The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 77, July 1973 - April, 1974 Page: 282

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

South Carolina and Alabama background, particularly the latter, only su-
perficially, covering these fundamental years in a few scant pages, and with
some naivete. Travis's father, for instance, hardly owned a "plantation"-
it was more of a frontier subsistence farm-and her treatment of Travis's
marriage to Rosanna Cato is far too brief. On the other hand, her treat-
ment of Travis in Texas during his Anahuac and San Felipe period is both
frank and accurate. Many readers may recoil at the admission that Travis
was promiscuous or contracted a venereal disease.
If there are to be serious criticisms of the book, they must be these: first,
Turner has filled far too many pages with lengthy quotations from the
Travis correspondence; indeed, some chapters seem no more than quoted
letters. It may be admitted that bringing this correspondence into print is a
service, but it could have been better presented as an Appendix or an edited
book. Secondly, her book, in the end, goes back to the legendary Travis
with his halo firmly fixed, and the concluding chapters on the Alamo lose
him, as indeed earlier chapters do, in the fog of too much concentration on
peripheral events. Finally, the number of very distracting typographical
errors simply must be noted.
Fans of Texana will enjoy this retelling of the familiar story on the Texas
Revolution and of the Alamo, but we do not yet have an adequate biogra-
phy of Travis.
Stephen F. Austin State University ARCHIE P. McDONALD
To Live on This Earth. Estelle Fuchs and Robert J. Havighurst. (Garden
City: Doubleday and Company, I972. Pp. xii+390. Illustrations,
appendices, selected bibliography, notes, index. $8.95.)
This volume is concerned centrally with reporting the results of the 1971
National Study of American Indian Education which was funded by the
United States Office of Education and carried on through eight university
centers. The investigation "sought to document how Indian people them-
selves perceived education and to examine the community and school con-
texts in which education was taking place." One could wish that the authors
had more adequately placed the present volume in its proper historical per-
spective. Despite the critical importance of the present-day state of affairs
vis-a-vis Indian education, one feels, on the basis of the authors' statistically
rich and impressively organized quantitative evidence, that the historical
antecedents may afford the most intelligible guide for an analysis of this
confused and tentative phase of American education and culture.
Significantly, the aims and efforts made to educate Indian children

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