American Rivers

THE MISSOURI -- Stanley Vestal--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

THE RIVERS OF AMERICA -- 26 vols. -- Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50 ea.).

When he came upon the Great Falls of the Missouri River in 1805, Captain Meriwether Lewis found himself in the heart of the northwestern wilderness. On an island below the Falls, on a high cottonwood tree, he saw a lone eagle's nest. Lewis went on alone, toward the Sun River, and shot a buffalo. Then he saw a bear creeping toward him, ran to the river and jumped in. When he climbed out, he met an unknown brown- & -yellow animal ready to spring upon him. He shot at it. Then he was charged by three buffalo bulls. He escaped again, "inclined to believe it all enchantment if the thorns of the prickly pear piercing his feet did not dispel at every moment the illusion."

Steamboats and Gold. Much of the country along the Missouri is still almost as wild as it was then. While Stanley Vestal was writing The Missouri near Sioux City, Iowa, the wild geese, held up in their spring flight by a six-inch snow, made such a racket that sleep was impossible. Through its loveliest country the Missouri is rich in historic sites that almost nobody ever sees because nobody ever uses the river for travel any more --old campgrounds, old trading posts and forts, Indian battlefields, old steamboat landings that date from the days when river boats pushed to Fort Benton, Mont., 3,575 miles from salt water. (Round trip fare between St. Louis and Fort Benton was $300; the menu included smoked buffalo tongue, bear and elk; profits were as high as $40,000 a single voyage; the captains got $1,200 a month.)

The Missouri flows by Confederate Gulch and Montana Bar in the Big Belt Mountains. Exiled to the mountains during the Civil War, Confederate prisoners went prospecting. When the gold rush began, a greenhorn asked a bearded old prospector where he should dig. The old man spat, pointed to the least likely-looking place he could see, and said, "Try that bar yonder." The greenhorn scooped up panfuls of clean gold.

Turbulent and clear in its headwaters, the Missouri changes its character after its junction with the turbid waters of the Yellowstone, changes again as it meanders through the prairies to earn its nickname of "Big Muddy" and empty at last into the Mississippi ten miles above St. Louis. The longest U.S. river (2,470 miles), it is also one of the most dangerous in flood. Forever seeking its lost channel (it once flowed north to Hudson Bay), the Missouri is also the hungriest of U.S. rivers, with a yearly menu of "ten thousand acres of good rich farming land, several miles of railroad, a few hundred houses, a forest or two and uncounted miles of sandbars."

Unending Rhythm. The Missouri is the 26th volume in the Rivers of America series.* When the late Constance Lindsay Skinner started the series in 1937, it was planned to run to 24 volumes. Now the publishers intend to keep on as long as the rivers hold out. Already totaling 9,081 pages, the series is one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary U.S. publishing. It has been steadily profitable: The Missouri's 25 predecessors have sold a grand total of almost 200,000 copies.

"There is magic in rivers." said Editor Skinner. "They are unending rhythm; even when winter closes over them, in the mind they are still flowing." The Missouri, like most of the other books in the series, is a brisk, animated volume of 368 pages of history and anecdote and local color, written with less artistry than some, but livelier than most, retelling many old stories and some new ones, threading them together in a slow, upstream description of the changing river as it rounds Musick Ferry, Mule's Head Landing, Sheep Nose Bend, Kansas City, Rattlesnake Springs, Omaha, Cow Island, Great Falls, to its origin at Three Forks in Montana.

The 26 books describe a lot of water. They generally begin with an account of the river in Indian days, touch briefly on its exploration, cover the Revolutionary, Civil War; or Indian fighting that raged around it, and hurry on to the days of steamboats and romance. Surprisingly, the greatest lack in the volumes is of simple, physical description, rapids by rapids, bend by bend. There is barely a mention of a good place to fish in all the thousands of miles they cover.

