The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, July 1944 - April, 1945 Page: 128

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

very well, and the idea of seeing them and their doings through
her eyes is an engaging one. The device breaks down, however,
when the author gets well into his subject. Fortunately the
stories themselves are so rich in human interest and so well
told that the reader doesn't mind.
Tucson "was always a place of arrival and departure." Fur-
thermore, up to 1850 "Tucson in the interior and Santa F
and El Paso to the eastward were more important communities
than Los Angeles and San Francisco." The men who built Tucson
from a frontier hamlet into a city had more than their share
of color and individuality. It would be hard to find a group
of more varied backgrounds and ideas, but they all had courage
and they insisted on being themselves. Mark Aldrich, the
first American to arrive, was a merchant from New York who
conducted his business with Yankee efficiency and dignity. His
opposite was Pete Kitchen, a rough-hewn character who kept
up a feudal estate, fought the Apaches to a standstill, and died
poor when the old, heroic way of life was gone. Charles D.
Poston was a cosmopolitan at home in Paris and Washington
who came in with "a seasoned band of frontiersmen he had picked
up in San Antonio, Texas," and a million dollars with which to
organize a mining company. The rest of the figures in the book
seldom fall below these in interest.
Dr. Lockwood is no debunker of the pioneer character. He
recognizes the weaknesses of his men and women, but he likes
to think that frontier conditions produced people like Peter
R. Brady, who was "fearless, resolute, resourceful, companion-
able . . . honest, humane, devoted to the civic welfare" a
man who "exemplified in a high degree the qualities we most
admire in the American frontiersman."
The Tucson Civic Committee is responsible for the publication
of the book, and there is no price indicated on the dust jacket.
Apparently for once a community has had the impulse to en-
courage a competent historian to tell its story as a gesture of
patriotism and pride without too much thought about money.
C. L. SONNICHSEN
College of Mines and Metallurgy
A Doctor Comes to California: The Diary of John S. Griffin,
Assistant Surgeon with Kearny's Dragoons, 1846-1847.
Introduction and notes by George Walcott Ames, Jr., and

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