Nicolaas Mink

a narrative for NATURE'S NATION: CONSTANCE LINDSAY SKINNER AND THE MAKING OF RIVERS OF AMERICA

ABSTRACT

Most environmental historians are acquainted with Farrar and Rinehart's Rivers of America book series, but few know much about its genesis and context. This essay examines the six works edited by the series founder, Constance Lindsay Skinner, and argues that these books shed light on interwar environmental thought and suggest that environmental history, at least in its public form, is not as new as many historians in the field have supposed.

I was convinced that rivers—the perpetual motion in the quiet land—had had, and must ever have, a powerful influence on the temperament and imagination of mankind.

Constance Lindsay Skinner

ON A CHILLY early March night in 1939, the packed ballroom at New York City's Town Hall Club fell silent as Constance Lindsay Skinner approached the podium. Feeling slightly ill, the 61-year-old Canadian-born editor rose to deliver her talk about the founding and development of the series she had first envisioned nearly a decade before: Rivers of America. With the crowd's eyes intently upon her, Skinner proceeded to tell those in attendance that Americans were economically and culturally demoralized by the Depression and that they needed to rethink their past with an eye toward nature. By recasting the nation's history around its rivers and the landscapes they adorned, Skinner asserted, people could rekindle their nation's seemingly listless culture by seeing that their ancestors had created "a new faith and theory of government out of practical and physical struggle with the earth."¹

At the time of the Town Hall Club gala, Robert Coffin's Kennebec, Walter Havighurst's Upper Mississippi, Cecile Matschat's Suwannee River, Struthers Burt's Powder River, and Blair Niles's The James had already reached the public. These volumes garnered rave reviews from critics and their first printings all sold out within several months. The hunger for Rivers of America seemed insatiable. "Seeing place through the events which gives it meaning, and events before the background which conditions it," lauded New York Times reviewer Horace Reynolds, "this series offers the reader an intimate description of America which combines in new form history, geography and biogeography." This praise of a new and broader vision of history reads as if Reynolds were greeting the arrival of an early work by Samuel Hays or Roderick Nash. But the year was 1939—more than two decades before those pioneers of environ-mental history made their debuts.²

Figure 1. Constance Lindsay Skinner.

Courtesy Constance Lindsay Skinner Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Skinner was founder of Rivers of America and editor of its first six volumes. Though forgotten by modern-day environmental historians, Skinner's story sheds new light on the beginnings of the field, especially in its public form.

Skinner's warm reception at the New York City event came as no surprise to the Rivers of America publishers, Stanley Rinehart and John Farrar, who described the project as "a consistently truer picture of what Americans as a people are than history has yet been able to afford." What does come as a surprise is the near-total neglect of these volumes by later generations of environmental historians. Some scholars, to be sure, have acquainted themselves with a few of the outstanding titles in the series. Thomas Clark's The Kentucky, August Derleth's Wisconsin: Rivers of 1000 Isles, Stanley Vestal's Missouri, and most famously Marjory Stoneman Douglas's The Everglades: River of Grass have become classics to environmentalists and historians alike, and for good reason: Works like these helped to shape America's proto-environmental consciousness for more than a generation. Altogether the series ran to 65 volumes published over the span of 37 years, and offered chronicles of 122 rivers. With more than 350 total printings, millions of copies have been sold. Even today, a third of the books remain in print through the efforts of regional and university presses. But Rivers of America authors' penchant for blurring the boundaries between history and fiction and their ability to defy simple literary and historical categorization have kept environmental historians from fully appreciating the significance of the series.³

Rivers of America deserves our attention because it was such an overwhelming success in introducing the public to a prototypical form of environmental history decades before its emergence in professional form. The appearance of a popular series in the 1930s dedicated to probing the dynamics of culturally diverse people who transformed and were transformed by the landscapes of different regions represents something quite unique, even when one keeps in mind that this era represented the height of the regionalist movement in the United States. During this period, America's intellectuals (often with federal funds to support them) embarked on a host of regional cultural projects, ranging from the Federal Writers Project's American Guide Books to the literature, history, and criticism of John Steinbeck, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Angie Debo, John Crowe Ransom, Walter Prescott Webb, and others. While the series reflected this contemporary paradigm—with its emphasis on organic connections to place, cultural pluralism, a distaste for modernity, and a longing for an idealized past—it is not enough simply to describe Rivers of America as an outgrowth of the American fascination with cultural and geographic regionalism. The project represents something unique because Skinner, collaborating with many of the country's foremost poets and artists, appropriated many of professional history's prized ideas, presenting them in a way that captivated the public as much as it troubled and frustrated many contemporary historians who had a vested interest in controlling the genteel, masculine, and monographic status quo of interwar historical discourse. In contrast to Skinner, most women regionalist thinkers entertained little intellectual or personal interaction with the academy.⁴

Figure 2. Rivers of America National Map.

Courtesy of Cleveland Public Library, Map Collection.

This map was created by Ernest Clegg and published by Farrar & Rinehart, 1942. Now a prized item for Rivers of America collectors, this forty-five-inch by twenty-eight-inch promotional map accompanied later volumes in the series into bookstores.

An in-depth look at Rivers of America can both deepen our understanding of interwar environmental thought—an area that Kendrick Clements and Paul Sutter admit continues to be intellectual terra in-cognita—and re-ar-range our thinking about the genesis and fruition of environ-mental history, both inside and outside the profession. Although the very effort to categorize the series risks simplifying the variety and complexity of these volumes, arriving at a fuller understanding of such an important publishing venture—one with the American environment at its core—just-ifies such an under-taking. Captained by a talented woman with no higher education and dealing with a subject and in a format that contemporary historians shunned, the series helps us to comprehend better the contested ground of academic discourse, professionalism, and historical memory. If we can allow ourselves to refashion our crystallized notions about the meaning and practice of history, Rivers of America suggests that environmental history, at least in its public form, is not as new as many in our field suppose.⁵

Figure 3. Partial List of Rivers Included in the Series.

Image courtesy of the author.

This partial list of rivers included in the series was published inside a later edition of Carl Carmer's The Hudson.

