The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 73, July 1969 - April, 1970 Page: 570

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

carefully edited, and satisfactorily proofed. Although the suspicion
arises that at least some of the contributors hacked out their essays in
a single weekend, their scholarly reputations lead this reviewer to
suspect that all editing and proof-reading was handled, not by them,
but in the editorial offices of the publisher. The result, whatever the
reason, is a nightmare of misspellings, poor punctuation, inconsistent
capitalization, words and even phrases repeated, poor syntax, and
weird paragraphing such as one would hardly expect in the breadth
of a ten-volume encyclopedia. In three of the essays entire pages are
devoted to the same subject, the technicalities of trailing a herd. One
author says the cattle usually stretched along the trail for five miles,
while another says a mile. One writer has the Butterfield's first pas-
senger as a man with the first name of William, when it was really
Waterman, and he has the Trail starting from Santa Fe, when he
obviously meant San Francisco.
The subject matter of the Introduction is devoted heavily to the
artist, Melvin C. Warren. This reviewer is not an art critic but he
does admit to liking the sketches and paintings. Still, they are not of
the calibre of Remington's or Russell's, and the Texas-sized signature
is actually distracting. If Warren's work is of lasting quality a mono-
gram the size of a pinhead will do; if his work is ephemeral, then a
signature half the size of the painting or sketch will be useless.
Florida State University, Tallahassee RICHARD A. BARTLETT
Gunman's Territory. By Elmer LeRoy Baker. (San Antonio: The Nay-
lor Company, 1969. Pp. xv+339. Illustrations, bibliography.
$7.95.)
This is a somewhat fictionalized biography of James Robert Hutchins
(1871-1951), who served as a law enforcement officer in Oklahoma
and Texas for over fifty years. Elmer Baker, a retired educator in
Durant, Oklahoma, met Hutchins as a boy; he began interviewing
Hutchins a few years before the old man died in Ardmore, and even-
tually fell heir to his papers and other mementos. The book Baker
constructed is sprinkled with dialogue, sketchy on chronology, and
heavily weighted toward atmosphere. The historian will find the forty-
seven short chapters vague, but the popular reader will enjoy the
romanticized prose and human interest stories.
Baker has taken a rather slim array of facts on Hutchins and deftly
woven them into a series of well-known southwestern episodes. We

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