Volume 5, Number 6 · October 28, 1965
Lone Rangers
By Marius Bewley
Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail
by Lewis H. Garrard, Introduction by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
Oklahoma, 298 pp., $2.00
The Western Hero in History and Legend
by Kent Ladd Steckmesser
Oklahoma, 281 pp., $5.95
Although the present edition of Wahto-yah and the Taos Trail was published a few years ago, it was not widely reviewed at the time. As the book is a minor classic of great charm, which has never had anything like the currency or critical recognition it deserves, there seems some point in reviewing it even so late in the day. Fanciers of Western literature have always praised it, and in 1938 Ralph P. Bieber published an excellent scholarly edition of it in the Southwest Historical Series. But it has qualities of language and observation that should recommend it to a more general literary audience. To respond to its vitality of language and description it is no more necessary to be an addict of the frontier than one must be a cultural primitivist to respond to similar qualities in Melville's Typee.
Review, 2310 words
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