A BUDDING HISTORIAN

BORN DURING THE WINTER of 1877 at a Hudson Bay Company trading post along the Fraser River in Quesnel, British Columbia, Constance Lindsay Skinner grew up surrounded by Native American Cree, as well as French and British men and women who thrived off the fur trade in the remote outpost. At fourteen, she moved with her family to Vancouver, where she would soon embark on a distinguished, though now largely forgotten, literary career. During the first two decades of the century, moving from Canada to Los Angeles, Chicago, and finally New York, Skinner published prize-winning and internationally acclaimed plays, poems, novels, short stories and children's literature in publications that included Out West, Harper's Weekly, The Los Angeles Examiner, Ainslee's, The Bookman, Munsey's, Scribner's, and The Saturday Evening Post. Nearly all her works reflected adolescent experiences with Native American peoples and the Canadian wilderness on what she believed to be a palpably real frontier in British Columbia.⁶

While successful in these genres, Skinner's history-writing career began in 1918 when publisher Robert Glasgow, an acquaintance from Vancouver, asked her to participate in Yale University Press's Chronicles of America series. Edited by Allen Johnson and modeled after Glasgow's recently completed Chronicles of Canada, the planned fifty-volume series brought together men and women of letters both inside and outside the professional ranks in hopes of providing the American public with a more complete understanding of its past. Skinner accepted the invitation, completing two volumes about the American frontier: Pioneers of the Old Southwest: A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground (1919) and Adventures in Oregon: A Chronicle of the Fur Trade Period (1920). As Jean Barman has noted, this interest in both physical and metaphorical frontiers shaped the way Skinner envisioned the past: Skinner reified the past lives of others using her own life as a model. She had journeyed from a fur trading outpost to one of the largest cities in the world in three decades. Her own life's story, it seemed to her, mirrored much of North American history.⁷

Both works surpassed expectations. Glasgow called Pioneers of the Old Southwest a book "so good that it seems like an impertinence to praise it." Many inside and outside the history profession considered Pioneers the best new work on the late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century trans-Appalachian South. At first glance, the reasons for her success appear simple and straightforward: She had a knack for writing, a passionate love of the fur trading frontier, and a clairvoyant tone warmed by a sense of place. A passage about Major Patrick Ferguson in Pioneers of the Old Southwest illustrates this point nicely:

Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them of out bed to give fight or die. It was generally both fight and die, for these dark adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no neutrals or conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeiting ... Hence his wolfish fame. 'Werewolf' would have been a fit name for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the daylight he was a man and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one.⁸

This passage, replete with hyperbole, rhetorical bells and whistles, and flights of poetic prose, is characteristic of Skinner's style. But behind this free-flowing narrative lay a calculated critique of the then-fashionable "scientific history," which undervalued the literary element in historical writing and often accepted mediocre work because the profession privileged a doctoral degree over literary and historical acumen. To this end, Skinner's two contributions to the Chronicles of America series represent a radical literary and historical departure from others in the series. A Parkman-esque romanticism tinges her works. More than other authors, Skinner examined the lives of ordinary people of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. Finally, Pioneers of the Old Southwest and Adventures in Oregon reject the monographic style—the keystone to historical writing at that time. This point is important and deserves further consideration not only because it had a profound effect on the Rivers series, but also because it explains in part the neglect of the series by present-day historians who too often equate quality history exclusively with the monographic form.⁹

Skinner's essay, "History as Literature: And the Individual Definition," which appeared in the literary magazine, The Bookman, provides her most cogent critique of the hegemony of the monograph. History, for Skinner,

is dead stuff ... because the writers have not perceived that the drama of human feelings, motives, and inspirations is essential to true historical narrative, they have told us practically nothing about the character ... of the common people during significant periods. Hence the background of the acting scenes has been blank. Against a blank background figures move but they do not live ... Not linked, themselves, to the massed life of their period, they fail to link their period to ours through the human sympathy which makes all men and times intelligible and near.

This passage reflects the call for a "usable past" that one often heard in the 1920s and 1930s. Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, and other American men and women of letters criticized professional historians for their inability to reach a public audience. Yet the idea that a disregard for human emotions lay at the heart of this problem was uniquely Skinner's. She realized, quite astutely, that monographs lent themselves to academic interpretations, not to human empathy. In its broadest terms, then, Skinner's contributions to Chronicles of America can be seen not as a rejection of history itself, but rather as a critique of the monograph, which failed to incorporate the impulse-driven emotional makeup of human lives.¹⁰

As one might suspect, many academics blasted Skinner's two contributions to Chronicles of America. Reviewing Adventures in Oregon, Lester Shippee sharply criticized Skinner for "sacrificing clarity," and giving "an erroneous impression" of Lewis and Clark, and although he complimented Skinner for her literary style, he noted that "historical perspective appears to have suffered." Pioneers of the Old Southwest received equally caustic treatment from Archibald Henderson. He too complimented the volume's deft and appealing narrative, but then emphasized that "equal commendation cannot be bestowed upon the historical value of the book." His conclusion: "From the strictly historical standpoint, let us say, this is one of those books which need not have been written."¹¹

On the surface, these humbling reviews seem to stem from the contradictory meanings of history held by the two parties, with Skinner preferring literary narrative that stressed contingency and Shippee and Henderson equating history with arguments supported by evidence. Underneath, though, these reviews were almost preordained: Skinner simply lacked the qualifications (education, gender, and social class) to garner intellectual legitimacy in the profession. While Johnson and Glasgow clearly thought Skinner's work bright and compelling, Chronicles remained an academic project. Most of the Chronicles contributors came from the academic world, among them some of the profession's most esteemed historians—Carl Becker, Carl Russell Fish, Archer Hulbert, Walter Lynwood Fleming. Of the thirty-six contributors to Chronicles, moreover, Skinner was one of only three women, and the only one to write two volumes.¹²

TURNER'S RIVERS OF AMERICA?

IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE, however, to simplify this evidence into a battle between an amateur woman with a preference for literary narrative and a male-dominated profession bent on enforcing its own vision of the past. As evident in the praise from Johnson, not everyone in the profession was at odds with Skinner's portrayal of the past. Her supporters included Frederick Jackson Turner, who admired both her writing and her interest in the frontier. At the 1920 meeting of the American Historical Association Turner queried Allen Johnson about the young writer whose work he enjoyed. "You will be pleased to know that Professor Turner of Harvard inquired with the utmost enthusiasm, 'Who is Miss Skinner?' and 'What is her record?,'" Johnson said to the upstart historian. "You can feel more than flattered by this interest on the part of America's greatest living historian."¹³

