(of the Pacific Northwest), "Beyond the Border" (oi-the settled portion of the Mississippi valley), "Japan," and "Kamhkin" (the head-chief or the Yakimas). What but a medley would one expect from such an aggregation of parts! And yet there is a unity, if not bodied forth, at least shadowed out, in this work. It theme is nothing less than the meeting on the Columbia and in Japan of the vanguard representatives of the eastward-moving and the westward-moving races. Mrs. Dye contends that the American Indian tribes were off-shoots of the Japanese stock and does not tire in pointing out anthropological, ethnological and philological parallels among these peoples—and she finds not a few that seem significant. Incidents in the great westward streaming of the English speaking peoples and in the interflow of the races reaching even to the shores of Japan constitute the bulk of the volume. These are given as vividly and as pieturesquely as only Mrs. Dye can.
The unique and original contribution that Mrs. Dye makes in this book to the literature of the "Westward Movement" is the story of Ranald McDonald. His name thus fitly figures in the title, though that account comprises but a minor portion of the book. Ranald was the son of Archibald McDonald, a chief factor of the Hudson Bay Company, and of a daughter of Cumcumly, a head-chief of the Chinooks. His childhood was spent at different posts of that Company in the Pacific Northwest. He was educated at St. John's Academy at Red River and became a clerk in a bank at St. Thomas, Ontario. But the heredity of a Scotch Highland father and of an Indian mother was not to be held in restraint. He resolved "to break into Japan," and with an exploit that involved most daring and reckless ventures he succeeded. He not only saved himself where others paid with their lives the penalty of violating the mystery of Japan, but also instructed his Japanese attendants so that a few years later these could interpret for Commodore Perry in his forced negotiations for the opening of the harbors of Japan to the world. Furthermore it is claimed for Ranald McDonald that he was "the instigator of Perry's expedition" and more particularly that Perry's equipment of working models of all the more important inventions of western ingenuity with which he was able to set up a small exposition when he landed was solely the suggestion of McDonald.
While the story of Ranald McDonald and of the subsequent expedition of Perry are the distinctive features of the book, Mrs. Dye made it serve for a grand resume of the results of her explorations in the whole range of early Oregon history. In it she "touches the high places" in the progress of events from the coming of the Hudson Bay Company fur traders (1823) to the close of the Yakima War (1856). Mrs. Dye has genius for ferreting out blood relationships.
