Volume 51, Number 12 · July 15, 2004
The Unknown West
By Larry McMurtry
One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark
by Colin G. Calloway
University of Nebraska Press, 631 pp., $39.95
Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier
by Shirley Christian
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 509 pp., $27.00
A few years ago I grumbled in these pages that until around 1970 historical studies having to do with the American West were mainly the work of semipros: 'Country editors, prairie schoolmarms, county historians, retired lawyers, lone professors here and there, and not a few raving eccentrics' who left us a few good books while operating in a kind of conceptual emptiness, with neither much rigor nor much reach.
Review, 3350 words
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