A twelve-year friendship grew from this inquiry, continuing until Turner's death in 1932. Among other things, both relished comparing their childhood frontier experiences. Skinner noted, "I, like himself, was frontier-born." Turner's adolescence at the portage between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers in Wisconsin made him, "a frontiersman in the intellectual realm." He had learned to think "in contact with actualities, rather than primarily from things told and things read. So his imagination was never out of touch with facts." They also shared "a common outlook on the problem of history," which (in Skinner's words) stemmed from the fact that, "he could never forget that history is the story of human beings, of individuals composing a mass called society. He distrusted the modern glibness about 'forces', 'causes', and 'main courses.'" In one of Skinner's many missives to Turner, she included an outline of a project she might one day undertake as a long book or a series of volumes about rivers of the world. Turner read "the work of mine in manuscript," she later reminisced, "and wrote detailed criticism of it, binding me to secrecy until after ... [Turner] departed this life." According to Skinner, Turner noted that a project on the world's rivers was a bit too ambitious, even for someone with her intellectual motivation and vision. Turner recommended that Skinner pare down her project. Perhaps she should undertake a series about rivers in America, he suggested.¹⁴

Turner's influence on Rivers of America is undeniable. In a memorial to him in the New York Herald Tribune, Skinner emphasized his tutelage: "I never met Turner but I can consider myself, in a sense, a pupil of his because of our correspondence. His letters were not only rich in scholarship but in humanity ... These aspects of our great modern historians are known to his confreres and to his many students. But perhaps I can tell even them something of Turner's kindness, helpfulness, his eager interest in new pens if these seemed to have ideas behind them." In an introduction to an autobiography Turner wrote for Skinner—one of the few hand-written autobiographical sketches he penned, whose publication in The Wisconsin Magazine of History in 1935 also represented Skinner's first public chance to promote her project—Skinner described her plans for the series: "The casual reader may think it a far cry from Turner ... to a literary series on the rivers of America." she wrote. "Yet the link is there: since 'rivers' will prove to be only another way of treating 'sections.'"¹⁵

Because this point has been lost on those who came after Turner, who have canonized and criticized his ideas for more than a century, the thought of Skinner's Rivers of America as an extension of his sectional thesis is richly evocative. Eclipsed by the renown of his frontier thesis, Turner's ideas about sectionalism reflected the growing intellectual curiosity about regionalism and offered an important addendum to his earlier theory. Turner defined sections as distinct cultural landscapes that arose from local geographies once the movement of frontier settlers had subsided. On his deathbed, Turner's dying words to Max Farrand at the Huntington Library were: "Tell Max I am sorry that I haven't finished my [section] book." Although his colleagues completed the work, could Skinner have taken this as her charge? Taking Skinner's words at face value, the answer is yes. Nevertheless, Turner's influence on Rivers of America is a bit tougher to evaluate than it first appears. Allusions to Turner clearly represented a tribute to her friend and mentor in historical scholarship. "As the geographers continue, ever more vigorously and successfully, to contend with the economist for the soul of man," she told her readers in the introduction to his autobiography, "Turner's stature will enlarge and his work as an interpreter of America will be found to have a vaster significance than has yet been conceded to it." Similarly, in a correspondence during the initial drafting stages of Upper Mississippi, Skinner suggested that Walter Havighurst incorporate Turner into his text. Tinged with geographic determinism, Havighurst used Turner's rendering of American history to explain the historian's intellectual origins. Skinner beamed with excitement after she read a draft of the young Ohio author's work: "I am keen about 'Another Harvest'"—the chapter of the work in which Turner appears. "It shows that section producing pioneers in literary and other ideas—originality. [Hamlin] Garland wrote his 'different stories,' Turner revolutionized the teaching of history ... It is a quite extraordinary 'harvest' of originality and intellectual power and success." For the pair, no better way existed to honor the Wisconsin historian than to place him in a story that was so much his own. After all, Havighurst noted, "there is a stamp that a country puts upon men's faces and upon their speech, and more mystically, upon their minds."¹⁶

Yet Turner's relationship to Skinner and his influence on the series also represented a bit of self-fashioning on her part. By emphasizing her relationship with America's most famous historian, Skinner legitimized her own definition of history as well as her ability to undertake such a monumental project. In her mind's eye, she silenced skeptics by positioning her ideas near to those of Turner. Moreover, Skinner always eyed commercial promotion for her series, and making a connection with Turner's sectional thesis represented an astute economic decision. Yet keeping these points in mind, one should not underestimate Turner's intellectual impact on the series. Never a simple epigone of Turner's work, Skinner intended Rivers of America to be her homage to a historian with whom she seemed to have so much in common. If one comes to this conclusion, and it seems a fair one to make, Rivers of America represents one of Turner's most lasting—and forgotten—legacies to public history.

RIVERS REDISCOVERED, AMERICA REDISCOVERED

THE INSISTENCE ON a Turnerian sectional basis for historical thought in Rivers of America was also a reflection of broader intellectual trends. With roots that dated to World War I, the American regionalist movement brought together a disparate group of intellectuals who positioned themselves against the modern tendencies of industrialization, standardization, and centralization in hopes of creating a more meaningful existence by stressing the geographic and cultural heterogeneity of America. Operating with a heightened sense of immediacy caused by the catastrophic Depression, the intellectuals who promoted this regional philosophy, among other ideas, emphasized local folk cultures, a search for a more primitive America in nature, a desire for a unique national identity, and a veneration for the past. At a time when the dislocation of the present overwhelmed many, Skinner, like most regionalists, offered her readers comfort in the past and in nature. When Americans began to question their existence as a nation, Skinner hoped her forthcoming works would utilize the natural world to inspire opportunity in a forlorn populace. "When American folk have troubles which do not end swiftly, they begin presently to examine their own sources as a nation and their own story as a people," she wrote, and "they remember that a new story, like no other in the world, was carried ... across the American wilderness on a strong rhythm and they catch at phrases to console and encourage themselves." Stressing both encouragement and consolation, and streaked with a sense of nationalism, Skinner used nature to justify America's cause in a way that reflected these contemporary sentiments.¹⁷

Although no historians of regionalism include Skinner in their analyses of the era, her story supports many of their contentions about women involved in the movement. Unlike male regionalists, who usually enjoyed conventional marriage, higher education, and academic service, women like Angie Debo, Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Constance Rourke, and Skinner rejected the dependent, domesticated lives which American society in this era deemed acceptable for most women. These women of letters either never married or opted for divorces early in their lives (Skinner chose the former). Each of these women, moreover, embarked on a career as a free-lancer because of the exclusionary practices of most academic departments during the period.¹⁸

In addition to the gender and intellectual influences of American region-alism, Skinner's par-ticipation in Chronicles of America portended the format for Rivers of America in several important ways as well. Both series hoped to incorporate high standards of schol-arship with literary accessibility. Each of the projects also partitioned the past into manageable themes, relying on the authors to flesh out the underlying human stories that underscored each of these epochs. Most importantly, the frontier ideology she employed in Adventures in Oregon and Chronicles of a Dark and Bloody Ground represented a logical forerunner to the ideas about geo-graphic regionalism that informed Skin-ner's editing of the Rivers series. In a process that mirrored Turner's intellectual shift from frontier to section, the persis-tent movement of Turnerian pioneers in her Chronicles books eventually gave way to a rooted sense of place that reflected an import-ant second act of Euro-American set-tlement—a theme that her series would explore. As gegrapher Michael Steiner points out, frontier ideology and geo-graphic regionalism were never mutually exclusive; rather, they existed in conversation with one another, creating a rooted framework for American history and life.¹⁹

Figure 4. Cover of Cecil Matschat's Suwannee River.

