Books: Dry Rivers

POWDER RIVER—Struthers Burt—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Powder River rises in central Wyoming, fed by the snows of the Big Horn Mountains. North it flows, joined by Salt Creek, Dugout Creek, Pumpkin Creek, Wild Horse Creek and Crazy Woman Creek. Bitterly alkaline, mushy with quicksand, flanked for 100 miles by badlands, Powder River is nothing compared with such rushing beauties as the Feather, the Snake, the Salmon.

But it drains the Powder River grass country where Western history was made. It watered the great ranch of the English-owned Powder River Cattle Co., which once ran 60,000 head of cattle. Along its valley rode 55 raiders from the big ranches of the South who came to fight the Johnson County war.

Powder River is fine folklore material but Struthers Burt skims only the surface.

Powder River is the fourth volume in a projected 24-volume series, edited by Constance Lindsay Skinner, called Rivers of America. Thus far the Kennebec, the Upper Mississippi, the Suwannee have been covered. One of the most promising publisher’s projects of the decade. Rivers of America is conceived as “a literary and not an historical series.” Unfortunately it is distinguished neither as literature nor as history. The worst features of regional writing—shallow local color and uncritical acceptance of apocrypha—make the books little more than extensions of the pioneer tales that fill magazine sections of Sunday newspapers. As an example of such journalism, Powder River is no worse than its predecessors, except that Struthers Burt, 56-year-old Philadelphian, best-selling novelist and owner of a dude ranch in the Jackson’s Hole country of western Wyoming, has contributed an exclamatory style that can be described only as Wild West prose.

The very names of American rivers make poetry, from the Pee Dee to the Little Muddy, from the Penobscot to the Salt. But in Powder River, as in the previous volumes of the series, poetry is lacking. The rivers of America were never so dry as they seem in these books.