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Reviews
Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History
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By Joseph A. Amato
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University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 261 pages. $48.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.
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Eastern Oregon Books and Print: An Annotated and Historical Bibliography
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By Wayne Kee
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| Paunina Press, Prineville, 2001. Photographs, illustrations, index. 247 pages. $20.00 paper. |
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Illahe: The Story of Settlement in the Rogue River Canyon
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By Kay Atwood
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| Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2002. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 254 pages. $18.95 paper. |
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The Mystery of the Blue Bucket Gold
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By B.F. and Claire Laurance
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| Self-published, 2001; available through Xlibris, www.xlibris.com Photographs, maps, bibliography. 123 pages. $17.84 paper, $8.00 e-book. |
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The Applegate Trail of 1846: A Documentary Guide to the Original Southern Emigrant Route to Oregon
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By William Emerson
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| Ember Enterprises, Box 1343, Ashland, Ore., 97520, 1996. Photographs, illustrations, maps, bibliography, glossary, appendices. 158 pages. $19.95 paper. |
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Looking Back at Wallowa Lake: A Photographic Portrait
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Edited by Mark Highberger
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| Bear Creek Press, Wallowa, Ore., 2001; www.eoni.com/~highberg/bear_creek_press 800-355-2554. Photographs, map. 83 pages. $17.95 paper. |
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In Pursuit of the McCartys
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By Jon M. and Donna McDaniel Skovlin
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| Reflections Publishing Co., Cove, Ore., 2001. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 358 pages. $29.95 hardback, $19.95 paper. |
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Reviewed by Richard H. Engeman
Oregon Historical Society, Portland
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Historians, notes Joseph Amato in Rethinking Home, delineate
regions in various ways. "All historians to a degree both record
and invent pasts and presents for people, places, regions, and nations.
They are makers of place and home" (p. 14). Historians of macro-regions
— Amato uses the example of the American West and the New
Western historians — are preoccupied with creating "moral
narratives" that encompass an understanding of such ideas as the
spread of democracy, nation-building, and new economic and industrial
orders — narratives that examine transformations in both society
and nature. "Localities and micro-regions become forgotten stars
in the movement of such immense heavens," writes Amato.
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We need a sense of place, however, if we are to connect ourselves with whirling new economic and industrial orders, to comprehend how we and the place where we are both fit the models and remain distinctive and understandable. Using examples from rural southwestern Minnesota, where he is a professor of rural and regional studies at Southwest State University in Marshall, Amato breathes life into the idea that local history is both socially relevant and intellectually stimulating. He argues compellingly that local historians should look beyond their usual concerns and that they should examine a variety of unstudied or understudied aspects of life, including sounds, literature and folklore, anger and other strong emotions, madness, and what he calls the "clandestine." He also encourages local historians to spend more time on a locale's basic physical aspects — its plants, waters, and animal life — and to document how the massive changes in ecosystems through the conversion of land to agriculture and the transition from local economies to global ones affect local communities. |
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Amato suggests that local historians mine some neglected sources, such as the records of asylums and prisons, prose, poetry, song, and legends and tales; and he is right to do so. Curiously, he does not, at least in Rethinking Home, include photographs, artwork, maps, or any graphic materials among his resources. This is especially curious when one realizes how essential visual evidence can be in defining and explaining locale and region. I have never been to southwestern Minnesota, and I do not have a visual grasp of the area. As a consequence, I found myself going to Web sites to see what the town of Pipestone looked like and what pipestone was in order to make sense of Amato's essay "The Red Rock: Inventing Peoples and Towns." |
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Amato's innovative ideas about regional studies — particularly the studies of rural areas — was the impetus for taking a look at a number of recent local history publications that deal with rural areas in Oregon. |
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Perhaps the most unusual work is Wayne Kee's Eastern Oregon Books and Print, an old-fashioned annotated bibliography of the kind that has nearly disappeared in the past two decades. Nothing like it has been done before for the area, and eastern Oregon is a region that has seen a steady growth in interest among historians. The rising tourist appeal of such areas as Wallowa Lake and Steens Mountain and the explosive population growth in central Oregon have also raised the level of interest in local history there. The book identifies and, more importantly, describes dozens of works that can easily escape historians' notice, and I will certainly keep it around for reference. Nonetheless, it suffers from editing lapses (it is difficult, for example, not to notice the consistent misspelling of the name of Thomas Vaughan, longtime director of the Oregon Historical Society) and from strange omissions (such as High & Mighty: Select Sketches about the Deschutes Country, edited by Vaughan and published by the OHS Press in 1981), as well as annotations that are vague or nonevaluative. On the other hand, Kee has included many entries for fiction and poetry, materials that are all too often omitted both from standard bibliographies and local history studies. There are pitfalls in the use of such sources. As Joseph Amato advises: "Local historians must indeed embrace literature, but keep one eye peeled" (p. 142). It helps to know what to look out for, and Kee's work is a flawed but useful tool for the task. |
