Forty-Niners: The Chronicle of the California Trail
ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Atlantic Monthly Press & Little, Brown, $3.50]
MR. HULBERT has given us the first realization of the California gold rush. Our generation has added to a bulk of Californiana, already enormous, a great mass of prefaces, monographs, doctoral dissertations, and other professional studies, besides several full-length histories and a distressing number of supposedly popular redactions. The professional studies reduce a dynamic spectacle to something like a syllogism, finding in the march of thousands of men over desert and mountains, in pursuit of our most glorious mirage, little that appears more lively or more interesting than debates of terri-
torial legislatures over toll roads. Historians, perfectly at home among legislatures, have usually been impotent when confronted with passionate humanity at the breaking point. The popularizations have been on the level of ’Western fiction,’ both in reliability and in literary skill.
A gorgeous field was thus left open, and Mr. Hulbert takes it over with great brilliance and almost unimpeachable success. For the first time we have, grounded on a flawless professional study, an account of the gold rush that actually presents to us the life of those who participated in it. Forty-Niners creates a new classification in its subject: it ceases to be a study of the gold rush and becomes, just about as nearly as literature may be, the thing itself, the experience of strong men at the extremity of effort, making a mass surge westward (the ancestral direction), heading through excitement, ecstasy, and agony for the problematical gold of the Sierras. The accomplishment tugs alarmingly at the superlatives of criticism. Since ‘brilliant’ has already been expended, let not one hesitate to support it with ‘superb,’ for if this is triumphant as history it is more triumphant still as literature, and will fecundate a good many books to come.
A purely literary problem imperiled Mr. Hulbert at the very beginning. His decision to present his material in the form of a supposed diary of a typical Forty-Niner, a synthesis of hundreds of contemporary accounts, risked disaster. It required him to employ the mechanism of fiction and so involved him in warring criteria. It forced him to cumbersome devices for the presentation of events that could not have happened to any single party of emigrants, and in the early pages these devices disturb the reader. It forced him to lead his typical wagon train through incidents that are atypical, and this necessity sometimes strains credibility. It even necessitated his writing occasional passages in a kind of prose impossible before the last decade and so produced as queer an anachronism as ever horrified a pedant. Nevertheless, Mr. Hulbert fully vindicates his method, and as the book goes on one is convinced that no other method would have done so well. Certainly the climactic passage, the account of the journey down the Humboldt River and over the Humboldt desert, owes its magnificent effectiveness to the belief already established by his mechanism.
It is all there — the cholera and the insanity; the fighting and the drinking, the songs, the dances, the strumming of banjos and guitars; quarrels, murders, massacres, thefts, weddings, births, funerals; the exhilaration of adventure, the group hypnosis and hysteria, the desperation of ill-equipped, exhausted men dying in anonymous hundreds under the desert sky; the darker passions of mankind in a feral pack, and the obbligato of courage, fortitude, kindness, and strength wisely husbanded and spent; above all, the hard-boiled humor of Americans doing heroic things with a realism that derides both romantic posturing and romantic despair. The hook is an immense repository of fact — of the details of geography, climate, organization, outfitting, management, plains craft, mountain lore, and mining information. That is splendid, but still more welcome is its other aspect.. For it is also an interpretation — a description of the American nation and of its moods and manners, myths, jokes, and behavior while it raced through alkali and dust, through storms and stinking water, through the menace of lonely and savage death, for the possession of its most glittering rainbow. It is, in short, social history at its finest expression, an accomplishment. whose interest cannot be exaggerated and whose value is no less.
BERNARD DEYOTO