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James Pattie’s West: The Dream and the Reality by Richard Batman

1987; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1987.0036

1948-7142

Paul Witkowsky,

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Reviews 93 machinery. Seventy-five years ago, on the farm we can still see on the late night, two-star movie, he might have made out, with a son’s help. Rudy Blythe may not have been a loser, but he was a failure if judged in terms of his ambition. He was a man of some intelligence; he earned a degree in economics;he had a successful career in banking before he came to Ruthton. He chose to become a small-town banker “building something of his own in a cohesive small town with that warm sense of inclusion.” Thirty years ago he might have made it, but not in Ruthton in the 1980s. There is a parallel in the ambitions of these two men. There are other parallels that are almost mythic and certainly dramatic. Both the Blythes and the Jenkins left Minnesota and went to Texas to find a better living, then returned to Minnesota, each in their own way, to recover losses. Darlene Jenkins left her husband for a more successful man; Susan Blythe saw the futility of the small town bank and threatened to leave. Blythe and Jenkins fixed the blame for their losses on each other, and to both of them the fore­ closed farm became the focus of frustration and hatred. Jenkins lured Blythe and Thulin to the farm, but it seems necessary that they should have met there, and that Steve should be there with his Ml carbine. ROSCOE L. BUCKLAND Western Washington University James Pattie’s West: The Dream and the Reality. By Richard Batman. (Nor­ man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. 284 pages, $12.95.) In 1825 Sylvester Pattie, newly widowed, and his son James Ohio headed south and west from Missouri to make their fortune trapping and trading. In 1830, James returned alone from California to Cincinnati, his father dead and his fortune unmade. In 1831, with substantial help from Timothy Flint, he published the self-aggrandizing Personal 'Narrative that has become a classic of western travel literature. Richard Batman’s aim is to strip the Narrative of its embellishments, interpolations, and distortions and to estab­ lish the facts of Pattie’s tour of the prairies and the Southwest. Batman’s study (originally published as American Ecclesiastes: The Stories of James O. Pattie) isboth a biography of Pattie and an exploration of his unreliability as an autobiographer. He uses contemporary sources to cor­ rect obvious errors of fact and distortions of perspective; he speculates intelli­ gently on plausible sources for some of Pattie’s less plausible adventures; and, based on internal and external evidence, he identifies Flint’s “topographical illustrations” and other interpolated material. His thesis is that Pattie—who went to the wilderness with a father whom he almost worshipped, and who did a lot of growing up between 1825 and 1830—“relived those five years in the pages of the Personal Narrative . . . not as the man he was but as the man he wished he had been.” 94 Western American Literature The idea that an autobiographer may have shaped his material to make himself look better is, of course, neither new nor controversial, and Batman’s accumulation of evidence for Pattie’s revisions of reality seems at times to exceed the requirements of his thesis. Still, this is a valuable contribution to the study of the relationship between the history and mythology of the West. Especially in view of the fact that the Narrative was “edited” by the author of the Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, Batman helps establish Pattie’s contribution to the myth of the frontier as it developed during the nineteenth century. PAUL WITKOWSKY Radford University Chinese Camp. Poems by John C. Pine. (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Sunstone Press, 1986. 60 pages, $6.95.) In pool halls originated the expression, “off the wall.” It means you play with cues you choose racked on the wall. These cues are public property for the game and are assorted states of wacko as to straight. Pine’s poems are these kinds of cues off California’s walls, be they adobe, wickiup, buddhist lattice, or board and batten. They give us a fine set of glimpses of the...