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A welcome sight, once again, is Kay Atwood's Illahe, first published privately in 1975 and now handsomely reissued by Oregon State University Press. Illahe is a study of the residents of a remote, forty-mile section of the Rogue River canyon upstream from today's community of Agness. The sparse American Indian population in the canyon virtually vanished after the wars and forced resettlement of the 1850s. In 1868, three families wound their way from the declining mining areas along the Klamath River to the south and settled on isolated farmsteads along the Rogue. Missouri-born miner and packer John Billings, his Shasta wife, Adeline, and their three children were joined by Abraham and James Fry. The Fry brothers, immigrants from Ohio, also mined, packed, and kept store. They married Karok women and raised large families. Settling in the canyon, these families eked out a living mining, subsistence farming, packing, and guiding. The canyon also attracted a number of single men who found a niche — some for a few years, some for a lifetime — as miners or packers. |
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Despite the isolation — indeed, probably because of it — a distinct community evolved along the river, characterized by mutual aid, respect for others' idiosyncrasies, awe of the river and the landscape, and understanding of the natural world of the region's flora and fauna. The story must be told through the words of Atwood's informants, primarily seven long-time residents of the canyon, supplemented by a hard-won array of snapshots and by Atwood's own maps and sketches. This is local history that has held up well, for it tells a trenchant story that has few heroes but many vigorous and distinctive characters and that integrates a distinctive and vanished place into the story of the larger world surrounding it. |
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The Mystery of the Blue Bucket Gold by B.F. and Claire Laurance is a self-published collection of several brief and well-known legends and episodes. There is nothing new here, but this small book would make a good gift for a middle-school student interested in Oregon lore. The Applegate Trail of 1846 has larger aspirations. It may be the detailed route guide it purports to be, but it suffers the misfortune of poor editing, amateurish and unconvincing maps, and mawkish illustrations. Look elsewhere for the whys and the wherefores of the Southern Route. |
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Looking Back at Wallowa Lake is a compilation of historic photographs of that stunning and remote lake, dating from the 1880s into the 1940s. The captions seem to be either derived from information written on the photograph — a number of the images are from "real photo" postcards, with typically terse and cryptic messages — or quoted from other sources, so that there is no real interpretive story line. The image reproduction is not as good as one would wish, although it still manages to be better than that in all too many local publications. Still, one gets a good sense of the changes in use of the area over time as fishing diminished and boating became a recreational pursuit, as roads were improved and lodges built, and as the locale was recognized as the homeland of Chief Joseph's band of Nez Perces. This work is a case of wonderful images in need of supporting text, which is at least a reversal of the more common wonderful text in dire need of supporting images. |
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Oregon's literature of the outlaws-and-bandits genre is mighty slim. In Pursuit of the McCartys boosts the list with a biography of an extended western family whose men tended to direct their career efforts toward horse and cattle theft, train and stage holdups, and the occasional bank heist. Between the mid–1870s and about 1917, Tom McCarty was the focal point of a swirling but low-key family of outlaws, despite the fact that his parents were a sedate couple, his father a physician who retired to quietude in Myrtle Creek, Oregon. The saga of the McCarty sons, their wives and children, and an assortment of stepchildren, in-laws, and cousins is a fascinating one that ranges over much of the West and ends without a bang — with less than a whimper, in fact. |
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I did not have high expectations for this book. Are outlaws, cowboys, and bank robberies the stuff of Oregon history? Of course they are, and Jon and Donna Skovlin have done a remarkably able job of bringing tales of outlawry down to the community level and weaving them into a family history that says a lot about life in northeastern Oregon as it moved into the twentieth century. The McCartys ranged over Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and in time into northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington, with criminal hijinks in Sparta, Oregon, and Roslyn, Washington. There are a number of aspects of the book that will aggravate historians: imagined sequences of events, suspicious sources, and strange footnoting practices. Still, these authors have scoured state and local archives, located or taken dozens of informative photographs, and read thousands of lines of newspaper type. In the end they have revealed a good bit of what Joseph Amato calls the "clandestine" in local history. Family ties both made and broke the trains of lawlessness in the McCarty clan, and changing economies and means of transport had their effects as well. The Wallowa County of this book is vastly different from the one in Looking Back at Wallowa Lake. |
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Local history can be a revelation; it can also be a tedious bore. If you don't know the place and you don't know the people, why bother? We bother because when there is a story there for us — as there is in Illahe and in In Pursuit of the McCartys— we can absorb and understand the sense of the place and come to know the people. Both will matter to us. |
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