Image courtesy of the author.

This volume, edited by Skinner and published in 1938, was printed most recently by University of Georgia Press. It remains the second best-selling volume in the series behind only Marjory Stoneman Douglas's magnum opus, The Everglades.

Yet the similarities between Chronicles and Rivers end there. One of the most striking differences between the two projects was Skinner's insistence that her authors have diverse regional, gender, professional, generational, and ethnic backgrounds. Walter Havighurst was then a little-known composition instructor at Miami University who had just published his first novel, Pier 37. Stephen Vincent Benet and Robert Tristram Coffin, by contrast, were two of America's most accomplished poets, winning Pulitzer Prizes for Stars Fell on Alabama and Strange Holiness, respectively. Skinner also assigned nearly half the planned twenty-four Rivers volumes to women. Of the six books Skinner edited before her death, women were authors of two: science fiction writer and botanist Cecile Matschat, author of Suwannee: Strange Green Land, and ornithologist and geographer Blair Niles, author of The James. Yet the most important litmus test for her authors—not a single potential author was an academic historian.²⁰

Figure 5. Illustration from Suwannee River.

Image courtesy of the author.

Skinner believed strongly in pairing her authors with nationally acclaimed artists—in this case Alexander Key, who later became famous for writing Escape to Witch Mountain.

With her own series, Skinner no longer felt constrained by historical academic discourse. She preferred, in her own words, a literary take on America's rivers that stretched traditional historical conventions. "This is to be a literary and not an historical series," she said of the volumes in "Rivers and American Folk," a pre-publication promotional pamphlet distributed by Farrar and Reinhart in 1936. "The authors of these books will be novelists and poets ... If the average American is less informed about his country than any other national, knows and cares less about its past and about its present ... is because the books prepared for his instruction were not written by artists." Skinner explained, "The average American has been prevented from a profound self-knowledge, as a descendant and a citizen, and deprived as an individual of the thrill and inspiration of a dramatic experience, because the epic material of America has been formulated by the scholastics instead of the artist." Once again, though, she stressed that this problem stemmed from academia's failure to capture the emotions of human lives. "Few artists," she wrote, "have displayed to [the average American] the colors and textures of the original stuff of American life."²¹

Yet Skinner did not conceive of the series as just a work of art. She was keenly aware that this was a historical series, if not strictly speaking an academic one. She firmly wished to see Rivers shed light on America's history in a way that was judicious, intelligent, and true to the past. Powder River author Struthers Burt acknowledged in a letter to Skinner, "I am particularly grateful to you, of course, for the historical amendments ... I have read voluminously on the subject, but I am not an historian, as you are, and hence you stepped in at just the right time." Skinner also insisted her prospective authors credit those in the profession from whose works they borrowed. In a discussion about bibliographies, Skinner told Havighurst, "I don't want the usual string of sources ... How'd you care to do a brief personal chapter as a bibliog. telling of your travels and researches, the discoveries and thrills ... that sort of 'research adventure' would be good reading, informative, give a slight not painful 'academic' or scholarly touch and maybe inspire some readers to study historical collections." This insistence on including bibliographic essays is revealing because it suggests the importance to Skinner of staying in conversation with the academy.²²

RIVERS OF AMERICA

THE FIRST VOLUMES of Rivers of America, Kennebec: Cradle of Americans by Robert Coffin, and Upper Mississippi: A Wilderness Saga by Walter Havighurst, appeared in 1937. In the next two years, four Skinner-edited books followed: Cecile Matschat's Suwannee River: Strange Green Land, Struthers Burt's Powder River: Let'er Buck, Blair Niles's The James, and Carl Carmer's The Hudson. The books sold most of the first printings before they reached stores. "You won't believe this," wrote a friend, "on the subway this morning, there were three copies of KENNEBEC—a colored man had one, then a girl and another man." Writers in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Library Journal, Saturday Review of Literature, and New York Herald Tribune praised each volume. The reviews continually pointed to this "new" story that fused together geography and history in a literary fashion. Of Kennebec, Lincoln Concord wrote that the work "makes your hair curl": telling "the story of a river in an utterly new way, [it] gets its effects by startling flights of style and matter, combines history and romance and philosophy in a generous spirit of human appreciation, and brings out truly and strongly the epic quality of Maine coast settlement and development." For Burt's Powder River, "His book is history warmed with love of place in which there's a precious sense of room, history and legend recent enough to have been gathered in part from the lips of the men who made it." For Matschat's Suwannee River, "In text and picture there are the remoteness and menace, the curious simplicity, the reality of stark anachronism, which stamps the character of the Suwannee River's swampland and will give a new and lasting association of knowledge to this most peculiarly romantic among the rivers of America."²³

Figure 6. Illustration by Stow Wengenroth.

Image courtesy of the author.

This map appeared in Carl Carmer's The Hudson, edited by Skinner and published in 1939. Each Rivers of America book included a full-page map that highlighted the natural and cultural features of the region.

But the contents of these books suggest much more about both contemporary culture and Skinner's vision for the series than this public recognition reveals. Attesting to Skinner's editorial orchestration, her collaborators all presented similar stories that experimented with literary form, rejected academic conventions of historical writing, embraced Turnerian themes, and reflected many current cultural ideas about the natural world.

