Jedediah Smith, No Ordinary Mountain Man, by Barton H. Barbour. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009, pbk., 290pp., $19.95.

William H. Goetzmann in his Pulitzer Prize winning Exploration and Empire, the Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (1966) called Jedediah Smith "one of the giants of the fur trade and one of the greatest of all American explorers."

Smith however is less well known among general readers than other great men of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. Perhaps this is because his stern and nearly humorless Protestant personality set him apart from other Mountain Men, who were more carefree than he. Smith did not smoke, he did not drink. He carried his Bible, and he read from it. He never married. Most men called him "Mr. Smith," and later "Captain Smith."

It is impossible to imagine him drinking, fighting, and whoring with the boys at the annual fur rendezvous, or sitting around evening fires telling "stretchers" with the best of them, great "liars" like Jim Bridger, Joe Meek, or "Ole Fitz" Fitzpatrick. The fact is that Smith was distant, even aloof. He was also literate. He kept journals, and he made maps of his explorations. Few other Mountain Men did. Smith truly excelled as an explorer and journalist and as a leader of men rather than as a trapper.

As a boy in Ohio, he received basic education in reading and writing, and he had a Methodist upbringing. In 1822, he arrived in St Louis, the place to go at the time for young men seeking adventure and willing to work for wages. He signed on with the first Ashley-Henry fur party to go up the Missouri River, and, through sheer courage and ability under great pressure, he survived unhurt the party's near massacre by Arikaras in June, 1823 on the upper River.

Smith was then chosen to lead a party farther west. After being horribly mauled by a grizzly, and after passing through numerous other extreme hardships, he and his party "rediscovered" and crossed the South Pass of the Central Rocky Mountains, first "discovered" on October 23, 1812, by Robert Stuart leading a party of six Astorians returning eastward from Astoria, their fur company's old post on the Pacific.

The South Pass would later become the route of the "Emmigrant Trail," and still later, famous as the "Oregon Trail" to Oregon and California. After returning to St. Louis late in 1825 with almost 9,000 pounds of beaver fur, Smith was invited to become a partner with Ashley and Henry. Soon afterward he succeeded Ashley in a new company to be known as Smith, Jackson, and Sublette.

His most important achievements were yet to come. In succeeding years, he led two expeditions to California via the Mojave Desert and San Gabriel Mission - today a beautifully kept Catholic museum piece within the great urban sprawl of Los Angeles. On the second of these expeditions, Smith's entire party was massacred by Kelawatset people on the Umpqua River. In spite of such hardships, Smith kept a detailed journal of the country and its people. Surviving the massacre, he trapped again in the Rockies, sold his partnershp in the company, and returned to St. Louis to buy a house, and, seemingly, to settle down at last.

It was not to be. He soon organized an expedition of 74 men and 22 wagons to enter the Santa Fe trade. The caravan left St. Louis in April 1831. Late in May they took the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail. This was the shorter of the two branches of the famous trail, but it crossed a nearly waterless desert. While he was out alone searching for water, a band of Comanches rode up, surrounded him, and shot him out of the saddle.

Barbour might have explored in more depth the apparent contradictions within Smith's character which drove him to succeed, then quickly drove him out again to meet his violent death. But the book is thoroughly researched and very well written. It is an important contribution to our knowledge of Smith and the part he played in the history of the Fur Trade of the Far West. ~ DR

The Bronco Bill Gang, Karen Holliday Tanner, and John D. Tanner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011, cloth, 270pp., $29.95

Bronco Bill and his gang, though not known as well as the Daltons and the James brothers, stirred up a lot of trouble in southern New Mexico and eastern Arizona around the turn of the century. The Tanners, experts on Western criminals, and their fields of plunder, have written a very good book on the gang. Bill and his bunch became true experts in stealing property, in their early days chiefly horses and cattle. After a gang in Ohio got the brilliant idea of robbing trains, a rash of bad men across the West mastered that risky art. Still another new field of daring do was the art of robbing banks.

When the Civil War ended, the "western movement" really got its boost. Thousands of young men, large numbers of them fresh from the Confederate army with nothing left for them in the South, drifted west where the opportunities were.

