Across the Wide Missouri

Bernard DeVoto was an author and editor who worked in the first half of the 20^th Century. He wrote several works about Mark Twain and was the editor of a volume of Twain’s mainly unpublished works Letters from the Earth. He was also a historian of the early days of the American west.  I have just finished reading his book Across the Wide Missouri which deals mainly with the mountain men and fur companies of  the west in the 1830’s and the Indians they encountered but also covers the  Whitmans and other early missionaries to the Indians.

It is a fine and interesting book on a colorful and fascinating subject. DeVoto is a good writer, a thorough and  scrupulous collector of information, and a thoughtful and reasonable historian who makes a thoughtful and reasonable effort to separate fact from myth and tall tales and to be fair while still having an obvious point of view. He clearly admires the mountain men but does not romanticism them. He equally clearly is put off by the priggishness and  self righteousness of many of the missionaries but still recognizes their importance in history and their remarkable commitment and dedication.  He seems somewhat less fair when writing about the fur companies  (it was the 1940’s, and DeVoto was a colleague of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.),  but even there he generally gives them their due, and some of the things the companies did were pretty rough.

His treatment of the Indians is particularly noteworthy. While he is sympathetic to them and fully aware of the raw deals they got and the doleful consequences of their encounter with 19^th century civilization, he avoids the silly, Manichean ultra-Rousseauianism so popular in the last few years. His Indians are not presented as noble savages, pacifists, proto-ecologists, philosophers, or fonts of profound insights coincidentally dovetailing perfectly with the present day’s politically correct conventional wisdom. (There was enough of that even his time that he lampoons it a bit.) Instead he tries to show them as they really were -  a Neolithic, superstitious, often warlike people with complex and varied habits and traits, some admirable and some not, and with significant differences among the tribal groups. He tries to tell the truth about the Indians and their interactions with the whites and with each other.  (His thorough and convincing debunking of the myth of smallpox epidemics among Indians being caused intentionally, usually by infected blankets, is  a good example.)   

The book is also just fun. DeVoto writes with good humor. His prose is lively, and he likes a good yarn, even the ones he points out as false. I recommend it. For people weary of the boring and tendentious leftist morality plays that often masquerade as works of history today, it should be an especially welcome change.  His book The Year of Decision 1846 is also good.