"Pack Trains and Pay Dirt": A Review

Book Review of Robert V. Goss’s Pack Trains and Pay Dirt in Yellowstone: On the Trail with Whispering George Huston (Bozeman: Insty-Prints, 2007).
by Lee H. Whittlesey.

The age of self-publishing and the Internet has made the historian’s task more difficult, because anyone can now easily publish any unsophisticated book or article that claims to be history and make it available to large numbers of people with none of the accompanying peer review that has protected readers of history until now. Kim Scott of Montana State University has pointed out that only in the history field, can amateurs pose as historians and thus create great havoc. “Doctors and lawyers have to have licenses to perform surgery and lawsuits,” says Scott, “but not historians.” Thus every time that one of these less-than-genuine history pieces is published, it has the potential to cause trouble for historians by a) giving out incorrect information and b) confusing the public as to what constitutes “real” history.

Such is the case with Robert Goss’s Pack Trains and Pay Dirt. Although this 88-page pamphlet fills a void by relating some of the history of an early Yellowstone character named George Huston, it is, all things considered, an amateurish job. The author attempts to tell the story of George Huston’s life in Yellowstone National Park—a story that has not been spaded before—from Huston’s arrival on the scene as a gold prospector in 1864 until his death in 1886. In many cases, the author has done adequate research, but research alone does not make a book.

Like so many others of his type, George Huston was an early-day hanger-on in Yellowstone who initially arrived to prospect the gulches and then remained in the area when he saw the possibility of making a slim but less precarious living by other means. Like so many others of his time, he dreamed of making the great gold strike but never “hit the mother lode,” and so contented himself by guiding, freighting, and specimen selling in the new national park so that he could continue his prospecting. He was mentioned in a fair number of early diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and other Yellowstone accounts, but the lack of an autobiographical account by Huston himself or a lengthy discussion about him by a compatriot consigns today all of what we know about Mr. Huston to short, unsatisfying snippets. Through these snippets, author Goss has attempted to insert Huston into numerous larger events of early park days. The result, unfortunately, is downright confusing in many places.

Huston arrived in Yellowstone in 1864, following his release from civil war duty. He made at least one trip into the park that year, apparently making what was probably the earliest viewing of an eruption of Giantess Geyser. What he did in 1865 is not precisely known, but he could have been one of the men prospecting in early 1866 with “Uncle” Joe Brown near present Gardiner, Montana. A Bozeman newspaper noted that “in the spring of 1866, Joe Brown and two others [Huston? A. Bart Henderson?] took out $1,800 at the mouth of the stream [Bear Gulch] in two weeks.” [“Mines of South-Eastern Montana,” Avant Courier, February 12, 1880, p. 1.]

Author Goss’s only attempt to summarize Huston’s life (p. 5) stated that Huston was “the first known permanent white resident of the park…[and] one of the founding fathers of Cooke City…aided in the rescue of the hapless Truman Everts, persevered as one of the earliest packers and guides in the park, prospected the Emigrant, Bear Creek and Clark’s Fork regions for [gold], and guided Gen. Howard in his search for…Chief Joseph during the Nez Perce forays of 1877.” This list does sum up Huston’s contributions, but the author has failed to discuss why these things were important, leaving us to place them in context for ourselves. He failed to postulate that because Huston was one of the leaders of several of the earliest prospecting parties of the region and proffered as a candidate for the park’s chief guide, he was probably greatly respected by his fellow men even if he was not formally educated. In that respect he was typical of many enterprising pioneers in the West who became “leaders of men” without more robust educational credentials.

But like so many of his day, Huston was not formally educated and that probably handicapped him, both in his leadership attempts and in his prospects for leaving us a more detailed history of his life. William Blackmore summarized George Huston’s existence in 1872 by discussing how these men operated at their mining sites. “The occupation of these old mountain men is somewhat remarkable,” wrote Blackmore. “In summers they prospect or mine. In the autumn hunt when a good shot can always manage to get a few loads of meat and from this some realize 200 H [sic] or 300 dollars which keeps them during the winter months and suffices to provide them with an outfit in the spring.” (Blackmore 1872:6, 86-87). Author Goss, who clearly used William Blackmore’s account, would have been well served to use this statement in his analysis of George Huston, for it referred to all prospectors, whether they were educated or not.

Problems with Pack Trains and Pay Dirt are numerous. Its title—apparently provided to the author by someone else—is nicely alliterative, but the author fails to tell us much about how George Huston utilized pack trains, and he mentions the “whispering” part of Huston’s name only briefly. One would hope that all elements used in a book title would be examined a bit less superficially. Other problems that the book suffers from are a lack of organization, a lack of historical analysis, citational difficulties, informational errors, irrelevancy of illustrations, and, above all, poor writing.

The book is poorly organized. It is loosely arranged by chronology, and that approach, while acceptable, could have used an outline-style layout to tighten the book up. The author’s use of quotations instead of chapter titles is confusing. He tends to tell us way too much about events that George Huston was only peripherally involved in, such as the Truman Everts story—two pages here could easily have been shortened to one. And he forgets to keep the reader oriented as to what George Huston was doing within each story and during each section of the book. The Matthew McGuirk story for example should have been written with Huston as the subject of its topic sentences, and the reader could thus have more easily figured out how Huston’s story related to McGuirk’s. Instead, we get more information about McGuirk than we needed and less about Huston than we wanted. Likewise much of the information about N.P. Langford and Harry Horr could have been omitted as unnecessary, and the author’s jumping around from Huston’s game hunting to his storytelling to his guiding to his alleged specimen-coating continually confuses the reader. Strong topic-sentences about Huston, along with transitional sentences using Huston to move us from section to section, could have cured these deficiencies, but the author apparently does not see the need for peer review of his writing before he publishes it. Likewise the entire Nez Perce story is too long and too detailed for a reader who simply wishes to know what George Huston had to do with that famous foray. Mr. Goss would have been better served to just give us the general story and point up for us where Huston fit in, while placing more detailed information (when it was needed) in endnotes.

