darlene Jenkins left her husband for a more successful man; Susan Blythe saw the futility of the small town bank and threatened to leave. Blythe and Jenkins fixed the blame for their losses on each other, and to both of them the fore­ closed farm became the...