Mr. Williams has restored in a sub title Winthrop's own name for the book, "Klalam and Klickatat."
Two survivors of that early period, Gen. Henry C. Hodges, who, as a lieutenant of the Fourth U. S. Infantry, was adjutant of Capt. McClellan's railway reconnaissance in the Cascades, and Col. E. Jay Allen, builder of the famous "Citizens' Road," which Winthrop describes with much humor, contribute interesting recollections of the brilliant young adventurer, and of events in which he and they played a part in that eventful summer.
In the spring of 1853, Theodore Winthrop, then only twenty-five, came to the Pacific Coast from Panama. Five years earlier he had been graduated from Yale, with honors in languages and history. Not of robust constitution, he sought health by life in the open air. Two years were passed in the south of Europe, mainly in travel on foot amid the Alps and in the Mediterranean countries. Study of the scenery and historical monuments of those lands developed a naturally poetic and imaginative mind, and prepared him to appreciate the vast panorama that spread before him as he traveled from the Isthmus to California, thence, after a brief stay in San Francisco, up the coast by steamer to the Columbia, overland from there to Puget Sound, and finally across the Cascades and through our great "Inland Empire," homeward bound, to Salt Lake and Fort Laramie. This journey of half a year, then almost unprecedented, is fully recorded in his letters and journals which Mr. Williams has recovered for us.
In these wanderings Winthrop visited the young communities of the Northwest, Portland, Salem, Vancouver, The Dalles, Olympia, Nisqually, Steilacoom, Port Townsend, Victoria. He studied its scenery, resources and people. He quickly won the regard of pioneer leaders, army officers, Hudson's Bay Company factors, and of the humbler settlers as well, by a hearty democratic appreciation of the meaning of their work in founding future states. It was just this quality, as Mr. Williams has well shown, that enabled Winthrop to understand the raw west. To a real liking for people add his well trained powers of observation, unfailing humor, a vivid imagination and a tireless love of adventure, and we have the secret of his success as a painter of the frontier and its life.
In his delightful introduction Mr. Williams points out and emphasizes these qualities:
"Winthrop was probably better fitted to study and portray the West than any other Eastern man who attempted to describe it. His books and still more his private letters and journals show him wholly free from that tenderfoot superiority of tone found in most of the contemporary writings of Eastern men who visited the frontier. In an age when sectionalism was fast driving toward civil war, his point of view was broadly national. His pride in his country as a whole had only been deepened by education and foreign travel. He had come home from Europe feeling the value to humanity of the struggle and opportunities presented by the conquest of the new continent. In the rough battle with the forest, in the stumpy farms on the little clearings, in the crude road that would link the infant settlements with the outside world, he recognized the very processes that had laid strong the foundations of the republic to which later he so gladly gave his life. Ungainly as was the present, this descendant of the great governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut saw in it the promise of a splendid and beneficent future.
"Most of our writers in the years preceding the Civil War were either occupied with sectional discussions and local traditions, or were looking to Europe and the past for their inspiration. * * * For fiction, our people read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and reprints of the English novelists. Our literature had not yet discovered the West. Winthrop's Western books, 'The Canoe and the Saddle' and 'John Brent,' minted new ore."
George William Curtis, who was Winthrop's neighbor on Staten Island and his closest friend in the years just before the war, bore similar testimony, in a conversation with Mr. Williams more than twenty years ago:
"Winthrop's death was as great a loss to American letters as was that of John Keats to English poetry. He was far ahead of his time in thinking continentally. Cut off before his prime, his books, brilliant as they are, are the books of a young man. But he had vision and power, and had he lived to improve his art, I have always believed that he might have become the strongest, because the most truly American, of our writers."
Readers of Books of Old Oregon are all familiar with the early "Canoe and Saddle." It was the only work in lighter vein descriptive of conditions on the ultimate frontier, when we had here a white population vastly outnumbered by the Indians. The new volume will appeal to surviving pioneers, to Native Sons and Daughters, and to all who are genuinely interested in Northwestern history.