The Plains Across

Wilbur Jacobs says: This volume is unquestionably a major contribution, a tour de force, in the corpus of scholarship on the American West.

Any careful reader cannot help but be impressed with the author's persistence in sifting a massive data base to bring us an original, revisionist study on a subject that has occupied generations of able historians of the frontier.

[3]Martin Ridge says: Unruh read the secondary literature from anthologies to pot boilers, combed the newspapers of the great era of the trail-1840-1860-for accounts and perceptions of the West, and analyzed more than ten score diaries, both published and unpublished.

Conflicting statements were reconciled; numerical data were corrected; and reminiscences were tested against facts-all with revisionist results, for myths tumble like ten pins in Unruh's retelling of the trail narrative.

The nature of Indian-white contact, for example, is less a tale of violence and theft on the plains and more a case of cooperation and assistance by the tribes and diffidence and abuse by whites, especially in the 1840s.