Book Review by Lee H. Whittlesey: From Sail to Trail: Chronicling Yellowstone’s E.S. Topping (self-published by the author, 2008) by Robert V. Goss.

The latest in a series of self-published booklets by Robert Goss, this one is no better than its predecessors and is a perfect illustration of what sometimes happens when amateurs—even ones who have done some reading in corners of local history—attempt to write history. Mr. Goss has chosen an innocuous and uninspiring person to chronicle, apparently taking his title from the book that Eugene Topping produced in 1883 (we have a copy here in the Yellowstone Library) entitled Chronicles of the Yellowstone (St. Paul: Pioneer Press, 1883). While that book stands tall in the history of early Montana Territory and Yellowstone National Park, E.S. Topping’s life is infinitely less tall and Mr. Goss’s treatment of it will probably not add to historians’ interest in or deep understanding of his obscure life. This spiral-bound booklet being sold on a website (http://www.geocities.com/geysrbob/Content_Links.html) leaves much to be desired.

Inexplicably starting his book at “page 3” (which strangely goes to page “2” at the “Foreword”), the author immediately presents the reader with a confusing “splash panel”—an 1883 map of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming captioned with an explanation that “the mapmakers misidentified the Northern Pacific RR as the Union Pacific RR.” This is a totally irrelevant caption for those of us trying to figure out what the map has to do with the book’s subject matter, namely E.S. Topping. Thus Mr. Goss immediately displays an annoying tendency to do no basic analysis or proper labeling for us and instead lets the reader guess at his purpose for including the map. A simple statement such as “showing the country as it was interpreted during the time that E.S. Topping lived” would have gone far to decrease our confusion and make the book look less amateurish, but that is one of the problems with many self-published books—they receive no prepublication peer-review and thus cannot benefit from the careful scrutiny of what should have been numerous readers.

A “Foreword” written by the author would have been better written by someone else in order to indicate that the manuscript had been read by others. Instead Goss writes it himself and leads us through some mundane and at times downright corny summaries of Topping’s life, including a hackneyed discussion of water as one of the basic elements of our lives and how it influenced Eugene Topping. One reference to the “mighty Atlantic Ocean” was corny enough, but a few paragraphs later Goss gets cornier and more repetitious by referring to the Yellowstone River as the “mighty river” and a bit later (p. 4) to the “mighty Columbia.” At least on page six, a reference to the North Atlantic Ocean is “tempestuous” rather than “mighty.” Prepublication readers/reviewers could have helped the author’s vocabulary here, and those same readers would probably have advised the author to omit the Foreword’s final bit of hackneyed corniness: “from sea to shining sea.” This kind of writing generally heralds an inexperienced and amateurish author, and here it sets the stage for the entire book.

Mr. Goss’s inclusion of a sidebar (p. 3—the second such numbered page) from the town of Trail, British Columbia would have been interesting and useful had he relabeled its heading into something like “Topping: Father of the Town of Trail, British Columbia.” Instead the sidebar merely proclaims “Father of Trail—Colonel Topping,” and because we have no idea that “Trail” refers to a town (let alone one in British Columbia), we are immediately confused into wondering what trail Topping blazed or built. We also wonder whether E.S. Topping was ever really a “colonel,” and that question is never addressed or answered.

Mr. Goss seems to love sidebars but does not explain their relevance to us very well; nor does he know when or how to use them. Instead of labeling the sidebar (p. 8) “Wreck of the Ship Persian April 1853,” why not help the reader by labeling it something like “Topping’s Seafaring Father Saves a Ship in Distress, 1853”? Likewise, page eleven’s “Story of James M. Worth” would have made more sense if it were labeled something like “Biography of James M. Worth, Who Must Have Told His Stories to E.S. Topping.” Sidebars on pages 40, 41, and 60-62 are hardly connected to Topping’s story at all and seem to have been included merely because the author found them interesting. However, a sidebar labeled “E.S. Topping” (p. 57) is highly relevant—so much so that it should have been included in the main text and analyzed for accuracy and meaning rather than being placed as a sidebar.

The book’s organization, or lack thereof, further confuses the reader. The author has elected to use mere quotations instead of chapter titles to separate the book’s main sections. After I figured this out, I could more easily negotiate my way through the text, but that plan is not immediately evident even to a relatively sophisticated reader—let alone to a casual one. All of these quotations are unattributed, so we have no idea from whence the author obtained them. In light of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, perhaps that is okay, but some of them are downright mysterious, such as the alleged quotation on page six, which is credited only to “Old Indian Saying.” What Indians said it, when, and where? How do we know it was an “old Indian saying”? Goss does not tell us. Nor does he tell us the source of the supposed “Chinese Proverb” on page fifty. We are left to wonder and to be suspicious.