Emotion in Tranquillity. The series justifies Editor Skinner's claim that American history approached through these waterways throws a new slanting light deep into the American consciousness. Americans' lives are indeed impoverished, as she said, if they lack a sense of identification with the country around them, and are ignorant of its written and anecdotal history. And as men's political horizons expand toward the world state, each man feels a stronger need to cherish some one region small enough to be compassed by one heart and mind.

Beyond their obvious value, the Rivers of America books at their best contribute a way of writing unsparingly about American history without making its harsh conflicts harsher in the telling.

The horrors and heroisms and hardships are poised against the timeless rivers on whose banks they take place and, sometimes with the help of the authors, and sometimes in spite of them, serenity comes into the accounts. Thus they acquire the quality of genuine poetry, by Wordsworth's definition: "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

Beauty & Pain. Edgar Lee Masters' simple, poetic description of his boyhood on the Sangamon is pure, old-pioneer's prose: "This river winds and bends around heights and hills covered with oak trees and through prairies where the buffalo grass grew in the long ago, but where now and for many years there are distances of corn and oats and clover."

Arthur Tourtellot's account of Longfellow on the Charles perhaps comes closer to summing up the quality of the series than any other piece of writing in them. At a time when the U.S. was torn by politics, and his own life had been darkened by tragedy, Longfellow "found importance in simple legends, boyish dreams, an open fire, the river flowing by him on its way to the sea."

The poet wrote: "The blue river runs in front, and the wind roars loud in the trees, and it is all springlike. . . . The glimmer of golden leaves in the sunshine, the lilac hedge shot with crimson creeper; the river writing its silver S in the meadow; everything without full of loveliness. But within me the hunger, the famine of the heart!"

In their own ways and in their own words the countless explorers, trappers, miners, farmers, pilots and rivermen, millers, lumbermen, hydraulic engineers, artists and cowboys echoed him; these books are a record of their joy and travail.

Deep in the South

THE WINDS OF FEAR--Hodding Coder --Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

When the mayor of Carvell City drove up, Cancy Dodd was sprawled on his broken-down porch staring glumly at his scrubby farmland and thinking about his hidden still and the two men he had once killed "in self-defense." Cancy was Carvell City's toughest Negro-hater. But his eyes popped when His Honor boomed: "We're looking for a new marshal. . . . Somebody who'll keep the niggers in their place." "When do you want me?" said Cancy.

Hodding Carter, 37-year-old co-publisher of the Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times, now serving as a major in the War Department, has not written his first novel simply about Negrophobes. The Winds of Fear is a study of a small Southern town in World War II -- grimly united on the question of Hitler, feverishly disunited on the question of Negroes.

The whites in Carvell City were passively prejudiced or fiercely intolerant, according to what they heard and how they were aroused. Sometimes they listened to Kirk Mabry, liberal editor of the local Salute. But when Kirk's son, Alan, came home wounded from Guadalcanal, he found that a Negro murder had stirred up the whites and that they were primed to follow the new marshal.

Cancy and His Tart. Cancy enjoyed being marshal. He had more money than ever before; ladies bowed to him in the street. He was not supposed to touch liquor, but once in a while he would stop at a friend's house for a few slugs. He took up with a smooth little tart named Julie, who showed him the gay life on a visit to the state capital. Nobody but Editor Mabry and his son seemed to bother about the new marshal's goings-on. Cancy had the Negroes so scared that they would hardly venture out after dark.

Urged on by Julie, Cancy grew bolder. When Catfoot Grimes and an Italian storekeeper peddled their liquor to the Negroes, Cancy looked the other way --after pocketing a fat cut. When Doc Stanley found out, Cancy's pals ran him out of town. But Julie, greed and liquor got the better of Cancy in the end. Slowly, shrewdly, Editor Mabry and his son piled up the evidence against Cancy, worked painstakingly to win over one respectable citizen after another. Then they struck--in an editorial that staggered Carvell City and brings the story to a bloody end.

