Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/437



This book is more comprehensive than its subtitle would indicate. Part one gives the story of George Rogers Clark and the American conquest of the Old Northwest; part two is an account of the Lewis and Clark expedition; part three unfolds the work of William Clark, first as territorial governor of Missouri and then as United States Indian agent, in leading the Indian tribes westward before the advance of the white man.

The book gathers up, at different spots in Virginia, threads of adventure, romance, and war of certain national Ulyssean spirits, weaves them into our national history, carries them across the continent to the mouth of the Columbia, and bringing them back, with one main thread left, the author works a rosette with Saint Louis as the center. Or, to change the metaphor, she clears a highway from the Blue Ridge to the Mississippi and blazes a trail to the Pacific. It is a stupendous task that she essays, the story of the pressing back of the red race by the white, from the Alleghanies to beyond the Missouri, and the penetration of the white race to the Pacific.

Her style is admirably adapted to carry out such a work, but it is quite evident that a plan like that of Mrs. Dye's in "The Conquest" no more lends itself to art than did the lives of the successive generations of pioneers who carried the frontier from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific. Though the lone explorers and pathfinders led very plain