| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.3 | The History Cooperative

*Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience*. By Jennifer Eastman Attebery. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. xx + 305 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $20.00, paper.)
Whereas we often find that writers refer collectively to European immigrants, Jennifer Attebery deftly illustrates the particular lives of Swedes in the Rocky Mountain West of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She effectively explores their evolving Swedish identities and their networks with family members and friends left behind. Those networks were cultivated by correspondence that may have been formulaic in its organization of topics, but was revealing in the consistency of themes among various writers. At the same time, there is the compelling attraction of the West, its magnetism, mystery, mythology, violence, and promise of opportunities.	1
Drawing upon 331 letters from seventy-four men and women (noted in the book's appendix), Attebery engages in parallel yet overlapping endeavors: first, a folklorist's analysis of the letters as texts that can be deconstructed in order to draw out the vernacular writing styles and the codes and conventions that echoed Swedish oral traditions and, second, the correspondence as windows into Swedish—and gradually "Swedish American"—life in the West and the newcomers' perceptions of America's mountainous frontier.	. . .

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