Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 60/Review: Land of Giants: The Drive to the Pacific Northwest, 1750-1950
LAND OF GIANTS: THE DRIVE TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, 1750-I950, by David Lavender. Mainstream of America Series, edited by Lewis Gannett, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, N. Y., 1958. Bibliography. Index. Maps. 468 pp. $5.95.
DAVID LAVENDER'S Land of Giants will not disappoint those acquainted with his earlier works, such as Bent's Fort. As a popular, readable, generally accurate, one-volume account of the Pacific Northwest it meets a definite need.
The historian or serious student of history will, to be sure, have to qualify, at points, his generally favorable opinion. The proportions of a volume avowedly covering two centuries may be questioned. Once Indian fighting and transcontinental railroad construction are over the author's interest rapidly declines. The fifty years of the twentieth century are dealt with in approximately thirty-five pages, as compared with well over 400 assigned to the preceding century and a half. The major emphasis, moreover, is on readability. It is narrative throughout-no pretense at a preliminary presentation of the "lay of the land" or an orderly description of the native inhabitants and little attention to analysis or interpretation.
The narrative style, however, is usually rapid and sinewy and the author does not find it necessary to employ invention or distortion in order to achieve readability. A careful and informed reading will turn up the inevitable errors—in, for example, the accounts of the Applegate Trail and the Centralia Massacre—but all which the reviewer has noted are minor and there seem to be fewer than in some works of similar dimensions and loftier pretensions.
The historical student cannot help wishing that he could learn from a
footnote just where the author found this or that tantalizing nugget of fact instead of having to dig through perhaps a dozen volumes listed under such general headings as "The American Fur Trade" or "Missionary Activities," but is grateful, nevertheless, for the listings. One of the volume's related and greatest deficiencies, I am reasonably sure, is the responsibility not of the author but of the publisher. There is an increasing tendency for indexes to be reduced to such sketchiness as to be almost—although I suppose not quite—worse than none at all; perhaps the hope is that those readers who use indexes will eventually decide that this point has been reached, thus enabling the publisher, with a sigh of relief, to feel free to eliminate them entirely—and with them an, to him, unnecessary expense.
Land of Giants represents a somewhat extreme form of this tendency toward reducing the index, like the human appendix, to a vestigial organ. This reader discovered early, although hardly early enough, that unless he intended to leaf through the volume a separate time for each topic he wished to refer to subsequently, he would have to prepare a supplementary index as he went along. For example, Mr. Lavender has a good deal to say on the reviewer's special interest of the Negro on the Pacific Northwest frontier—on pp. 25, 2I6, 244, 245, 247, 312, and perhaps elsewhere-but the index furnished no guide to this topic nor does it even include the names of two Negroes mentioned in the text.
It must be remembered, however, that Land of Giants is intended primarily not for the historical scholar—who might very well, however, find it useful-but for the intelligent, non-professional reader, and that it will doubtless be profitably enjoyed by many such who would be only repelled by the multi-volumed, footnote-studded works on similar themes. Very probably, moreover, a fair number of these readers, particularly in this centennial year, will eventually be impelled to peruse some at least of the books and articles to the listing of which is devoted over ten pages near the end of the volume.
KENNETH WIGGINS PORTER