Most of these men were to become law abiding citizens who used their labors for decent purposes. A small number of them, however, were driven by the urge to take from others what they themselves chose not to earn for themselves.

All of them surely knew that, at the end, they would die by violence - by the rope hanging from a limb of the solitary cottonwood tree or by the lawman's gunshot - or that they would languish away their years in dirty small town jails or a territorial penitentiary, living on black bread and beans, weak coffee and bad water. They had absolutely nothing to look forward to but boredom and a painful death, alone. Still they chose to steal from other men and women. They lived simply for the hell of it. They were indeed a special kind.

Bill's given name was William Walters. Most of what we know of him must be qualified by probably or maybe for such men left few records on purpose. Walters was probably born in Austin and came to New Mexico as a teenage cowboy. Stories were told of him. One that he worked in Santa Fe as a painter. Another that he cowboyed on the Pecos for John Chisum's famous long rail and jingle-bob outfit. Still another is that he may have held up a bank in San Marcial, once a thriving town on the Rio Grande below Socorro.

In 1889 he was arrested in Separ, east of Lordsburg, for horse stealing and other meanness. From there the famous sheriff Harvey Whitehill hauled him off to jail in Silver City, where Bill promptly broke out. Arrested in 1892, Bill was later jailed at Socorro, where he soon sprung the jail door again.

By October, 1896, he and others bungled the robbery of an A and P train westbound from Albuquerque. Not discouraged by failure, he and the gang successfully robbed two stagecoaches near White Oaks in Lincoln County before bungling another train robbery at Stein's Pass (pronounced Steen's) and still another near Grants. Then they hit the jackpot in a train robbery near Belen, supposedly getting off with $20,000. The next day while on the lam horseback, they were ambushed, but shot their way out, killing three lawmen as they went.

From then on, Walters's story is mostly on downhill. Badly wounded while hiding out in Arizona, he was locked up in Santa Fe's territorial pen, from which he escaped in 1911, then returned to the pen, where he was sentenced to life. Strangely, however, he was pardoned in 1917.

Thereafter, in a most ironic turn of events, he was offered a "straight" job as a "windmiller" for the famous Diamond A Ranch near Hachita in New Mexico's Bootheel. Death came on the day Bill took a bad fall from a Diamond A windmill. At least he was spared having to wink out defiant, six guns ablazing.

A well told story of a serious Southwestern outlaw and his gang. ~ D

Robin Olds, Fighter Pilot: The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds. New York: St.Martin's Griffin, 2010, pbk., 400pp., $15.99.

When I was a boy in the 1930s, every kid dreamed of flying an airplane. The most exciting event of my early childhood was seeing Amelia Earhart's aluminum skinned Lockheed Electra, a twin engine, tail wheel aircraft powered by radial engines.

The first woman to fly the Atlantic solo in 1932, Amelia was on the staff of the Aeronautical Engineering Department at Purdue University as an aviation consultant and career counselor for women. She often flew her silver bird beween the West Coast and the University. The newspaper announced one Friday that she would stop over in Indianapolis for the weekend and that her Lockheed would be on display at the city's airport.

My dad drove the three of us kids over to the Indianapolis airport on Sunday afternoon. I can hardly describe my excitement when we climbed wooden steps and walked along a platform from which we viewed the aircraft and looked down into the Lockheed's cabin.

I was hooked on flying, but put off taking lessons. Eventually as an adult I got my pilot's license, but much too late in life to do any serious flying. Had I gone ahead as a youth, I might well have become a real pilot - a fighter pilot. At least I'd have given it a shot.

Robin Olds, whose father was also a combat flyer in the Air Corps, was probably the greatest American fighter pilot of all time. He was an "ace," scoring enough kills in World War II and again in the Vietnam War to qualify as a "double ace." He was also, surprisingly, a very skilled writer and a thoughtful and reflective man. He kept a daily journal throughout his years in the Army Air Corps and later in the U. S. Air Force. ~ D

The Fort Bayard Story, 1866-1899, by Neta Pope and Andrea Jaquez. Introduction by Dr. Dale Giese, copyright 2011 by Andrea Jaquez, 390 pp., hardback, $45; pbk., $30.