"They Lynch Up North. . . ." The Winds of Fear is better, as well as more timely, than most current best-selling novels. Its faults are the usual ones of a novel of its kind: in his worthy effort to be scrupulously just, Author Carter often sounds more like an honest broker than an imaginative novelist. Like most just men he sounds best when he lets go--as when Editor Mabry bellows: "They lynch up north, and a damn sight more people than we do. Only they call them race riots."

China Revisited

THE VIGIL OF A NATION--Lin Yutang-- John Day ($2.75).

"Going over to China seems almost like a visit to a neighbor's front porch," writes Novelist-Philosopher Lin Yutang (The Importance of Living), a resident of the U.S. since 1936. "I believe the Age of the Open Door is over and the Age of the Front Porch has just begun. . . . Good Neighbors will come to sit . . . of an evening, and taking out their pipes, will chat and exchange gossip until the moon is high."

The author of Between Tears and Laughter (TIME, Aug. 30, 1943) is no longer bitter about U.S. neglect of China. After six months in his native land, he is back on his adopted front porch, puffing amiably on his literary pipe, gracefully chatting and gossiping of home.

Regretful Vision. In China, Good Neighbor Lin saw suffering aplenty. There were starvation, poverty, and inflation that raised the price of a package of Camels to $180 and worked tragic hardships on the underfed, underpaid Chinese soldiers. But his travelogue, designed to supply Americans with "a more intimate knowledge of the social and political background" of his country, leaves the U.S. reader to deduce for himself the nature of China's struggle.

Author Lin gives hints aplenty. For he himself is obviously caught between his admiration of the U.S. industrial culture and his deep attachment to the serene traditions of his own land. He foresees a glowing future for an industrialized China. But his vision, like that of a tycoon returning to his home town to build a new factory, is dimmed by nostalgic and regretful recollection. "The disharmonies" of a "transition age," bad print, "and bad paper are "but some of the side aspects of the ugliness and pain of a changing China."

In Chungking he met Lu Tsofu, a sort of Chinese Henry Kaiser, whose ingenuity developed the resources of the Minsheng Steamship Co. from a single 100-foot steamer to a fleet of 98 ships and a shipyard "scattered over miles and partly hidden in underground caves." The meeting convinced him that China needs a business government of men chosen "solely for their ability to get things done." But in Chengtu Lin savored with relish the "teahouse culture . . . where one passes hours in conversations and loquacious peregrinations on topics that are strictly not one's own business, and in smoking the water pipe, reading newspapers, exchanging gossip, chewing melon seeds, and buying odd curios . . ." as well as eating the "sentimental dish called 'nine times twisted intestines.' "

Communists and Confucians. In only one chapter does Scholar Lin throw off his bemused detachment. "The greatest harm the Americans can do themselves," he says, "is to underestimate the Chinese Communists. . . . The Chinese Government does not wish to tell the story for the sake of face and appearance and the Chinese Communists do not want to tell the story because it makes ghastly reading of their record in this war." Lin blames Chungking for vainly appeasing the Communists.

In the undeclared civil war which has existed since the latter part of 1939, he asserts, the Communists have killed six Chinese for every Japanese, have thrown patriots by the thousands into traitors' camps. "It is hard to understand," he comments bitterly, "how such destruction of Chinese manpower was to help in the war against Japan by the weirdest stretch of materialistic dialectic."

In his final chapter, an essay on democracy and the future, Author Lin predicts an inevitable defeat for the Communists. "Marxism," he says, "sounds 'foreign' to Chinese ears, and the Chinese family and Confucianism . . . will be too strong for them. They will become pro-Confucian and pro-nationalist. ... So history will play pranks with men's ideas."

*The others: Kennebec, Upper Mississippi, Suwannee River, Powder River, The James, The Hudson, The Sacramento, The Wabash, The Arkansas, The Delaware, The Illinois, The Raw, The Brandywine, The Charles, The Kentucky, The Sangamon, The Allegheny, The Wisconsin, Lower Mississippi, The St. Lawrence, The Chicago, Twin Rivers, The Humboldt, The St. John's, Rivers of the Eastern Shore.

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