lives, hardly conscious of the high purposes they were fulfilling, their work, nevertheless, was exceedingly useful as forerunners of civilization and heralds of national destiny. So with Mrs. Dye's book. Her coign of vantage in her home in the oldest American community on the Pacific Coast for the perspective of our national history, her spirit as an ardent hero-worshipper, her aptitude for biographical narrative, her keen zest for dramatic and historic conjunctions of time or place, her strongly feminine point of view so rarely applied to chapters of adventure, and above all her intense enthusiasm which fuses remotely related details into an integral whole these make "The Conquest "a book useful to the student of history. She was indefatigable in her search for the material for her book, and successful. Many a new clue promising information about some one of the Lewis and Clark party did she find and follow out. Her book represents a fine array of historical material, and not a little of it is new.
She took a large field. Of necessity she could point out only immediate relations of events. The deeper relations, the true proportions, could not be expected. It was natural, too, that salient and relevant facts should be overlooked. For all that the book is a genuine and an important contribution to the literature of American history.
