Captain Mayne Reid by Joan Steele (review)

78 Western American Literature decade, when most of the ranches seem to be disappearing rapidly. The novel’s protagonist — a Mexican vaquero and ranch foreman named Ignacio Ortiz — serves the McAndrews family for more than sixty years, never wavering in his early promise to the older Douglas McAndrews to “keep the fence tight.” For Ignacio, “keeping the fence tight” means riding herd on Jamie McAndrews, Douglas’ son, as well as serving the whole family in the roles of trusted employee and virtually adopted son-brother-uncle. The novel follows the changes in the New Mexico range country through statehood, the two world wars, and the Depression, and in the process it details the effects of mechanization on ranching — such as the replacing of horses with pickup trucks and the changing public ethos in regard to the land — with a realism seldom seen in contemporary fiction. Ignacio Ortiz is almost infallible: always dependable, always anxious to serve and to suffer, he is perhaps a little too good to be believed. Douglas McAndrews approximates god-head. He is reminiscent of Colonel James Brewton in the first section of Conrad Richter’s The Sea of Grass, but in contrast with Brewton, McAndrews is without the hint of a tragic flaw, and is therefore a characterization of limited dimension. Despite the overdrawn portraits and a number of scenes that border on the melodramatic or sentimental, Riders to Cibola is an engaging novel of power and eloquence and one that should invite comparison to The Sea of Grass and the modern-day Westerns of such authors as Clair Huffaker and Max Evans. This is good company to be in. GEARY HOBSON, University of New Mexico Captain Mayne Reid. By Joan Steele. (Boston: Twayne Publishers/G. K. Hall & Co., 1978. 149 pages, $8.95.) Given that the study of popular literature has been largely excluded from traditional literary histories, it follows that a good deal of literary history needs to be rewritten in order to present a more accurate and bal­ anced view of our literary past. The publication of Joan Steele’s Captain Mayne Reid is a step in that important direction, dealing as it does with one of the nineteenth century’s more successful writers of popular adven­ ture literature. Unfortunately, the book is more of an excellent, long essay stretched to book-length than a truly cohesive volume. A tighter focus would have resulted in a more effective piece of literary/cultural analysis. Never arguing for Reid’s artistic talents, and appropriately so, Ms. Steele does point out that it is important to study the psychological ramifi­ cations of Reid’s impressive list of publications. Reid’s life and work spanned Reviews 79 the nineteenth century rather well, both chronologically and in terms of literary taste. Coming to America for the first time in 1839, he was to spend twelve years of the remainder of his life on American soil. Despite his physical relocation in the Old World for a large part of his writing career, he remained imaginatively in America. For, as Ms. Steele suggests, it was the image and concept of America which informed his fiction and gave it its vitality; and Reid never forgot the promise of the New Land which he was unable to find in the Old World and about which he was to write so successfully. He earned his place in literary history as a “dime novelist” by penning numerous Western romances, a number of which were published by the firm of Beadle and Adams. While Reid has a tendency to emphasize the detail of setting over plot and characterization in his fiction, a tendency still quite evident in con­ temporary popular Western writers, his work was also pervaded by a roman­ tic vision of mankind’s possibilities. Ms. Steele points out that while Reid has been considered a juvenile writer, a market he certainly did enjoy in his lifetime, she also presents the case for his appeal to adult readers of adventure fiction in both Victorian England and America. The author of The Rifle Rangers (1850), The Scalp Hunters (1851), The White Chief (1855) and The Quadroon (1856) deserves to be re­ membered in literary history and...