The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, July 1945 - April, 1946 Page: 671

Book Reviews

should disclose to him the real persons whose talk surges
through the pages with the truant prodigality of wind in the
pines.
Hoole has laid all of us who value Texas history under an
imperative to search more diligently into the roots of our past.
The impressive amount of labor spent in finding out so small
a quantity of data concerning Hammett, a man who must have
impressed his contemporaries, furnishes an object lesson in the
drudgery of research. Many men of less note have left more
footprints and broken twigs of history for the tracker.
REX W. STRICKLAND
Texas College of Mines
The Cherokee Strip: A Tale of an Oklahoma Boyhood. By Mar-
quis James. New York (The Viking Press), 1945. Pp. 294.
Map. $3.00.
"Pop, why don't you write some of the things you tell about
instead of what you do write ?" Because a little girl asked him
that, Marquis James worked for nearly ten years on an auto-
biography of his first twenty-one years in Enid, Oklahoma.
Enid is, in fact, the heroine of this book of recollections, while
the hero is a sensitive, observant, country-newspaper reporter
called Markey James. Young James became a reporter while
still in high school, and by the time he was twenty, had worked
for several of Enid's papers. His ambition was to be a journey-
man printer, but he became instead a biographer with two
Pulitzer Prizes to his credit. One is, in fact, reminded of his
biographies of Sam Houston (The Raven) and Andrew Jackson
while reading the "Tale of an Oklahoma Boyhood."
Author James' interest in history developed early, and in
Enid's one-room public library he read Froissart's Chronicle
and studied the lives of the Presidents of the United States.
His favorites were George Washington, Andrew Jackson, An-
drew Johnson, and Abraham Lincoln. But once in the presence
of Temple Houston, he was embarrassed that he couldn't think
of a thing about General Sam Houston of Texas. "Pretty soon,"
he wrote, "I got hold of a book that told about General Sam
Houston of Texas; also Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, James
Bowie and others-all in one book. Then something happened
... my passion for posing as a historical wizard gave way to
something else. So I cannot recall having paraded my knowl-

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