Oregon Historical Quarterly Winter 2004

"Adventure’" of the Colonel Allen, by H. Lloyd Keith
Before merging with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821, the North West Company attempted “to diversify its trading strategy by plying goods in South America, California, and the Sandwich Islands (now Hawai’i) as well as offering its Columbia furs for sale in Europe rather than China.” Historian H. Lloyd Keith explores one such attempt at diversification, the 1815-1817 voyage of the North West Company’s brig the Colonel Allen. Beginning with the question of why such seemingly useless material as women’s hosiery and coats of mail should have been stored on the lower Columbia, Keith compiles scarce documents regarding plans for the trip, sale of cargo, and inventory of goods at Ft. George to describe the economic adventures of the Colonel Allen. Keith determines that the brig’s voyage “marked an early but disappointing attempt by the North West Company to market Columbia pelts in London and presaged the Hudson’s Bay Company’s successful implementation of a similar trading strategy.”

Cartographic Representations: A Controversy in Mapping Lewis and Clark’s Fort Clatsop, by Kenneth W. Karsmizki
Scholar Ken Karsmizki provides context for a controversial historic map — understood by many to definitively locate the site of Lewis and Clark’s Fort Clatsop — through deep exploration of archival documents. The 1852 map was discovered in the National Archives in 1999. Karsmizki uses letters written by the map’s cartographer, local land-use documents, other nineteenth-century maps, and records from the expedition itself to counter claims that the 1852 map showed a precise location for Fort Clatsop. Going beyond this particular controversy, Karsmizki reminds readers that although maps “beg to be the final arbiter of geographic information . . . researchers need to look beyond this air of authority.

Impressions of Oregon: The Art of Reverend Melville Thomas Wire, by Ginny Allen and Greg Nelson
From the early 1900s until he died in 1966, Melville T. Wire created hundreds of etchings, oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings that depict Oregon’s landscape. Wire also served as an ordained minister of the Methodist church in numerous parishes across the state. Wire’s work as both minister and artist took him across Oregon’s diverse landscapes, and Ginny Allen and Greg Nelson note that his artistic “interpretations provide a unique record of the entire Oregon landscape as it appeared during his lifetime. The authors utilize newspaper accounts, archived material, and the paintings and etchings themselves to describe Wire’s artistic lifestyle and philosophies.

Oregon Voices
Oregon's First State-Mandated Uniform School Readers: Politics and Education, by Lee Lau
During Oregon’s early settlement era, students and teachers in public schools worked with whatever books parents were able to supply. Following the national Common School Movement trend, Oregon’s state legislature created a Board of Education in 1872, which was charged with adopting a standard set of textbooks to be used by all pupils.In adopting a set of readers written, in part, by a political insider and published on the West Coast, the board prompted a dramatic response from Oregon residents and newspaper editors. Writer Lee Lau traces the 1870s debate over state-mandated school readers through the pages of Oregon’s newspapers. She concludes that “the fate of Oregon’s first state-mandated school readers was determined by a political situation that gave the state’s first superintendent of education power to adopt his brother’s books and by a set of political alliances and resentments that influenced editorial policies of Oregon newspapers.

Book Review Essay
Thomas Slaughter's Expedition: Exploring (and Deploring) Lewis and Clark, by reviewed by Clay S. Jenkinson
Review of Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness, by Thomas P. Slaughter
In a decidedly mixed review of Slaughter’s revisionist exploration of the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Clay Jenkinson concludes that “if we find ourselves disagreeing with much of what he has written, then we have at least awakened to the possibility that bold new readings are possible.”

Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed, reviewed by Karl Brooks

David Peterson del Mar, Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West, reviewed by Jacqueline K. Dirks

Mason Drukman, Wayne Morse: A Political Biography, reviewed by David H. Stratton

Richard W. Judd and Christopher S. Beach, Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon, and the Nation, reviewed by William G. Robbins

Liza Nicholas, Elains M. Bapis, and Thomas J. Harvey, eds., Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity, and Play in the New West, reviewed by William L. Lang

David R. Montgomery, King of Fish: The Thousand Year Run of Salmon, reviewed by Jim Lichatowich

Ernest Haycox Jr., On a Silver Desert: The Life of Ernest Haycox, reviewed by Robert Frank

Claire Strom, Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West, reviewed by John C. Hudson

Stewart L. Udall, The Forgotten Founders; Rethinking the History of the Old West, reviewed by Stephen Haycox

Linda Lawrence Hunt, Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk across Victorian America, reviewed by Elizabeth Jacox

Rebecca Dobkins, Rick Bartow: My Eye, and Roger Hull, Eden Again: The Art of Carl Hall, reviewed by Henry Sayre

Al Sandine, Plundertown USA: Coos Bay Enters the Global Economy, reviewed by Linda Carlson

Dorothy Fujita-Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941, reviewed by Robert R. Swartout, Jr.

 

Linda J. Goodman, Singing the Songs of My Ancestors: The Life and Music of Helma Swan, Makah Elder, reviewed by Sandy Johnson Osawa

Molly Cone, Howard Droker, and Jacqueline Williams, Family of Strangers: Building a Jewish Community in Washington State, reviewed by Jeanne Abrams