While nature played a prominent role in the construction of the books in the series, the works all began in an archetypal frontier progression with American Indians. As in the works of Frank Bird Linderman, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and John Neihardt—whose original inclusion in the series to write the book on the Missouri River speaks to these points—the depiction of Indians in Rivers often participated in the romantic, anti-modern discourse so prevalent during the era. Indians and their cultures represented a simple, primitive, and natural antipode to the depressed modern condition. In her own work, particularly her poetry in the first decade of the twentieth-century, Skinner championed this natural, primitive brand of Indianness. As for Indians' perceptions of rivers, she wrote, "To the first [Native] American ... seeing them ever flowing away, yet ever there, they were mystery and wonder ... Rivers symbolized life to him, as they have to other primitive poets in other lands." Particularly in Coffin's Kennebec and Carmer's The Hudson, Indians often embodied nature itself, revealing Skinner's editorial insights. "They swim as well as the river otters" wrote Carmer of the peoples who lived along the meandering stretches of the Hudson. In regard to the Abenakis in Kennebec, Coffin wrote, "they could swim like salmon."²⁴

Yet simplifying Rivers's portrayal of Native peoples in a way that merely highlights an anti-modern bias fails to untangle the contradictory meanings Skinner's collaborators projected upon American Indians. While at times the series construed Indians in a way that entered into the larger anti-modern conversation, they also held fast to Turnerian Eurocentrism. In every work except Burt's, Indian peoples "disappear" from landscapes as one might expect from a student of Turner's frontier. Matschat's Suwannee, Niles's The James, and Havighurst's Upper Mississippi glossed over the physical struggle for the earth itself, opting for passive constructions. In Havighurst's work, for example, "Time has removed the Chippewa villages from the riverbank [of the Mississippi] and stripped the forest itself from the hills." Time, not pioneers, removed Indians and trees from the landscape; pioneers were passive agents of progress, not active agents of westward expansion.²⁵

It would be easy enough to misinterpret these statements as heavy-handed erasures of the Indians' presence on the land, but the story Rivers tells is more nuanced than that: European pioneers also disappeared, expunged by new forces of modernity. Coffin's views, in particular, demonstrate this point: he blurs the cultural boundaries between the Abenaki and early European settlers. "They were dark with rust and covered with cobwebs," he writes of old ice harvesting tools found in the banks of the Kennebec by the house of an acquaintance. "They had joined the flint arrows and the bows that once bent to men along the ancient Kennebec ... Someday our own sons' far great-grandchildren may find among the timers of my friend's house the rusted shards of the electric refrigerator that serves the house today. And the Kennebec will be going down to the sea, as young and as fresh and as blue as ever." Coffin explains elegiacally that a cultural gulf existed not between the Abenaki and Maine's French and British pioneers, but between the pioneers and those who eschewed work with the land for the urban, the industrial, and the modern. Like other authors, Coffin casts the pioneers—folk who had an intimate working knowledge of nature, however market-driven—on the nature side of the nature-culture dichotomy. Europeans displaced Native Americans, but ultimately the artifices of modern life replaced them both.²⁶

In a manner similar to Coffin's, Havighurst investigates Norwegian-Americans who worked on the land astride the upper Mississippi rich in white pine for lumbering and clayey loam for growing wheat. Struthers Burt's Powder River explores that river's basin through the lens of the local grasses, which lured buffalo, sheep, and cattle and thus Plains Indians and Euro-Americans, who relied on the animals for sustenance. "The story of Powder River," he wrote, "is—in reality—the story of grass. The search for it. The fight for it. The slow disappearance of it." As for the Hudson River, Carl Carmer portrayed a thick ethnic stew of immigrants—French, Dutch, German, and English—who arrived at a place where they became one with each other and the land through fishing and farming. In a way that illuminates contemporary cultural thought, every book promoted the belief that local environments interacted with disparate cultures to create a unique American cultural and natural landscape, both past and present.

While these works clearly privileged the vibrancy of regional cultural diversity, they also underscore one of the central paradoxes in Rivers of America: the odd marriage between Franz Boas's cultural pluralism, change and relativism—a paradigm promoting difference, not hierarchy—and the Turnerian evolutionary view of human history that streamlines a narrative of the past between the poles of civilization and savagery. Though no single answer is fully satisfactory, this dual allegiance to binary schools of thought seems best explained by the fact that Skinner never saw these two paradigms as separated by an ideological chasm. Editing the series in her Park Avenue apartment, within a taxi's ride of all industry and modernity had to offer, Skinner elided Indians and pioneers from the landscape in the same way her childhood in the old-growth pines of the Canadian Rockies represented a distant memory in the steel-enforced and concrete-covered infrastructure of New York City.²⁷

The line between Boasian pluralism and Turnerian evolutionary progression was for Skinner indeed a gray one. Yet adopting these two ways of thought profoundly altered the tone of the series. Along with its obvious content-based influence, Boasian thought sounded the death knell for more structured literary forms because it allowed people of letters to question older conventions. Although her work in Chronicles certainly foreshadowed this, the new precedent set by Boasian thought allowed Skinner (along with such notable modernists as T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and most famously William Faulkner) to experiment with verse in a way that shocked those who remained entrenched in the older literary ideals tied to sterile Victorian notions of culture. "There is something new in the approach which indicates the American writer's reliance on traditional forms is coming to an end," acknowledged Skinner to her fellow literati whose feelings echoed hers. To this end, she told Havighurst, "The form of a River book should be very free—and I fear I may have seemed not to realize that rivers don't run like the lives on a checkerboard." Although eschewed by professional historians who clung tightly to the monograph, Skinner and her authors—as well as a host of other writers, such as Carl Sandburg and Marquis James, who dabbled in historical verse during the Depression—stretched the meaning of history and literature, weaving into their various narratives a hodgepodge of loosely structured history, personal narratives, interviews, literary recastings of folklore, and environmental writing. These included instances as diverse as a conversation with Franklin Delano Roosevelt about his Dutch relatives in Carmer's Hudson; a tour of colonial Williamsburg in Niles's The James; and a rendering of Cleng Petersen, a mythical Norseman who wandered the Northwoods in Havighurst's Upper Mississippi.²⁸

No story in Rivers better illustrates these ideological inconsistencies, and none is more a model for what Skinner desired for the series, than Cecile Matschat's Suwannee River: Strange Green Land. Although largely forgotten by historians and eclipsed by Douglas's Everglades, Matschat's book remains the number two seller in Rivers of America. With a contract from the Literary Guild of America as a book of the month choice, sales of Suwannee River surpassed seventy-thousand copies in its first year, making the work, along with Carmer's Hudson, one of Skinner's two Publisher's Weekly best sellers. "If the project as a whole needed any further justification," speculated the book's New York Times reviewer, "it would find that justification abundantly in the depth and importance of this book's variety." For Skinner, it was imperative to incorporate a Southern region into her work, partially to confirm that a distinct and vibrant population still resided in the South. As she wrote to a potential author during the series' planning stages, "I had been sure there was this solid 'backbone', a sound folk-core, or the southern Back-country would have gone back to timber and wild animals."²⁹