Mr. Goss’s attempts to compare E.S. Topping with William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody—apparently undertaken because the two men died in the same year—are a stretch, with the author at one point admitting in a hackneyed phrase that Topping, unlike Cody, “almost vanished into the fading pages of time.” Notwithstanding the author’s statement (p. 4) that “neither one was buried in the town that made them [him] famous,” Mr. Topping was anything but famous while Mr. Cody certainly was. I remain unconvinced that there is a legitimate analogy between the two men, especially when the discussion is accompanied by Goss’s annoyingly poor punctuation: italicizing the towns of Cody, Wyoming and Trail, British Columbia for no apparent reason; abbreviating “captain” as “Capt.” for no apparent reason; and failing to set off appositives with commas (“eastern gateway to Yellowstone Park”). In one place the author uses dashes instead of commas (p. 3), and throughout the book he seems uncertain as to how those punctuative marks should be used.

Goss refers to Eugene’s ancestor Thomas Topping three times as “Captain” Topping (p. 6). Although the author mentions that he was appointed “Captain of the Banded Soldiers” of town and was “reportedly captain of a whaling vessel,” Goss misses an opportunity to elucidate for us a bit more about this alleged captaincy from a time when such annoying fake titles could be bestowed on anyone who did not deserve it by anyone who felt like it. The statement that Thomas Topping was “reportedly captain of a whaling vessel” is inadequate documentation, and the same criticism can be leveled at the author’s use of “Captain” to apply to Edward Doane Topping (“believed to have been captain”—p. 7). We want to know whether these people were really “captains,” but the author uses the titles without telling us or discussing the problem. Suffice it to say that Goss assumes that Eugene Topping’s forebears were “captains,” so as to pave the way for Eugene to become a “captain.” Whether they were or were not real captains, a bit more discussion on the subject and its possibilities would have helped our understanding, even if the author were to end up stating that he ultimately did not know.

The writing in this book abounds with corniness and hackneyed phrases. These include “lady luck…smiled upon him” (p. 5); sail the “Seven Seas” (p. 12); “the westward march of our nation” (p 14); “the [railroad’s] shining ribbons of steel” (p. 14); “mile after mile through the forbidding wilderness” (p. 14); “summers unbearably hot and the winters brutally cold” (p. 15); gold in “them thar hills” (p. 18); “spent the night…under the stars” (p. 21); “wanderlust again filled the soul of Topping” (p. 56); “the lure of glittering gold” (p. 13); and “survive the test of time” (p. 30). Such overused and stereotyped phrases would probably have disappeared had the author found legitimate reviewers to examine his manuscript.

In many sentences, the author’s writing is not grammatically incorrect but merely awkward. These include: “Coupled with fear from enemies at sea, the Civil War created fear among the populace surrounding New York Harbor” (p. 12); “The lure of the West caught hold in Topping’s soul” (p. 14); “its glory was short-lived and by 1872 both towns had already approached ghost town status” (p. 17); “prodded on by his lack of mining success” (p. 18); “as a hunter, the abundant wildlife of the area certainly would have caught his attention” (p. 19); and finally “During the spastic throes…that then…that later…”(p. 25). I thought this last sentence would never end.

In other places, the book’s writing is both dull and unclear. For example, the paragraph on waters near Moriches (p. 8) would have been more interesting and less confusing to us if it were tied into an opening topic sentence about E.S. Topping, such as this: “Growing up on these shipwreck-strewn waters must have stimulated young Topping’s imagination.” Instead, Goss confuses us with a discussion of “lifesaving stations,” bores us with where they were located and how many there were, and only later in the paragraph finally remembers to mention E.S. Topping.

I found myself left with many questions regarding factual statements in the book. The author refers twice to “Indian campaigns” (Sioux war?) in which Topping allegedly participated (pp. 4-5). Perhaps I missed them, but what campaigns were these and where did they occur? If “34,000 wolves were killed during the years 1871-75” (p. 25), where were they killed? (In Montana? In the U.S. as a whole? In only the American West?) Did the “vast global commerce that developed at Sag Harbor” (p. 9) really develop there or was Sag Harbor merely a cog in a much bigger wheel of such commerce? How do we know that Eugene’s older brother “went to sea at age seventeen” (p. 9)? (Did I miss the citation for this? Was he an influence on Eugene? Why was he more or less of an influence than James Worth?) Such statements require a bit more discussion and documentation, and should not merely be a recitation of supposed facts.

