Course of Empire
Neuberger, R. L.
Western Pathfinders The Course of Empire, by Bernard DeVoto. Houghton Mifflin. 647 pp. $6. Reviewed by Richard L. Neuberger ABOOK about Lewis and Clark once was written called First Across the...
...All the pathfinders are here, the true pathfinders and not the cowboys and the cavalrymen...
...Reviewed by Richard L. Neuberger ABOOK about Lewis and Clark once was written called First Across the Continent...
...Many great books are spoiled by bungled, inadequate maps...
...He follows them up every canyon and through each forbidding pass...
...Lewis and Clark came down to tidewater on the Columbia River in November of 1805...
...THE REVIEWERS DAVID FELLMAN is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin...
...Not this one...
...DeVoto knows each trivial meandering of the historic party...
...Whenever DeVoto has had a spare moment during the past decade, he has rushed toward the sundown to trek, drive, and fly over the trails which Lewis and Clark pioneered nearly a century and a half ago...
...This is the genuine company of adventurous souls who first discovered what lay beyond Winnipeg and St...
...Then DeVoto flashes back to Christopher Columbus' orders to his men on May 12, 1492, and the book is closed...
...But Alexander Mackenzie had ridden in a cumbersome cedar canoe at the bottom of a great fiord of the Pacific Coast in July of 1793...
...Bernard DeVoto has put the exploration and discovery of the American West in perspective...
...He tilts a lance for civil rights...
...He helped write speeches for Adlai Stevenson...
...DeVoto has other interests...
...CARL R. WOODRING teaches English at the University of Wisconsin...
...The Course of Empire is a book recommended for any family that wants to know what really went into the discovery of our continent, both above and below the Canadian boundary...
...SELIG PERLMAN, nationally known labor economist, is professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin...
...Erwin Raisz has made a series of splendid charts which show the slow, inexorable process by which thinking man got to know what lay to the westward on the vast expanse of North America...
...RICHARD L. NEU-BERGER, the well-known West Coast writer, wrote "The Lewis and Clark Expedition" for the Random House Landmark series...
...He scourges the ranchers and stockmen who would take over the National Forests...
...But the title was a misnomer...
...He wrote "A Theory of the Labor Movement" and, with P. Taft, "Labor Movements, 1896-1932...
...He wrote "Victorian samplers...
...The finale of this book occurs when Lewis and Clark and their party at last begin to build Fort Clatsop, first American post on the Pacific's shores...
...Louis— Fraser, Mackenzie, Gray, Veren-drye, David Thompson, Pond, and finally, Lewis and Clark...
...But the author already has moved ahead to such explorers as Thompson and the fur traders, so that the reader is aware of at least some of the effect of the magnificent pilgrimage of exploration which has just been completed...
...Although Lewis and Clark are only a part of this magnificent book, they are the best part...
...But his long-abiding interest is the discovery of the West in general and, particularly, the memorable expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark...
Vol. 17 • March 1953 • No. 3
