Book Review originally published in Montana the Magazine of Western History
After the Fires: The Ecology of Change in Yellowstone National Park. Linda L. Wallace, Editor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004).
Illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, index. vii-x + 390 pp. $64.77 cloth.
The 1988 Yellowstone fires were a seminal event in the history and ecology of Yellowstone National Park and the American West. Called the nation’s first “prime time” forest fires because of their dramatic depiction on network television (p. ix), they changed the way America looked at forest fires. At least 53 fires, most caused by lightning, burned across more than one-third of Yellowstone’s 2.2 million acres. Now sixteen years later, 27 scientists and ecologists are reporting on what we have learned ecologically from those fires. After the Fires, says its editor, is an attempt to remedy the problem “that ecologists have not always communicated results of such studies effectively to natural resource managers” (p. 362).
Most of the book is not for general readers. It is hard science that presents and explains the methodology, discussions, and conclusions of the thirteen included studies. Most readers will probably be satisfied to peruse only the first and last chapters, those dealing with the history and chronology of the fires and the summary of what we have learned from them.
According to this book, almost all of the ecological conclusions that scientists have reached postulate that the fires were not negative but rather were positive for regeneration of the diversity of the landscape (p. 368). Using the geomorphology of debris flows to date fires, two researchers now say fires of this scale have occurred relatively often in the past and will likely recur in the future—on the order of 5-17 times every 1000 years, depending on climate. Seven studies demonstrated that the park’s recovery to prefire conditions is occurring relatively rapidly, “surprising for most people given that the visual effects of the fire are still quite dramatic” (p. 365). The “leaf-area” of the park’s lodgepole pine forests recovered to pre-fire levels by 1997 because of regrowth of herbaceous plants that retain nutrients and water and because of improved nutrient retention in soil shielded by fallen woody debris. Recently burned sites appeared to be comparatively resistant to invasion by exotic plants (p. 369). Variation in stream flows was caused more by annual climate than by fire. Effects of fires on fish populations were temporary or indiscernible. Animal researchers have stated that the fires jeopardized no animal species, although the results for moose are not yet complete. And “immediately following the fires, overall grass and meadow production was stimulated and remained higher than prefire levels for at least five years” (p. 367).
The editor concludes that “all of these studies support the assertion that sustainable management of preserves such as Yellowstone depends on our ability to accommodate natural disturbances [like fire] and the processes of change that derive from it.” She says the studies show that “wholesale, large-scale responses [by humans] may end up being out of proportion to the responses of the ecosystem” (p. 369). Most important for managers, the editor concludes that seed planting by humans, restocking of fish, and artificial feeding of animals may actually aid other problems (such as alien species invasions and diseases) and may actually slow ecosystem recovery following large fires.
After the Fires represents the recordation of important new science by experts and their recommendations to land managers for the future.
Lee Whittlesey
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Friday, October 30, 2009
Book Review originally published in Montana Magazine of Western History
Mountain Spirit: The Sheep Eater Indians of Yellowstone, Lawrence L. Loendorf and Nancy Medaris Stone. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2006. Illustrations, map, notes bibliography, index. 224pp. $19.95 paper.
Archeologist Lawrence Loendorf at New Mexico State University and writer/editor Nancy Stone have combined their talents to produce a book that has long been needed by historians of the northern Rockies. W.A. Allen’s 1913 book The Sheepeaters has been in disrepute for many years, and incorrect information about this tribe of Mountain Shoshones that inhabited the fastnesses of the northern Rockies has abounded since Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872. Loendorf and Stone have set out to correct such misnomers as 1) The Sheepeaters and Indians in general did not inhabit Yellowstone; 2) the Sheepeaters were physically small in size (“a pygmy tribe”); 3) the Sheepeaters were cowards or at least timid; 4) the Sheepeaters were retarded or otherwise mentally deficient; and 5) the Sheepeaters were afraid of Yellowstone’s geysers. None of these assertions is true, although white writers have long (and inaccurately) reported all of them as “fact.”
Instead the Mountain Shoshones were a robust people, full of talented artisans who made powerful bows from sheep horns, well-tailored clothing, and intelligently designed shelters. Loendorf and Taylor wish to present them as the historic, archeological, and ethnological evidence suggests that they really were: “intelligent, inventive, congenial tenants of a high-latitude landscape that they occupied without initiating conflict” (p. 1).