Likewise, the statement “Eugene was probably influenced by his brother-in-law James M. Worth” (p. 10) needs a bit more backup. Considering that Worth was twenty-four years older than Eugene, why does the author think this? Can we document that Worth spent a good deal of time around Eugene? Or is the author only presuming time spent with Worth? We need to be told why and then given a citation for the source, not left to draw such conclusions for ourselves based upon sidebars, alleged facts, and inadequate documentation. The sidebar on James Worth (p. 11) should have been dissected and used in analysis for a discussion of how Worth influenced Topping rather than being reproduced as a sidebar. If the author cannot show evidence of Worth’s influence on Topping, then the side bar should be omitted as irrelevant.

I wanted to read further about James Worth but the URL at endnote 18 is not functional: http://longislandgenealogy.com/worth/James_Worth.htm. Using internet citations can be risky, because they are easily mistyped and websites can disappear. Another example appears on page ten (notes 16 and 17) where the URL www.newsday.com/community/lihistory again does not seem to work. This is one reason why many authorities advise citing real books or periodicals rather than the internet.

The tendency for many writers to use internet citations rather than more reputable ones is really a commentary on current society rather than a swipe at this particular author. Through internet (potentially shallow) research, books can sometimes be produced too quickly with less-than-thorough documentation. I teach my undergraduate students to be skeptical of what they find on the internet, and these URLs illustrate why all authors and researchers should do the same.

One sentence, while painting a nice word picture, seems questionable to me. “Ship captains returning from exotic ports who had seen indescribable wonders bellied up to waterfront bars to swap lies and recount fantastic yarns of whaling adventures and life on the sea” (p. 9). This sounds more like something pulled from the author’s imagination than documented by anything that he read from history. Is this fiction? Or is there a study somewhere that backs up this picture? If so, the correct procedure would be to cite such a study and then “endnote” it by saying something like, “The picture given here is, of course, speculative, but so-and-so-work-of-reputable-history paints such wharf scenes for us.”

Mr. Goss’s booklet contains numerous individual problems, far more than I can list. There are spelling errors (“Gardiner” for Gardner River [p. 50]; and “descendents” for descendants [p. 12] and endnotes 196 and 197), tense shifts (“forts were…attacked and…other clashes stand out…” [p. 18]), too much usage of the passive voice (pp. 14, 18, and dozens of others), redundancies (“sloping Continental Divide” [p. 17]; “much heavier: and then “40 pounds heavier” [p. 19]), incorrect use of possessives (“William’s” when the form should be Williams’s [p. 30]); improper use of single quotation marks (‘Horn’—p. 18); and the hyphenating of words for no good reason (“oft-times,” “non-existent,” and “none-the-less” [pp. 7, 55] are incorrect, because the words are ofttimes, nonexistent, and nonetheless). I wondered whether the spelling of Topping’s town was “Sag Harbor” (p. 9, lines 2, 5, and 8) or “Sagg Harbor” (pp. 7, 9 photo captions). A photo captioned “Topping Point” (p. 26) is incorrectly labeled. It was not snapped from Topping Point near the outlet of Yellowstone River, because one cannot see Mount Sheridan from that point. Goss’s place names are sometimes inconsistent in form (“Topping’s Point,” p. 33, versus “Topping Point,” p. 34) or incorrect altogether (as a place name, Storm Point has replaced “Curiosity Point” and the two refer to the same feature, so “Curiosity Point” is not located “just west of Storm Point”—p. 34). And occasionally we are treated to a sentence fragment (“All this while fighting and subduing Native Americans…” [p. 53]) or to something that is darn near a run-on sentence: “Topping fully believed in the tenets of western expansionism and felt that the West needed to be wrested from the hands of the Native Americans and brought to bear fruit and blossom with the civilization of modern development.” (p. 54).

Strangely, Mr. Goss seems to believe that all direct quotations should be placed in italics. He continues this annoying practice throughout the book in accordance with no authority’s approved mode or style.

A photo captioned “CSS Shenandoah” (p. 13) has little to do with the story of E.S. Topping, and the author adds to our confusion by including a long caption that has even less to do with his main text. Likewise, James Waddell (p. 12), having little to do with Topping, should have been consigned to an endnote if even mentioned at all. This tendency to “go off” into side events and side personalities that have little relevance to the main story line happens far too often in this book to keep a reader oriented. Mr. Goss tends to freewheel through various events in which Topping is only peripherally involved, too often giving us long information on those events but nothing substantial about what our central character did in them. As a result, we get more information about miners in the Clark’s Fork area (p. 18) than we need and less about Topping than we want. At times, the author goes so far afield in his side stories that we completely forget about Mr. Topping, and we—at least I—become hopelessly confused. Perhaps that is only my problem, but I do not think so.

