TRAILING THE WEST-BOUND PRAIRIE SCHOONERS
Netboy, Anthony
Trailing The West-Bound Prairie Schooners THE WAKE OF THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER, by Irene D. Paden. Macmillan. $3. Reviewed by Anthony Netboy THE PEOPLING of the Western states is an endlessly...
...The Wake of the Prairie Schooner is a less literary and more sober book, written in a quiet colloquial style, as if the author were taking a party of tourists along the meandering trails which the hardy pioneers followed in their prairie schooners from Missouri to California and Oregon...
...Paden photographed and sketched the scenes and took field notes...
...Early in 1943 we had Bernard DeVoto's Year of Decision which narrated in a sort of confused way the trials and tribulations of the great emigrant parties of 1846...
...This book is a compound of archaeology, history, and travelogue...
...The banal conversations between the members of the Paden party and their trivial tourist problems seem out of place in a work of this kind which aims to recreate an exciting panorama of American history...
...In time she developed a vast storehouse of facts about the spectacular migrations from their beginnings in 1812 to their deterioration after the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869...
...The material is based not only on the Paden expeditions but on hundreds of letters, memoirs and unpublished manuscripts, and endless conversations with living pioneers...
...The diets, dress, social customs, folklore as well as some of the more remarkable historical events, such as the incredible difficulties, including the resort to cannibalism, of the Donner and Reed parties who were stranded in the Winter of 1846 near Lake Truckee (now Donner Lake) are set down with patient detail and without a professorial display of erudition...
...It takes the reader over the trails almost mile by mile, and describes them today and as they were during the great migrations, recreating scenes of hardship, joy, sorrow, comedy, and tragedy which befell the pioneers in their search for an El Dorado...
...Reviewed by Anthony Netboy THE PEOPLING of the Western states is an endlessly fascinating subject, at which many writers, great and small, have tried their hands...
...For years Mrs...
...The Wake of the Prairie Schooner is the product of an avocation...
...The scholarship in this book is a marvel to behold...
...The book could have gained from defter editing...
...Paden accompanied her husband, superintendent of schools in Alameda, Calif., on his vacation pastime of uncovering and mapping the old pioneer trails...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 52
