Friday, January 25, 2008

To ride on the wide open trail

Van Gordon Sauter reviews classic Western book


By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer

Photo courtesy Kirsten Schultz Van Gordon Sauter

The Community Library's annual celebration, called Our Moveable Feast, chose Ann Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist" as its theme book and travel as its overall theme for the March 9 event.

The celebration—to be held at the library in Ketchum—will highlight the cuisine of several different books in separate rooms and areas. For the next several weeks, reviews of each of these books will be featured in these pages.

"The Oregon Trail" by Francis Parkman, reviewed by writer Van Gordon Sauter, will represent the cuisine of Western America. A Ketchum resident for nearly two decades, Sauter is a legend in the world of broadcast television, as the onetime president of both CBS News and Fox News. As a print journalist, Sauter covered a wide range of stories including the civil rights movement, urban riots and the Vietnam War. During that time, he co-authored two books, "Nightmare in Detroit," a profile of the Detroit riots, and "Fabled Land, Timeless River," a photo-test book about the Mississippi River.

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About a two-and-a-half-hour drive southeast of The Community Library is an unremarkable appearing juncture—actually, profoundly historic—where a runty creek with the delusory name of Raft River drops into the muscular Snake River. There are three graves there, at the point where the California Trail headed south along the Raft on its way into Nevada and over the Sierra, while the Oregon Trail pushed west and north with the Snake, into our Manifest Destiny.

You stand there and wonder who were these people who set off, and sometimes died, on these incredible journeys into the wilderness? What was it like back then, when there was no functioning government 10 miles from a military fort, and the old border with Mexico was only a few miles to the south, near the City of Rocks. When the trudging people and their lurching wagons fumbled into the virtually uncharted, unforgiving West, into the mysterious if not foreboding, world of the Native Americans.

The answer lies in one of the most remarkable non-fiction books in American history, "The Oregon Trail," by Francis Parkman. A sickly Harvard law graduate with an inheritance and a fascination with the West, Parkman set out in 1846 with a college chum for a "tour of curiosity and amusement to the Rocky Mountains."

His record of this journey, breathtaking in its audacity, is mandatory reading for those who embrace the West. He was there among the first. He saw it when it was real—not the creation of a Hollywood scenic designer—and took an astounding literary snapshot of a world that would quickly vanish. Citing the mastery of Parkman's descriptions, Bernard DeVoto called "The Oregon Trail" "one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature."

Sample it. Go to Google and punch in "Oregon Trail Parkman." Up will come the complete text. Go to the chapter headed Ogillallah Village. It will take your breath away.

In recent years, a few dainty writers have lambasted Parkman for his "politically incorrect" attitude towards the Native Americans, his failure in 1846 to recognize the "sensitivities" so many champion today. Rubbish! Parkman described what he saw and reflected the perceptions of his times. In many cases, though, he was incredibly prescient.

Late in life he looked back at his astonishing literary output, and spoke to the escalating plight of the Native Americans. He also bemoaned the loss of the West.

He wrote in a new introduction to "The Oregon Trail" that in the West, "the slow cavalcade of horsemen armed to the teeth has disappeared ... before parlor cars and the effeminate comforts of modern travel ... we have towns and cities, resorts of health and pleasure seekers. Paris fashions. The latest novels. If this book can help to keep the (Old West's) memory alive, it will have done its part." Indeed.

— Van Gordon Sauter




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