Books: Pioneer People

FARTHEST REACH: OREGON AND WASHINGTON—Nancy Wilson Ross—Knopf ($3.50).

Pioneers on Puget Sound ate so many clams “their stomachs rose and fell with the tides.” They were great individualists. There was Hazard Stevens, son of the first Governor. At twelve he left home to make a treaty with the Gros Ventre Indians. He was the first white man to climb Mount Rainier.

There was Asahel Bush, Oregon’s great banker (TIME, April 22, 1940). When he was 89 he lifted himself from his deathbed, asked “Is everything all right?” and, upon being told it was, said, “Keep it so,” and died.

Mrs. Nancy Wilson Ross, a native novelist and newspaperwoman, has pulled together some of the stories of these old-timers and woven them into a book of travels, essays and speculation about the Pacific Northwest. Much of what she writes is guidebook stuff—dutiful chapters on landscape, legends, and the myths of Paul Bunyan (who is by now one of the biggest bores in the whole bleak record of synthetic folklore). There is also a good map and 48 superb photographs. But Mrs. Ross’s humor, sensitivity to the ways of a people whose pioneer forefathers are not all dead yet, make Farthest Reach one of the best books written about the North west.

The old settlers Mrs. Ross saw were as much a vanishing race as the Indians. They were losing out to the modern world, to cities, to machines, to roads that brought tourists to their mountains and valleys, to Harold Ickes and his parks, to Bonneville and Grand Coulee, to the New Deal and the worldwide change of which it is a part. Ranchers, editors, storekeepers, hotelkeepers, windbags—they were alike hearty, wise, uninhibited, colorful, and out of tune with their time.

They let themselves go, like Bill Hanley of the Bell A Ranch. He kept a coyote as a pet and when he got too worried he would sit down and yowl and start the coyote yowling with him. He said: “Man’s only job is to deliver what is in him to the age he lives in.”

When Mrs. Ross went to interview the 99-year-old sage of Baker, Ore., she was introduced: “Papa, here’s Nancy Ross come to see you from New York. Not Betsy, but her niece.” The old man took one look at her nail polish and said: “Terrible wounded in every finger.”

What Mrs. Ross feels about this place and people comes out in her talk with Editor Clinton Haight of the Blue Mountain Eagle. Typical Haight editorial: ”Fie Fie on the Cockeyed World for shooting its taxpayers. . . . Never let a taxpayer die. … If taxpayers die, or we shoot them in wars, we can never hope to Bal. the Budg.” They had lunch in the Haight back yard. On the hillside above it was the mountain cabin where once lived Joaquin Miller, who wrote: “Sail on! sail on! and on!” . . . They talked about Hitler, about the Northwest, about war, about the modern world, and at last Editor Haight said: “There has come an end to the kind of democracy I knew.”