Skinner and Matschat's interest in the South also stemmed from heightened cultural and intellectual curiosity about the region during the 1930s. The popular image of the South came from novels like Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Caldwell depicted the South as an ironic comedy of human degeneracy, a land of ignorant and lazy sharecroppers who had little hope and even less chance of succeeding in a modern world. On the other hand, the Southern Agrarians, the South's most prominent literary fraternity, led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, called for a rebirth of antebellum plantation culture. Neither of these two prevailing conceptions of the South worked for Skinner and her Rivers formula. Southerners could not be rich plantation owners that the Southern Agrarians idealized; nor could they be the poor, hapless whites of Caldwell's Tobacco Road. For the South to work in Skinner's series, its vitality had to stem from the American people's relationship with nature. Embracing Skinner's perspective, Matschat's take on the Suwannee region broke with many of the traditional models for writing and thinking about the South, synthesizing a new picture of the area.³⁰

The men and women in Matschat's book—part travelogue, part history, part meditation on nature—were intelligent, vibrant people who acquired in three centuries along the Suwannee not only an intimate relationship with the land, but also a complex, intricate culture that reflected a connection with nature. Narrating chapters that uncovered the lives of both rural descendants of African-American slaves and English-American pioneers so isolated from the rest of America they still spoke Chaucerian English, Matschat records songs, details recipes, and inscribes stories, folklore, legends, and rituals. Besides detailing knowledge of plant remedies, the Matschat narrative also delves into how local perceptions and insights about their surroundings influenced the way folk lived.

Underneath Matschat's insistence on collecting folk traditions lay the contemporary assertion (promulgated by those like Benjamin Botkin of the Federal Writers Project) that anthropologists, writers, and historians needed to save the stories of communities and peoples that modernity seemed daily to be swallowing whole. To this end, Suwannee River provides even deeper insight into the series. As mentioned, Matschat constructs her narrative as a historical travelogue, oscillating between her present experience in the region and the history of the place in which they lived. The reason she did this, and the reason her strategy worked well in the series, was that these former slaves and rural white families with whom she spent the better part of 1937 were, as portrayed by Matschat, untouched by industrialization and modernity. These vibrant people were part of a primitive culture living along the Suwannee that illustrated what America could have been if it had stuck to its frontier, pioneer roots. Although "the Seminoles were driven into Florida" by these agents of empire, these pioneers demonstrated that the key to a healthy culture was an organic connection with the world in which they lived. As Matschat wrote in her introduction, "Okefenokee breeds no morons. Though book larnin' is hardly known among swamp people, they have intelligent minds, sharp and shrewd ... For their security in a jungle infested with menace, the swamp folk have learned to be keen observers of all wild life, plant life as well." Embedded in passages like these is an intense contempt toward the modern industrial complex. The folk along the Suwannee resisted modernity, and despite the Depression that plagued most of the nation, they lived rich lives, oblivious to many of the problems that beset modern America. The people of the Suwannee region were both living history and an archetype of a nation in touch with nature.³¹

These same ideas hold true in the presentation of westerners and their landscapes in Struthers Burt's Powder River. Whereas The Hudson, Kennebec, Upper Mississippi, and The James lamented or excluded industrialization, Burt emphasized that the West stood unique as a region because the people who resided there still worked on the land. Burt romantically portrayed the Powder River's cattleman and cowboys as a healthy people still in touch with an authentic America. "I supposed the big difference," he speculated, "is that the Far West lives by weather, and the Northeast by the stock market. The Far Westerner gets up in the morning and looks as the sky and not the market reports ... The Far Westerner is all the time smelling earth, and he is interested in it." Burt became even more explicit: "The West is essential. It satisfies some American desire. It is simple, it is stark, it is dignified, and yet it is lovely. I think, incidentally, that is also a definition of real democracy." By promulgating a Turnerian tie between the West's rugged landscapes, its rugged folk, and American democracy, Burt suggested that the foundations of this country lay at the intersection between the land and its pioneers who had disappeared in every place that modernity touched. In the minds of Skinner and her authors, the West and South represented cultural and geographic regions that preserved many of the attributes of a pre-industrial, romantic society where an American brand of democracy grew and thrived.³²

Here, then, was the crux of Skinner's Rivers of America message: the vitality of American culture stemmed from both nature itself and ordinary folk who had an intimate and working relationship with American landscapes. Speaking to contemporary audiences, Rivers writers urged Americans through their free-form explorations of the past to find salvation in nature. The books in the series paint a picture of a culturally diverse people, coming together on the American continent to create a democratic society through their relationship with one another and their regional landscapes. Rivers of America represented a search for a national identity; an identity constructed from diverse people's sweat, toil, and work on the earth. It was an identity that differed from region to region, but when taken as a whole produced something uniquely American. It was an identity with a river running through it.

THE END

A FICTION WRITER will say that a good place to end any story is with the death of the protagonist. But even as a writer of nonfiction, Skinner could not have composed a more poetic ending for her own story. The illness Skinner suffered while giving her talk at the Town Hall Club in New York City was not the passing kind. Just three weeks after the Town Hall dinner, she died of a heart attack at her home on Park Avenue while completing corrections on the galley of Carl Carmer's The Hudson. When friends discovered her the next morning, they found the 61-year-old slouched in a chair with Carmer's draft by her side. Written where she had just finished editing were the words that conclude any compelling yarn: "The End."³³

Environmental historians should be more cognizant of Rivers of America for many reasons. For one, because Constance Lindsay Skinner worked at the edges of the profession, her story helps us to understand better the permeable boundaries between the academy and the public as well as the contested meanings of history as a formal discipline, a style of writing, and an intellectual idea. The gender, literary, and historical boundaries she stretched, crossed, and bridged helped lay readers appreciate the past in a way that many academics of the time were not willing to allow. For practitioners of environmental history, Rivers of America more importantly alerts us to the power of place in history as much or more than any other publication venture in twentieth-century America precisely because of the series' overwhelming public success. Much has been written during the last fifty years about the place-based texts of the interwar era. But most have failed to ask about these works' public reception. We must realize that all too often the materials historians analyze have little impact upon the lives that many of us hold as our paramount concern. Walter Prescott Webb's magnum opus The Great Plains, for example, made little impression on either the academy or the public at the time of its publication. One of the most critically acclaimed pieces of Southern cultural criticism, I'll Take My Stand, sold only 2,147 books before it went out of print, only to be resurrected several decades later. The same holds true with James Agee's monumental work on poor Southern farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which met similar public rejection until the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The significance of Rivers of America stems from the fact that the series demonstrates that the general reading public—long before the days of Silent Spring, flaming rivers, and food shortages—yearned to understand the world in which they lived by probing the profound changes that people and landscapes have wrought on one another.³⁴

As William Cronon has suggested, most environmental historians—though many would be loath to admit it—hope that their readers will learn moral lessons from historical accounts of human interaction with the natural world. Skinner was entirely candid about this aspiration. Though hardly flawless in their presentation and interpretation of the natural world, she and her collaborators strove to seize a low point in America's economic and cultural history and recast America's story to include a working and productive natural environment that unchecked forces of modernity seemed to endanger. If there is a canon in the field of environmental history, these now underappreciated works deserve a place in it.³⁵

Nicolaas Mink holds history degrees from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Montana. He lives and works on Mackinac Island, Michigan, during the summer and began doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin this fall.

