REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
- McLoughlin and Old Oregon. By Eva Emery Dye. (Chicago: A. C. McClung and Company, 1900. Pp. VIII, 381.)
The incidents, personalities, color, and sequence of events in the growth of Oregon from 1832 to 1849 were never before portrayed as they are in Mrs. Dye's "McLoughlin and Old Oregon." Had the present day kinetograph and phonograph been at hand and in operation for recording the dramatic scenes and sayings of that period of wonderful changes in the Valley of the Columbia, we should have had more of the foibles, limitations, and obliquities of human nature, but Mrs. Dye's minute study, sympathetic assimilation, and unique strength in constructive imagination have given us an exceedingly interesting series of pictures almost as vivid as real life.
The book opens at Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia, the center of the Hudson's Bay Company's widely extended operations west of the Rocky Mountains, and the home of its chief factor, Dr. John McLoughlin. The time, 1832, marks the revival of the movement of American enterprise for the occupation of Oregon in the person of Nathaniel J. Wyeth. Nineteen years had passed since the Astor venture had suffered dismal discomfiture in that region. From 1832 on, however, the United States was to have representatives, in one capacity or another, of its interests in Oregon. Slender was its hold during the first half of this period, but its preponderance was overwhelming in the latter half. Wyeth failed with his commercial venture. Physical obstacles taxed his resources, and he had to meet the determined monopoly
