The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 71, July 1967 - April, 1968 Page: 303

Book Reviews

check of this minor matter will show that the lead mines to which
Austin moved from Richmond were in present-day Wythe County,
something over two hundred miles from Richmond.
Caruso has an indisputable flair for story-telling but he does not
shed any new light on his subject. Further, in too many instances
he appears to prefer being bright rather than right.
Del Mar College EDITH PARKER
America's Western Frontiers. By John A. Hawgood. New York (Alfred
A. Knopf), 1967. Pp. xxiii+44o. Illustrations, maps, bibliographic
note, index. $1o.oo.
This English historian's view of the broad sweep of America's
westward exploration and settlement is usually well integrated and
balanced and is brilliantly written. Professor Hawgood, who teachers
American history at the University of Birmingham, has added to his
advantage of perspective that of on-the-spot research. He has made a
score of continental crossings, studied in some of our finest libraries,
and visited the sites of many historic events.
In slightly different form, this comprehensive and well illustrated
volume was published first in England as The American West. Here,
before publication, it won the first Alfred A. Knopf Western History
Prize of $5,000. This award was fully deserved, since the book, while
packed with colorful details, maintains a point of view and a steady
unfolding of frontier development. It gives the reader a bold,
panoramic picture of the whole Trans-Mississippi West.
The aim of the author was to write a book "which can conjure up
the West as it really was, and not as the dime novel, the Wild
West show, the movies, and television have sometimes overdrawn it."
Beginning with a description of the pre-Columbian West, he tells of
coastal and overland explorations, adventures of buckskinned fur
traders and grizzled Forty-Niners, and the arrival of cattlemen and
homesteaders.
He brings in also the soldiers who subdued the Indians, the hunters
who cleared the plains of buffalo herds, the Mormons, and the
Oklahoma boomers. He notes the development of transportation from
the ox wagon and the stagecoach to the parlor car. In paying tribute
to the pioneers who tamed the West, he shows awareness also of

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