NOTES

The author would like to thank Kevin Armitage, Andrew Cayton, Mark Cioc, Dan Flores, Neil Prendergast, Peggy Shaffer, Bruce Thompson, Jon Wlasiuk, the two anonymous reviewers, and his environmental history class at the University of Wisconsin, Superior for their thoughtful comments and perceptive critiques.

^1. I've constructed the following narrative from the Constance Lindsay Skinner Papers (hereafter CLSP), "Notes for Town Hall Club Rivers of America Dinner," Box 17, New York Public Library Archives Division (hereafter NYPL). The quote is from Skinner's speech notes. In those notes, the word government is abbreviated "govt."

^2. For book sales, see Carol Fitzgerald, The Rivers of America: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2001); The New York Times Book Review, February 5, 1939.

^3.New York Herald Tribune, June 24, 1935; Thomas Clark, The Kentucky (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942); August Derleth, The Wisconsin: River of A Thousand Isles (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942); Stanley Vestal, The Missouri (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942); Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Everglades: River of Grass (New York; Farrar and Rinehart, 1947). For an excellent interpretation of Douglas, see Jack Davis, "'Conservation Is Now a Dead Word': Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the Transformation of American Environmentalism," Environmental History 8 (January 2003): 53–76. For statistics on the books, see Barbara Bryant, "'Rivers of America': Library Celebrates 60th Anniversary of Landmark Series," Library of Congress Information Bulletin 56 #10 (June 9, 1997): 204–09; and James A. Findlay, ed., The Rivers of America: A Selection of Books from the Collection of Carol Fitzgerald (Fort Lauderdale: Bienes Center for the Literary Arts, 1997): 5–11.

^4. For a short list of summaries of the field, see Richard White "American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field," Pacific Historical Review 54 (August 1985): 297–335; Alfred Crosby, "The Past and Present of American Environmental History," American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1177–89; Char Miller, "An Open Field," Pacific Historical Review 70 (February 2001): 69–76; Donald Worster, "Doing Environmental History," in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 289–307; and Dan Flores, The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2001). The seminal work on regionalism is Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); see, also, Michael Steiner, "Regionalism in the Great Depression," The Geographical Review 73 (October 1983): 430–46; Michael Steiner, "From Frontier to Region: Frederick Jackson Turner and the New Western History," Pacific Historical Review 64 (August 1995): 479–501; Marguerite Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identify, 1880–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 208–12; Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003), 17–40; and Jerry Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935–1943 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1972).

^5. Kendrick Clements, Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2000), quoted in Paul Sutter, "Terra Incognita: The Neglected History of Interwar Environmental Thought and Politics" Reviews in American History 29 (June 2001): 289.

^6. For Skinner's biography, see Jean Barman, Constance Lindsay Skinner: Writing on the Frontier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). This Canadian biography is an excellent source for those who wish to learn more about the author and her life's work. Where my interpretation of Skinner differs from Barman's is my emphasis on the interwar, Depression-era culture in shaping Skinner and her works. In light of the messages embedded in the Rivers books, I feel Barman's analysis, while compelling, relies too much on Skinner's frontier past. I also used Ann Heidbreder Eastman, ed., Constance Lindsay Skinner: Sketches of Her Life and Character, with a Checklist of Her Writings and the "Rivers of America" Series (Nashville, Tennessee: Women's National Book Association, 1980).

^7. Constance Lindsay Skinner, Pioneers of the Old Southwest: A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919); Constance Lindsay Skinner, Adventures of Oregon: Chronicle of the Fur Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920); Barman, Skinner.

^8. Robert Glasgow to Constance Lindsay Skinner in Barman, Skinner, 106. In my own trip to the New York Public Library, I was unable to locate this document; Skinner, Pioneers, 201–02.

^9. For the state of the profession and its exclusionary practices, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 47–205; Bonnie Smith, "Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Research in the Nineteenth Century," The American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1150–76.

^10. The history of emotions has captivated a new generation of historians. They grapple with many of the same issues with which Skinner struggled: see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in the Eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Andrew R. L. Cayton, "Insufficient Woe: Sense and Sensibility in Writing Nineteenth-Century History," Reviews in American History 31 (September 2003): 331–41; and Constance Lindsay Skinner, "History As Literature: and the Individual Definition," Bookman 49 (August 1919): 751. For a brief summary of the search for a "usable past" see: Alfred Haworth Jones, "The Search for a Usable Past in the New Deal Era," American Quarterly 23 (December 1971): 710–24; Merle Curti, ed., American Scholarship in the Twentieth Century (New York: Russell and Russell, 1953); Warren Susman, ed., Culture and Commitment, 1929–1945 (New York: George Braziller, 1973); and Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

^11. L. B. Shippee, "Review of Adventures in Oregon," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 7 (September 1920): 171; Archibald Henderson, "Review of Pioneers of the Old Southwest," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 8 (June 1921): 209.

^12. Novick, That Noble Dream, 47–205; and Smith, "Gender," 1150–76. Carl Becker, The Eve of Revolution: A Chronicle of the Breach with England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918); Carl Russell Fish, The Path of Empire: A Chronicle of the United States as World Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919); Archer Hulbert, The Paths of Inland Commerce: A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920); Walter Lynwood Fleming, The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919).

^13. For a fine example of why Turner might have admired Skinner's work, see Skinner, Pioneers, 31; Quoted in Barman, Skinner, 106.

^14. This story comes from Constance Lindsay Skinner, "Introduction to the Autobiography of Frederick Jackson Turner," Wisconsin Magazine of History 19 (September 1935): 91–92; and Constance Lindsay Skinner to Editor of New York Herald Tribune, March 19, 1932, CLSP, Box 4, NYPL.

^15. Ibid.

^16. The most recent Turner biography, by Allan Bogue, is the best: see Allan Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Bogue's biography says nothing of Turner's influence on the series and only mentions Skinner in passing. Farrand quoted in Steiner, "Frontier to Region," 479–501; Skinner, "Introduction," 91–92; Constance Lindsay Skinner to Walter Havighurst, August 2, 1935, Walter Havighurst Papers, Miami University Archives (hereafter WHP); Havighurst, Upper Mississippi, 244.