Of all the nineteenth century military posts in what is now the southwest quarter of the State of New Mexico, Fort Bayard was in many ways the most important. Yet no one until now, so far as I know, has ever published a major book length history of the fort.

Neta Pope and Andrea Jaquez have now done just that. And this thorough book has long been needed. For Fort Bayard was at the center of military action against Victorio's Warm Springs people and other warring Apache groups all across the vast sweep of land between the more important Fort Craig to the north and east and the still more important Fort Bowie to the south and west.

Soldiers from the fort, many of them "Buffalo Soldiers," patrolled this landscape during much of the period of the so-called "Apache wars," which lasted roughly from about 1862 or so until Geronimo's final surrender to General Nelson A. Miles at Skeleton Canyon.

From Fort Bayard, black soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry trailed Apache warriors and fought battles with them from the Florida Mountains on the south, throughout the Mogollon and Mimbres Ranges to the north, all the way to Tularosa, then eastward to the Ojo Caliente reservation at the base of the San Mateo Mountains. Across this immense spread of landscape, Fort Bayard's soldiers were ambushed, stood and fought, were wounded and died. Several of them received the Medal of Honor for great bravery in action. Perhaps even more important in the long view of history was that the courage and the discipline of these African American soldiers proved that black soldiers were as capable in combat as white soldiers.

Established in 1866 on orders of General James H. Carleton, head of the famous "California Column" and later the hated commanding officer of the Army's Department of New Mexico, Fort Bayard was believed important to protect settlers and miners who were swarming to Pinos Altos and the surrounding area after the gold strike of 1859-60 had turned the tiny camp into a boomtown.

After a trip through the area in June, 1867, Carleton wrote, "Fort Bayard, as yet, is only an assembly of log houses. It has a capacity for some three or four companies . . . Some stone foundations for the permanent quarters have already been commenced. A post of four companies of cavalry and two of infantry at this place would be strong enough soon to drive off or destroy the marauding Apaches which are now so great an obstacle to the filling up by farmers, stock growers and miners of this important part of New Mexico . . ."

Then Carleton added, too optimistically as it turned out, "Before six years shall have passed . . . there will be a town at or near Pinos Altos larger than the city of Denver . . ." (It may be of interest to know that the general himself held mining interests in the area).

Then he commented, "It may be doubted if there is on the known surface of the earth an equal number of square miles on which may be found as many as rich and extensive veins of the useful as well as the precious metals as at or near Pinos Altos, New Mexico."

After the Apache Wars came to an end, Fort Bayard continued as a more or less active army post until about 1900 after which it became a military hospital for veterans and soldiers with TB.

The Fort Bayard Story was unusually well researched. Pope and Jaquez used local sources, then went outside to libraries and archives elsewhere. They used the old-time method of research that I call "boot-leather research." One or the other of the two women went to sources where most of Fort Bayard's records (and other army records too) are kept. They visited the National Achives in Washington twice, the Carlisle Barracks collections in Pennsylvania twice, the New Mexico State Archives and Records Center in Santa Fe, and the Arizona Historical Society collections in Tucson.

Especially significant is the broad selection of photographs Pope and Jaquez collected from many persons and places. Here are images of men and women important to the fort's history, people we had all wondered about, but never really seen in person so to speak.

The Fort Bayard Story is also remarkably well written, thus very readable. The authors have succeeded well in filling in a gap in New Mexico's history. I congratulate them both.

	The Fourth Wife: Polygamy, Love & Revolution, by Carolyn O'Bagy Davis. Tucson: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2011, pbk., 206pp., $14.95;
	Hopi Summer: Letters from Ethel to Maud, by Carey Melville. Tucson: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2007, pbk., 160pp., $15.95.

Here are two exceptionally interesting, very well-written books about men and women who lived and traveled in the American Southwest and in northern Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tucson author Carolyn O'Bagy Davis has a sharp eye for as yet unused source material, especially interviews, family letters, and old photographs revealing rich detail.