Apparently unable to find sufficient material on Topping’s time with the Union Pacific Railroad, Mr. Goss pads his narrative with well known details about what it was like for others who worked on that railroad. Predictably, he includes a sidebar about “Union Pacific Railroad Construction,” which, given his other materials on pp. 14-16, is totally unnecessary. Another such sidebar (p. 20) is far too long, considering that it barely relates to Topping and instead is a biography of Dwight Woodruff. Two other sidebars about the Grahams and the Tracys (pp. 29-30) are interesting to those of us who care about Yellowstone trivia but not that relevant in a book about E.S. Topping. One gets the feeling that the author is sometimes reaching with difficulty to find material that relates to his central character but also wants to impress us with the depth of his research findings in areas other than Mr. Topping.

We would be more impressed if he could efficiently cite those findings. There are so many citational errors in this book (pp. 85-92) that pointing them all out seems about as easy as counting grains of sand on a beach, but a few of them are as follows. In endnotes 11 and 12 appears the mysterious and inadequate citation “Carolee.” (This reference does not appear in the bibliography, but I finally found her in the Acknowledgements; where this person is concerned, the author ignores the basic citational rule regarding interviewees: tell us their full names, where they are located, and the dates of interviews or else do not use them!) Mr. Goss is never quite of sure of what words to put into italics, placing types of manuscripts (“draft thesis” in endnote 48), places of publication (endnote 48), publishers (endnote 48), descriptions of sources (“excerpt of a poem” in endnote 52), volume numbers (endnote 125), titles of photographs (p. 28), and titles of unpublished manuscripts (endnote 60) all into italics when they should not be so italicized. Conversely, he often does not italicize newspaper names when they should be so italicized (endnotes 55, 73, 79, 80, 86, 109-111, 128, 132-134, and others) and he inconsistently underlines some titles (pp. 25, 47 photo captions) while italicizing others. One wishes that he had given us page numbers when citing Leeson’s History of Montana and A.W. Bowen Company’s Progressive Men of Montana, because these are huge volumes. Finally, in his endnotes, Goss constantly, unnecessarily, and annoyingly uses the word “Note” when the endnote itself is already a note. This redundancy reaches a ridiculous height in endnote 53, when he says: “Note [that] Leeson noted in his Topping biography…” At this point, I as a reader “threw up my hands.”

All of these problems make From Sail to Trail appear poorly done and untrustworthy, and all together they underscore the conclusion that Mr. Goss is an amateur who is out of his league in attempting such a book.

However, no book is all bad and there are a few good things about this book—a family photo of someone who is probably Topping as a youth (p. 12); numerous other photos of Topping (from “descendents”); and the included information on Topping’s founding of the town of Trail, British Columbia (dull though it is at times). And I do like this sentence (p. 10): “One can imagine Eugene as a child listening to stories of the sea from old salts who, as old men do, glamorize the past, and forget or neglect to mention the dangers, hardships, and hazards involved in life at sea.” Aside from the fact that dangers and hazards are essentially one and the same, I like the sentiment in the sentence and the picture that it paints. The sentence is a “rose in the midst of many briers.”

This all said, everything that I have mentioned so far in From Sail to Trail can be corrected—with great effort, to be sure—because most of it is less than permanent. However, a more substantial problem appears on page six in the sentence that reads as follows: “Inhabited by several tribes of Algonquin Indians, they called this island Paumonock.” Another occurs on page 21: “When they returned to Mammoth, tales of their discovery soon reached the ears of a party of visitors.” In producing sentences like these, the author shows that he seems not to understand basic syntax. The first part of sentence one is a dangling participial phrase that does not properly modify the sentence’s subject they. In sentence two, I found myself wondering whether the tales themselves returned to Mammoth.

Here we see the difference between an historian and a researcher. Historians must possess absolute mastery of the English language plus the ability to do sophisticated historical analysis. Both are skills that involve critical thinking, obtained from long instruction and study. A researcher does not necessarily need either of those skills and functions more surficially. Mr. Goss is, at best, a researcher.

Still, researchers do provide a needed service (I think) because historians cannot cover all corners of history. So even with all of this book’s difficulties, perhaps we should thank Mr. Goss for his efforts. As he ramblingly and a bit awkwardly notes: “Many of these people, including Bancroft, were not formally trained in historical research and some [of their] information may [thus] be suspect, but overall a tremendous amount of valuable information was gathered [by them] that might otherwise have been lost” (p. 55).

In that vein, perhaps From Sail to Trail is worth the paper it is printed on. But even if it saves information for future generations, the book itself is overwhelmingly amateurish and generally disappointing.