The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch (review)

Reviews 219 articles of the time and commenting upon them, Juster creates a detailed and lively picture of farmlife. There is a “simple and effective cure for those who may have accidently swallowed a wasp,” and advice on the uses of earwax. Recipes for such things as stove cleaner and “stewed ox palates” give one a feeling for what rural life must have been like. Secondly, Juster found in rural women’s lives a paradigm of contemporary dissatisfactions: “we seem no longer to be participants in the decisions that affect our lives— what we eat, where we live, how we work, what we believe. This appalling condition, if perhaps new to our collective consciousness, has been historically the given condition of women’s lives.” Jeffrey’s Frontier Women is, despite its author’s claim to the contrary, essentially a history text. It augments earlier pioneer histories byadding to the miners, cattlemen, and farmers the women and children whose presence and effect have been minimized. Jeffrey’sbook examines the agricultural, the min­ ing, and the Mormon frontiers, focusing on the problems women faced as well as on their role in shaping the West. Census data indicate that women were more plentiful on the trail west than one might expect, and their insistence on “acceptable” behavior profoundly influenced social structures on the frontier. Crusading for temperance, for example, women replaced saloons with ice-cream parlors, which in San Francisco alone served “up to three thousand customers a day, ‘lovers and their sweethearts, and husbands and their better-halves.’” Designed for the general reader, Frontier Women is difficult for the scholar to use. It lacks footnotes, and primary sources are listed in paragraph form at the book’s end. Anyone wishing to follow up an idea faces a difficult job sorting through Jeffrey’s copious sources. Both So Sweet to Labor and Frontier Women make significant contri­ butions to our understanding of western history. In writing of women, Juster and Jeffrey round out a rather male-dominated vision of the West. More importantly, by looking at the actual texture of women’s daily life, they help us to see exactly what taming the land meant and what that taming cost women. BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM University of Southern California The Death of Jim Loney. By James Welch. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979. 179 pages, $8.95.) Contemporary Native American literature spans a full range of philoso­ phies and moods from renewal and affirmation to alienation and negation. James Welch’s novel The Death of Jim Loney is close to the end of the 220 Western American Literature negative pole. Basically it is a story of a middle-aged man of mixed Indian and white parentage. He is confused by his life and spends most of his time drunkenly trying to figure things out. Into his life comes a young white teacher who tries to make him leave Montana with her. However, their attempts at communication become clouded and he draws away from her. Loney kills one of his friends, perhaps by accident, and flees into the hills where he awaits a ritualistic death at the hands of the reservation police. Along with the fairly simple plot goes a spare, often ironic style. In one passage the teacher reflects on the reality of life in Montana in contrast to her romantic ideal: “But instead of summer theaters and mountains and Glacier Park, she found herself in country that was all sky and flat land. She was in Big Sky country. With a vengeance. If it weren’t for the Little Rockies and the Bearpaws, small mountains to the south of Harlem, there would be nothing to break the tan and blue horizon. As for summer theater, there was a movie house that showed Walt Disney and adventure films.” Beneath the uncomplex plot and the lean, concise style is a powerful, thought-provoking theme. Welch has brought to this story of a few weeks in the life of a half-breed in a small Montana town the full import of the prob­ lems of America in the twentieth century. Loney is like the anti-heroes of many contemporary novels: he cannot find a purpose to...