Many European-Americans have been travelers toward the West. From the very early days on, "westering" was habit with them. Many wanted to move "out West" to settle and start a new life. Others just wanted to see the West, called "Going out to see the Elephant." My own Scots-Irish McCain ancestors and my German ancestors, arriving in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in Colonial times, kept picking up and moving farther west for generation after generation, across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and beyond, but always toward the West.

It was so with the Mormons, people of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, many of whom migrated all the way from northern Europe. Unlike the Scots-Irish Presbyterian McCains, however, they were persecuted by their neighbors. So they pushed ever farther West to the remote land around the Great Salt Lake, which they believed was their Chosen Place, the Promised Land, as their great leader Brigham Young put it.

Feeling safe there, these industrious people settled, farmed, built, and prospered. They had a strong impulse to convert others to their faith. And they practiced plural marriage openly, at least until about 1890 when the Federal Government passed laws making polygamy a felony. Meantime LDS president Wilford Woodruff backed an edict called the Manifesto of 1890, which denounced plural marriages in Utah Territory. During following years, many confirmed polygamous families either went into hiding or sought other countries where plural marriage was permitted. At that time, Chihuahua, Mexico, was an obvious choice. It was close by, and, although polygamy was illegal there too, the government did not bother people with plural marriages.

Julia Sarah Abegg was the daughter of a Mormon family which in 1899 moved to Colonia Dublan, Chihuahua, 170 miles southwest of El Paso. Brought up and educated there, Julia maried Anson Bowen Call, becoming his fourth wife. The story of her life is the focus of this book. Julia was what might be called a "good wife," one who perfectly represented a married woman of her day, her place, her Mormon faith, and her culture. It appears from the evidence that she truly loved her husband and that he surely loved her. As husband and wife, the two had twelve children, ten of whom lived to adulthood.

The family, and other Mormon families with them, was forced to cross the Border to Tucson and elsewhere several times for their own safety during the Mexican Revolution, while for years competing armies ravaged Chihuahua. In spite of the dangers, Julia always returned to her home in Mexico as soon as matters settled down a little. And there she lived, and died, in 1937.

I don't know of a more lively and moving account of the liife of a faithful, dutiful, warm-hearted woman of her day than the story of Julia Call. Fortunately for readers, Davis came to know Julia's daughter Lorna late in Lorna's life and interviewed her in depth about her mother. Thus this special book was written.

Hopi Summer: Letters from Ethel to Maud

Hopi Summer (winner of the ONEBOOKAZ award for 2011) is the story of a family's going west, but for different reasons than the Mormon migration westward.

Carey Melville, a professor of math at Clark Univesity in Massachusetts, decided in the fall of 1926 to take a sabbatical leave in order to see the West and tour much of the rest of the country besides. He, his wife Maud, and their three children packed "Hubbub," the brand new Model T Ford, and a trailer for camping and cooking gear, then set out to "tour" America, as people called such trips in those days. My own grandparents took a "tour" to Southern California from Michigan during Christmas season of 1924, went home, sold everything, including the family business, returned in the spring to Glendale, built a house, and settled down for the rest of their lives together.

The Melvilles' plan was to drive south to North Carolina to visit relatives while they loaded their camping supplies and repacked cooking gear, added spare parts for the Ford, metal water containers, and camera equipment, for Carey, a hobby photographer, wanted to take a lot of pictures. Over the nine months ahead, the family drove 17,671 miles, circling the country south into Florida, west through the Big Bend to San Diego, north to Seattle, then home again through Chicago. They drove muddy roads which were little more than trails, crossed creeks without bridges, and patched the Model T's tires. Carey patched them ten times on one day alone. In Albuquerque he bought four new ones.

Making a detour to the Hopi Mesas to visit a friend who was a Baptist missionary, Carey was fascinated by the photos the country offered, while Maud made friends with a Hopi woman, Ethel Muchvo. The heart of Hopi Summer lies in the correspondence betwen Maud and Ethel carried on over ten years. Maud's letters were lost. Ethel's fortunately were saved. They offer a rare view of the few pleasures, and of the daily trials of a Native American woman of the 1920s. They tell of her children, her pottery, her husband's corn and sheep, and of his long struggle with TB. This book is a gem. Every student of the lives of traditional Native American people should have a copy. ~DR