The book utilizes little or no historical analysis. It does not analyze for us who Huston was or how he fits into the larger context of Yellowstone history and the history of the American West. The author fails to give us a good summary at the end of why Huston deserves to be remembered, what contributions he made, and (especially) why they were important to Yellowstone and the West. He fails to analyze why Huston was probably ignored as a possible “chief guide.” Could it have been because he was merely an uneducated “good old boy”? Huston, after all, was one of the few persons who were present in the upper Yellowstone country during the relevant period. Arguably, if he had not occupied his niche, someone else would have. Huston hung out in Yellowstone because he needed the work when he failed to find gold, and not because he loved Yellowstone or knew that much about the place. In that respect he was much like the many semi-literate ne’er-do-wells who similarly hang out here (and everywhere else) today. Yellowstone is a place where there were, are, and always will be low-level jobs taking care of tourists. Thus George Huston, it can be argued, was merely someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time to participate in some interesting adventures.

The author gets hung up writing about events that are merely peripheral to Huston, rather than concentrating on and analyzing Huston. Like many interested researchers, this author is good at finding obscure materials but not so good at helping us to understand his subject. He seems at times to forget whom he is writing about, as he freewheels into many events and fails to keep us oriented as to what George Huston is doing during those events.

Poor writing permeates the book. Included are tense shifts (p. 4, paragraph one; and p. 7, first complete paragraph), dangling participial phrases (p. 5, line 8), awkward sentence construction (p. 7, lines 23-26; and p. 68n22, final sentence.), poor punctuation (p. 17, lines 7, 16, and throughout the book), incorrect use of semicolons and single quotation marks, poor word choices (p. 5, lines 6-7 “commingles” instead of “associates”), and a general failure to use the “active voice” instead of the “passive voice.” Mr. Goss badly needs an editor.

Citational problems add to the reader’s confusion. Three examples are a muster roll illustration (p. 7) that is poorly cited; the 1988 edition of Robert Wallace’s book from Galleon Press cited with a 1915 date (p. 68n34); and endnote 30, which puzzlingly reads “30. Note: 31” and then cites a Truman Everts book (What does it mean?). The author has an annoying tendency to place the word “note” within his endnotes—a redundancy, as each endnote is already a note! Additionally the book could have used fewer informational notes and more citational notes. The author seems uncertain of how to cite book titles versus volume numbers (incorrectly making both a part of the title) as well as how to cite newspaper and magazine titles, although he seems to have gotten over his former bad habit of reversing authors’ names in endnotes. Occasionally his desire to tell us everything rather than keeping strictly to Huston’s story overwhelms him, as in endnote 17, where, instead of citing his source, he gives us irrelevant information about the park’s pre-1892 tourist route through Hayden Valley and then ends up with explanatory information about Legh Freeman. All of this adds to the reader’s confusion in trying to make sense out of many scattered events and geography. And, too, the author seems not to realize that explanatory endnotes, like citational ones, need to be cited with their own sources.

Informational errors abound in the book that could have been corrected with simple peer review. “Leigh” Freeman (p. 9) is really Legh Freeman, and Emma “Cowen” should be Cowan (p. 26). The author states that McGuirk’s wagon was the “first wheeled vehicle to travel into the park” (p. 13). Such claims of firsts are often avoided by experienced historians because they are risky, always open to the finding of an earlier example, and in this case, sure enough, F.V. Hayden’s horse-drawn, wheeled odometer driven by F.L. Goodfellow beat McGuirk’s wagon by days if not weeks into the park (Merrill, Yellowstone and the Great West, p. 126, 140). The author’s attempt to locate Huston’s original cabin site is a potentially worthy contribution, but he messes it up by not explaining why he believes it is the cabin site, what sources he used to reach that conclusion, and where the cabin was precisely located. He fails to tell us why we should believe him about the cabin’s location.

The book contains many illustrations that relate only peripherally to Huston himself, and thus they end up confusing the reader. For example, a map included as an opener in the pamphlet is captioned “Map of Yellowstone Park circa 1888, two years after George Huston’s death.” It would have made greater sense to find a map (and there are many) that dated from the very year of Huston’s death or from, say, 1880, when Huston was arguably making his greatest contributions to early Yellowstone—contributions that Mr. Goss does not explain well for us. Other illustrations are similarly peripheral; many have little to do with George Huston and seem to have been included merely because the author considered them to be interesting. These include the plaque memorializing Lord Blackmore’s wife (p. 18), the Harper’s Weekly image of geysers (p. 66), and “He Conquered the Sheepeaters” (p. 31).

In sum, Pack Trains and Pay Dirt leaves much to be desired. Future historians would do well to take “another look” at George Huston, but the man’s relative obscurity makes it likely that this author’s book will probably be all that we see about him for many years.

Lee H. Whittlesey
Professional Historian and Author

This review soon to be published in a history journal.