Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 37/Number 4/News and Comment
REVIEWS
Life and Letters of Mrs. Jason Lee, Wife of Rev. Jason Lee of the Oregon Mission by Theressa Gay, Metropolitan Press, Portland, 1936, 224 pages, $2.50.
By Robert Moulton Gates
This recent publication from the Metropolitan Press has been long anticipated as we have known for a number of years that Miss Gay was at work editing the letters of Anna Maria Pittman Lee. Some years ago when Miss Gay visited my office I learned that she had already assembled a considerable amount of her needed editorial data. The approving words of the distinguished western historian, Dr. Herbert E. Bolton, written in his foreword concerning the careful editing of the letters are well deserved. The numerous details have been gathered by long, patient, and skillful research.
The book has two major divisions, the first ninety-four pages consists of a biography of Mrs. Lee, and the remainder of the book consists of letters by Mrs. Lee, and a few concerning her. This brief biography is excellently done, the story of this pioneer missionary being told in a simple, straightforward manner which holds interest. The author's attitude is sympathetic but restrained, and lacking sentimentality. It is minutely annotated and the historian can follow its sources of authority. The author has attempted no feats of imagination to bridge gaps in source materials, in which matter we could wish that some others, both older and recent writers had followed a similar course.
The letters, mostly written by Mrs. Lee to members of her family, are filled with the intense religious feeling characteristic of the day; but are not lacking in a considerable amount of objective information of the times, which throw much light upon the history of the Oregon mission. Miss Gay has given them ample editorial notes to supply needed information about them.
We agree with Dr. Bolton's estimate that “Miss Gay has made a fresh contribution to the early history of the rim of the Pacific. Personal accounts of pioneer life in the Far West by men are legion. Here we have one of the very few written in the earliest days by women-penned indeed by one of the very first white women in all the vast Northwest above California.”
The book is excellently set up and illustrated in an interesting manner.
Tribal Distribution in Washington, by Leslie Spier, George Banta Publishing Company, Menasha, Wisconsin, 1936, map, 43 pages.
By L. S. Cressman}}
DR. SPIER states the problem of this study as follows. “Although the material on tribal distribution within the borders of present Washing- ton is still quite fragmentary and confused, it is high time that it be assembled. The accompanying map of tribal territories is merely tentative. Its sole purpose is to serve as a basis for corrections in the light of future field work.” (p. 5). Faced with the practical difficulty of defining that elusive group the tribe, he solves his problem in a practical fashion by accepting as a "tribe" "any group which has figured in the literature as a national entity, avoiding as far as possible groupings that are too wide, like Teit's dialect groups, and those that are too narrow, like the local villages and band. Our purpose is not to give final expression to the political divisions of the Washington natives but to set down where they lived." (p. 6). The map "attempts to assign tribal location and boundaries as of the early nineteenth century." (p. 6).
The divisions of the state are discussed in the following order, the Northwestern Area, the Southeastern Area, the Lower Columbia Area, the Southwestern Interior, the Coastal Area, and the Puget Sound Area. The territories occupied in each case are determined by reference to early explorers, reports of field workers of earlier times and those who have brought the information down to the present. The difficulty of resolving conflicts in these sources is obvious and frequently the writer has simply to choose the one which seems to be the most reasonable and provide a target at which those who come after him may shoot. The problem is also complicated by the mobility of the Indian groups under pressure from the whites and perhaps other Indians. What were boundaries in 1830 may not have been in 1730. This is especially true for the southern part of the state,
The author accepts Teit's theory of Sahaptin migrations from east central Oregon with the consequent disruption of established territories of the interior Salish. This theory is based mainly on linguistic evidence and tradition of occupation of other territories at an earlier time. While this theory is plausible it is still theory and much of the sharing of linguistic elements might perhaps be accounted for by ordinary diffusion.
The map could have been improved by a legend indicating the significance of the solid and broken lines. The publication of the map on a single folded sheet would have facilitated its use.
This reviewer is inclined to feel that Dr. Spier's method of using not only contemporary field workers' reports but that of early explorers is preferable to that of reliance on the memories of contemporary informants among the pitiful remnants of once numerous tribes. Ray (Pacific Northwest Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2. April 1936, p. 3) deprecates the method of reliance on documents in favor of contemporary informants, with the result that a time element must limit his study. Where boundaries have shifted and cultures have been disrupted the sole reliance on the notoriously unstable memory of man for information concerning territories which are now almost legendary is highly unsatisfactory. Both methods as the author has used are to be desired as sources and mutual checks. To these must be added the final check, archaeology, where a time sequence is involved.
We now have a series of studies of tribal distributions for the Pacific coast states (although that for Oregon by Mr. Joel V. Berreman, M.A. thesis at the University of Oregon, is still in manuscript).
Dr. Spier has made a valuable contribution to northwest history and his study should prove as he hopes one of those dynamic hypotheses which will call forth a whole series of studies until we have the real solution to the problem he has attacked.
The October, 1936, issue of Civil Engineering is made up of papers read at the annual convention of the American Society of Civil Engineers at Portland in July. As an introductory article Dr. O. O. Winther writes on "Highlights in the History of Oregon." Other articles of general interest are "Improving the Columbia for Navigation," by Colonel Thomas M. Robins; "Construction Plant at Grand Coulee Dam," by C. D. Riddle; "Highway Design Applied to the State System," by R. H. Baldock; "Design of Coast Highway Bridges," by O. A. Chase; "Construction of Coast Highway Bridges," by G. S. Paxson. There are also articles on the construction of Bonneville dam and stream pollution in Oregon.
Articles relating to David Thompson appear in the Canadian Historical Review. September, 1936: "David Thompson's Surveys in the North-West," by W. M. Stewart; "The North West Company's Columbian Enterprise and David Thompson," by A. S. Morton, in which the author argues that Thompson first crossed the Rocky Mountains in 1801 instead of 1807, and discusses the "race" between Thompson and Astor's company for possession of the mouth of the Columbia River. The documents referred to in Mr. Morton's article are printed under the title, "The Appeal of the North West Company to the British Government to Forestall John Jacob Astor's Columbian Enterprise." They consist of four letters written in 1810, and are now in the Public Archives of Canada.
The Aurora community established in Oregon by William Keil in 1857 is mentioned in "A Survey of Mutualistic Communities in America," by Ralph Albertson, in the Iowa Journal of History and Politics, October, 1936.
Donald B. Lawrence, of the Johns Hopkins University, reviews the theories relating to "The Submerged Forest of the Columbia River Gorge," in the Geographical Review, October, 1936.
"The Fur-seal Fishery and Salem," by Edward H, Raymond, in the Essex Institute Historical Collections, July, 1936, is an account of that industry, with a mention of a number of vessels known on the northwest coast.