REVIEWS
Orient Meets Occident, by Enoch A. Bryan, The Students Book Corporation, Pullman, Washington, 269 pages.
By Leslie M. Scott
The author, president emeritus of the State College of Washington at Pullman, resident of the inland empire since 1893, makes available to readers his large knowledge of Pacific northwest progress and history.
The book is a narrative of railroad development in the west, and particularly in Oregon and Washington.
The railroad idea began in the 1830s as that of a transcontinental portage to connect the commerce of the occident and the orient, like that of the navigators who, beginning 300 years before, sought a route to the far east. The upbuilding of the pioneer west, led by gold discoveries in the 1850s and 1860s, and the need for fast transit for national defense enforced by the civil war, changed the railroad plan from oriental idealism to domestic industrialism. The author's first chapter portrays a part realization of the original idea in the later growth of transpacific trade. "The story ends," says the author, "as it began."
The lure of gold awakened energies which opened the west to industry and built the railroads. The civil war eclipsed the Santa Fe route which once had dominant southern support in the government. Then northern sentiment put through the central or Union Pacific route to California, with big subsidies of government lands and bonds, to the enrichment of Huntington, Stanford, Crocker and Hopkins. Followed the Northern Pacific, longer delayed because of popular objection to the methods of such personal gains. The author's hero is James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern Railway (no subsidies). Hill's adversary, E. H. Harriman, the author seeks also to praise, but by comparison does so faintly.
Especially satisfactory is the chapter in eighteen pages, "The Pacific Northwest Has Its Own Gold Rush," which rush began in the upper Columbia country in 1860 and created activities that drew in their wake first the Northern Pacific and the Union Pacific, then the Great Northern, and finally the Milwaukee.
The author gives credence to the questionable story of "treachery" to Astor on the part of Astor's partners in 1813; and to the version that the Pacific northwest was "almost" lost by the United States to Britain. He indulges in occasional colloquialisms; in popular dogmas that wastes and profits piled up excessive capitalizations, which survived bankrupt liquidations and perpetuated high rates; in the modern fiction that Dr. D. S. Baker built the Walla Walla-Wallula railroad out of public spirit and philanthropy, instead of profit designs. The greatest industrialists of their time, the ruggedest individualists, were the railroad builders, and the busiest periods of progress were those of railroad construction, 1868-73, 1880-93, 1905-09. Dr. Bryan has brought to fruition the observations and reflections of a long and useful career amid the scenes of his narrative.
Express and Stagecoach Days in California, by Oscar Osburn Winther, Stanford University Press, 1936, 197 pages.
By Dan E. Clark
Those who expect a book on stagecoach days to be filled with adventure and with stories of attacks by bandits and Indians may be disap-
