Across the Wide Missouri

BERNARD DEVOTO’S investigation of the origins and growth of what he calls the “continental mind ” has been persistent and brilliant. Mark Twain a America displayed Manifest Destiny in its peak years, the period closed and symbolized by the meeting of the rails at Promontory.The Year of Decision went back in time to trace the complex lines of force that, in 1846 made inevitable the pattern of western settlement, the war between the states, the eventual triumph of the continental idea. The present book goes still farther back, into the closing years of the mountain fur trade. In his next he will deal with Lewis and Clark, back in the years when the West was still Louisiana or Mexico, and the idea of a continental nation had just been born.

Provocatively, excitingly, with wide and curious learning Mr. DeVoto gives us in Across the Wide Missouri a history of the twilight years of the fur trade. He is at pains to project present into future and indicate the obscure beginnings of later and greater things. The period he treats contains the beginning of the end of the Plains Indians, the virtual end of the mountain trappers, the first trickles of empire down California and Oregon trails. These years saw the first wagons and the first white squaws go across South Pass and on beyond Fort Hall; they saw the founding of such landmark posts as Fort Laramie, Fort Boise, Fort Bridger.

On the trails and rivers of the West between 1832 and 1839 there were not too many whites. We see most of them here, in a gallery of sharply etched portraits: mountain men, factors of the rival fur companies, premature dreamers, missionaries, adventurous businessmen like Bonneville and Wyeth, sportsmen like William Drummond Stewart of Scotland. Stewart is especially important, because his summer and winter excursions to the mountains brought him into the heart of most of the important happenings of these years, and because in his 1837 safari was included a tame painter, Alfred Jacob Miller of Baltimore and New Orleans, with a commission to sketch the life beyond the frontier.

Historically and ethnologically as well as artistically, Miller’s sketches are of great interest. Discovered some years ago by Mac Reed Porter, they are the first pictures made of large parts of the West. Many of them are beautifully reproduced here, both in black and white and in full color, along with paintings by Charles Bodmer and George Catlin, and they add greatly to the beauty and to the value of the book.

Merely because of the freshness of its approach and its large use of primary sources, especially the diaries of travelers, this book is an important addition to such standard history as Chittenden and Coues. But because of its constant cross-reference and its restless curiosity in a very wide context, it becomes something more: the kind of intelligent study of social dynamisms that not too many historians are capable of.

Probably there will be objectors to Mr. DeVoto’s judgments on all the early missionaries except Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, yet his charges of narrowness, inflexibility, jealousy, petty rancor, are based in the main on quotation from their own journals. His treatment of the Indians too is likely to seem mercurial to some, and he may seem to grow too ribald about their stone age superstitions, too skeptical of their often-celebrated courage, too dubious of their savage skills and intelligence. On the whole, he likes the Crows and the Nez Percés best: the Nez Percés were the best horse breeders and bowmakers in the West, and the Crows were the most skillful thieves.

Mr. DeVoto admires skill, in other words; he admires the mountain men for the same reasons, for their perfect adaptation to a given set of conditions. No laws, even moral laws, can survive a basic alteration of those conditions, and that is one of the firmest lessons of this big rich book: How fast the mountain men went out, how fast the Indians followed them, when the conditions changed and the forts along the western trails became not trading posts but way stations on the road to Oregon. By the end of the book, the mountain man has been overtaken by the settler, and a period of the West’s brief and furious history has come to an end. The story has never been more excitingly told than it is here.

WALLACE STEGNER