Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/123

 would have done well to have utilized Hedges' recent work on Henry Villard and the Railways of the Northwest. In the discussion of agriculture the author goes from fact to fancy. To him, apparently, agriculture has no history aside from irrigation. The present plan of the Northwest to manipulate through congress, after the manner of Boulder Dam, the Columbia Basin project, receives more attention than agriculture, flour milling, dairying, horticulture, lumbering, shipping, development of power or development of communities. In short the last two chapters come somewhat as an anti-climax. If it was his purpose to give a history since the Civil war the book is practically worthless. If it was his purpose to close the book with the Civil war period, it would seem the work should have been entitled "The Early History of the Pacific Northwest" with the Northwest defined as that part contained within the United States.

The book is well documented, containing some forty-three pages of notes, and deserves recognition among the histories of the region.

"University of Oregon"

The geographical setting of this volume is the region between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean, and the period covered extends, as the title indicates, from the time of the wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca to the middle of the nineteenth century. Obviously the reviewer can give only a general summary of the contents of a work with such a broad scope.

The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with the period before the Louisiana purchase, and is divided into two lengthy chapters. The opening chapter is entitled "Spain against France," which is descriptive of the contents devoted to Spanish explorations and colonial enterprises in the southwest before 1762 and to French activities west of the Mississippi. The title of the second chapter, "Louisiana under Spain" is less indicative of its scope, for it deals not only with Louisiana, but also with the Spanish occupation of California, the voyages of the Spanish, Russians, English and Americans along the Pacific coast, and happenings in the southwest. The second part covers the American period following the Louisiana purchase, divided into five chapters averaging about sixty pages each. Here are presented accounts of explorations, fur trade development and decline, Indian affairs, the settlement of the first states west of the Mississippi, the early migrations to Oregon, the Mexican War and the acquisition of California, and kindred subjects.

The author has deliberately chosen an unusually rigid chronological order for his narrative, and hence the reviewer cannot complain because he has followed it. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether adherence to such a plan is productive of the most satisfactory results. The extreme effects of this method of writing are