^17. Dorman, Revolt; Steiner, "Regionalism," 430–46. Constance Lindsay Skinner, "Rivers and American Folk." Skinner originally wrote this essay as a promotional pamphlet for Rivers of America. It appears as an appendix to the Skinner-edited volumes. The one I cite appears in Cecile Matschat, Suwannee River: Strange Green Land (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1938). The appendix contains no page numbers.

^18. Dorman, Revolt; For a gem of a biography of Constance Rourke that also provides a reliable historical sketch of the era, see Joan Rubin, Constance Rourke and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980).

^19. Steiner, "From Frontier to Region," 479–501. Richard Pells argues essentially the same thing about the ties between the two periods that produced these schools of thought in Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Thought in the Depression Years (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).

^20. My list here comes from Constance Lindsay Skinner, "Rivers of America Journal," August 17, 1935, Box 15, CLSP, NYPL; Louise Kellogg's interest in the work in Box 4, CLSP, NYPL.

^21. Skinner, "Rivers and American Folk." For a general and more contemporary overview of the tension between history as monograph and history as literary stories, see David Samuels, "The Call of Stories," Lingua Franca 5 (May/June 1995): 35–43; Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History," Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24; Eric Hobsbawm, "On the Revival of Narrative: Some Comments," Past and Present 86 (1980): 3–8.

^22. Struthers Burt to Constance Lindsay Skinner, August 6, 1938, Box 1, CLSP, NYPL; Skinner to Havighurst, February 29, 1937, WHP. Quite telling of the Rivers series' tie to professional history, the first book Havighurst mentions in his bibliographic essay is Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1931).

^23. Several books are under review here: Robert Tristram Coffin, Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937). Coffin (1892–1955) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1936 for his collection Strange Holiness. He spent the prime of his career as Bowdoin College's Franklin Pierce Professor of English in his home state of Maine. Also, Walter Havighurst, Upper Mississippi: A Wilderness Saga (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937). Growing up along the Fox River in Wisconsin, Havighurst (1901–1994) spent his teaching career at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His work on Annie Oakley, Annie Oakley of the Wild West (1954), was the basis for the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun. Also, Cecile Matschat, Suwannee River. Matschat (1895- 1976) became best known for her science-fiction work, The Year After Tomorrow, with another Rivers author, Carl Carmer. It is considered a classic in the genre. Also, Struthers Burt, Powder River: Let'er Buck (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1938). Although a prolific short story writer, Burt (1882–1954) is best known for The Other Side (1928), a work that blasts European criticism of America. This work must have influenced Skinner in choosing him for the series. He also popularized dude ranching in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Also, Blair Niles, The James (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939). Most famously, Niles (1880–1959) wrote what many consider a classic in queer fiction, Strange Brother (1931). She was the next-door neighbor to Skinner when she died. Her book, more than any of the others, also least fits into the Rivers model, as I outline in the following section of this essay. It is also the least satisfying Skinner-edited Rivers work for environmental historians. Finally is Carl Carmer, The Hudson (New York; Farrar and Rinehart, 1939). Carmer (1893–1976) took over the editorial reins of Rivers of America when Skinner died. In addition to the Hudson, he also wrote the volume on the Susquehanna. Lincoln Concord, New York Herald Tribune Books, June 13, 1937; For Burt: Horace Reynolds, New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1938; For Matschat: Katherine Woods, New York Times Book Review, July 31, 1938. Among the many other reviews who echo these sentiments, see New York Herald Tribune Books, July 31, 1938; and December 12, 1937; Saturday Review of Literature, August 27, and December 10, 1938; Library Journal December 1, 1938.

^24. For Antimodernism in general see the classic text, T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); For a more Indian-specific interpretation, see Phil Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University, 1998), 96–127; Robert Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979), 71–112; and Sherry L. Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native American through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Carmer, The Hudson, 9–15; Coffin, Kennebec, 68.

^25. For the Turnerian storytelling progression, see William Cronon, "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner," The Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 157–76; Burt, Powder River, 190–98; Matschat, Suwannee River, 49; Havighurst, Upper Mississippi, 3.

^26. On racial attitudes during this period, see Betsy Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in Literature and Popular Culture of the 20s (New York: Routledge, 2002); Coffin, Kennebec, 177–78. The intellectual fate of the pioneer was split during the interwar period, with literati like Walter Prescott Webb holding on to the belief that pioneer life was the good life; others, led by Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, and Van Wyck Brooks contended that the pioneer led to deculturing of American life and the horrors of modernity. Skinner clearly sides with Webb. For this debate, see Dorman, Revolt, 85–87. One can find a nice summation of the intellectual origins of "the folk" in Robin D. G. Kelley, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Folk,'" The American Historical Review 97 (December 1992): 1400–1408.

^27. Kelley, "Notes," 1400–1408. Burt, Powder River, 3. My thoughts on Franz Boas and the importance of acknowledging the beauty of cultural difference in this period have been profoundly influenced and deepened by Lewis Perry, Intellectual Life in America: A History (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984); David Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); and David Whisnant, All that Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

^28. Perry, Intellectual Life, 323–26; Skinner, "Rivers and American Folk." Constance Lindsay Skinner to Havighurst, January 27, 1937, WHP. For other nonacademics writing history during this time period, see Terry Cooney, Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s (New York: Twayne, 1995), 20–26; and Jones, "The Search for a Usable American Past," 710–24; Carmer, The Hudson, 362–65; Niles, The James, 316–31; Havighurst, Upper Mississippi.

^29. On sales of Matschat's work to Literary Guild of America, see Fitzgerald, The Rivers of America, 687–704; Constance Lindsay Skinner, "Rivers of America Journal," April 16, 1936.

^30. The work on the South in this period is voluminous. For a short, but diverse, sampling, see Whisnant, All that is Native and Fine; Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); and Paul Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1988).

^31. Jerry Mangione, The Dream and the Deal, 263–70; For ideas about search for the authentic, see Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Matschat, Suwannee, 3–8, 146.

^32. Burt, Powder River, 334, 367.

^33. Barman, Skinner, 244–45.

^34. On neglect of Webb, see Crosby, "The Past and Present," 1177–89; on sales of I'll Take My Stand, see Conkin, Southern Agrarians, 70–71; on Agee, see Pells, Radical Visions, 246.

^35. William Cronon, "The Uses of Environmental History," Environmental History Review 17 (Fall 1993): 1–22.

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