Books: Oregon Fever

THE LAND IS BRIGHT—Archie Binns— Scribner ($2.50).

In a little over a decade the Oregon Trail carried “the greatest migration in history since the Children of Israel went to the Promised Land.” In fiction, the old Oregon Trail is still well plodded. But far fewer novels than pioneers have come through alive. Outstanding survivor was H. L. Davis’ Honey in the Horn. Archie Binns’s The Land Is Bright is another.

Author Binns, himself a descendant of an Oregon Trailer, centres his story on a family of Illinois farmers who made the trip in 1852. His characters are plain folk, not fancy Indian-fighters and adventurers. His Indians are mostly beggars and hangers-on, a menace only to horses, cows and the pioneers’ imaginations. The real enemies are cholera, diarrhea, dust, heat, rivers, white bandits, traders, quarreling among themselves. Out of jealousy, the caravan captain ruthlessly abandons a middleaged, kindly schoolteacher in the desert. But he is efficient, and he does not, like many another captain, abandon women and the sick because they cannot keep up. The romance between Nancy Ann and a hard-muscled “recruit” picked up along the way is as earthy-gritty as their food during a dust storm.

At journey’s end, in the fertile Willamette Valley, battered mentally and physically, the survivors are tough-skinned men and women whose memories hold at least as much to forget as to remember.