Loendorf set the stage for this book in his earlier book, co-authored with UCLA’s Peter Nabokov, entitled Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), but now he expands on what he presented then. We learn the details of the Sheepeaters’ well known bow making, minutiae about their steatite pottery that still can be found among Wyoming mountains, and even how they made the poison that tipped their arrows (“a compound made of the spleen of an animal mixed with crushed red ants, which produced a deadly poison”—p. 131). In individual chapters, Loendorf and Stone examine clothing manufacture, dwellings, hunting strategies, diet, and even the Sheepeater dogs that have become known to some observers.
The book contains a surprising amount of detail, considering the supposed dearth of Sheepeater material for so many years. Of particular interest is a chapter entitled “Living among the Powerful Spirits,” about Sheepeater religion and mythology. Ecological in focus, Sheepeater religion was centered on spirit entities that were embodied in meteorological forces and animals, and those forces were thought to control the dynamics of the mountain environment. These were defined as “sky people” (birds), “ground people” (animals), and “water people” (more than simply fish, these were water ghosts who lived in lakes and streams, which could be huge and heavy in size and weight). Perhaps a titillating bit of early sexual fantasy is revealed in the female water ghost Pa waip, who was believed to lure men into water on the pretext of a sexual liaison, after which consummation she captured and drowned them (p. 40). A great number of petroglyphs of female water ghosts have been found in the vicinity of Thermopolis, Wyoming, suggesting that that area somehow lent itself to the existence of these female water spirits.
Considering the reputation of its senior author and the writing ability of the junior author (which spices the work considerably), this is a book that will probably influence our thinking about the Mountain Shoshones for years to come.
Lee H. WhittleseyYellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Mountain Spirit: The Sheep Eater Indians of Yellowstone, Lawrence L. Loendorf and Nancy Medaris Stone. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2006. Illustrations, map, notes bibliography, index. 224pp. $19.95 paper.
Archeologist Lawrence Loendorf at New Mexico State University and writer/editor Nancy Stone have combined their talents to produce a book that has long been needed by historians of the northern Rockies. W.A. Allen’s 1913 book The Sheepeaters has been in disrepute for many years, and incorrect information about this tribe of Mountain Shoshones that inhabited the fastnesses of the northern Rockies has abounded since Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872. Loendorf and Stone have set out to correct such misnomers as 1) The Sheepeaters and Indians in general did not inhabit Yellowstone; 2) the Sheepeaters were physically small in size (“a pygmy tribe”); 3) the Sheepeaters were cowards or at least timid; 4) the Sheepeaters were retarded or otherwise mentally deficient; and 5) the Sheepeaters were afraid of Yellowstone’s geysers. None of these assertions is true, although white writers have long (and inaccurately) reported all of them as “fact.”
Instead the Mountain Shoshones were a robust people, full of talented artisans who made powerful bows from sheep horns, well-tailored clothing, and intelligently designed shelters. Loendorf and Taylor wish to present them as the historic, archeological, and ethnological evidence suggests that they really were: “intelligent, inventive, congenial tenants of a high-latitude landscape that they occupied without initiating conflict” (p. 1).
Loendorf set the stage for this book in his earlier book, co-authored with UCLA’s Peter Nabokov, entitled Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), but now he expands on what he presented then. We learn the details of the Sheepeaters’ well known bow making, minutiae about their steatite pottery that still can be found among Wyoming mountains, and even how they made the poison that tipped their arrows (“a compound made of the spleen of an animal mixed with crushed red ants, which produced a deadly poison”—p. 131). In individual chapters, Loendorf and Stone examine clothing manufacture, dwellings, hunting strategies, diet, and even the Sheepeater dogs that have become known to some observers.
The book contains a surprising amount of detail, considering the supposed dearth of Sheepeater material for so many years. Of particular interest is a chapter entitled “Living among the Powerful Spirits,” about Sheepeater religion and mythology. Ecological in focus, Sheepeater religion was centered on spirit entities that were embodied in meteorological forces and animals, and those forces were thought to control the dynamics of the mountain environment. These were defined as “sky people” (birds), “ground people” (animals), and “water people” (more than simply fish, these were water ghosts who lived in lakes and streams, which could be huge and heavy in size and weight). Perhaps a titillating bit of early sexual fantasy is revealed in the female water ghost Pa waip, who was believed to lure men into water on the pretext of a sexual liaison, after which consummation she captured and drowned them (p. 40). A great number of petroglyphs of female water ghosts have been found in the vicinity of Thermopolis, Wyoming, suggesting that that area somehow lent itself to the existence of these female water spirits.
Considering the reputation of its senior author and the writing ability of the junior author (which spices the work considerably), this is a book that will probably influence our thinking about the Mountain Shoshones for years to come.
Lee H. WhittleseyYellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
"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.
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.
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