Stillwater by William F Weld – Book Review

This book is set in the Swift River Valley in North America in 1938. The city fathers in distant Boston decide that the valley should be flooded to provide a constant supply of sweet water for the east coast cities. The locals can be bought off with minimal compensation and go and live and die somewhere else, there are only five small towns there after all.

Jamieson Kooby is fifteen and on the brink of becoming an adult, on the brink of falling in love. He was looking forward to growing up and spending his entire life in the valley. Now he will have to do that quickly, and like everyone else, he will have to do everything quickly. Jamieson is an orphan and lives with his feisty grandma who is determined to be the last person remaining in the valley.

He, like some others in the book display a real connection with nature, with all the creatures there, and he has no desire to be moved from the land where his fathers have lived for years. What is going to happen to the animals, Grandma?

So begins Stillwater, a book containing many interesting characters and decent little subplots. For example, there is serious opposition, that is only to be expected, but that is casually swept away with the time old method of fat brown envelopes dropped in the right places, though that causes more problems than it solves.

In parts the books is written almost like a diary as the fateful day draws ever nearer. There are a lot of characters here, and not too many of them deserve much sympathy, but I liked the book a lot and it remained with me some time after I had set it down.

The writer, William F Weld, was in his spare time, the Governor of Massachusetts so if anyone knows of the machinations of local government it will be he. Probably as well then that it wasn’t set in more recent times or some uncomfortable skeletons might have been revisited.

Western Book Reviews: Gunsmoke and Saddle Leather

It ain’t necessarily an easy gig, writing western history. There’s just so
much cultural freight behind the genre, so much expectation. Unless
you’re Bernard de Voto, how do you make an appeal to the general
market without losing the respect of your peers? Unless you’re Wallace
Stegner, how do you indulge the professorial without seeing your
subject turn bland as Ovaltine? Charles G. Worman’s new coffee table
book Gunsmoke and Saddle Leather: Firearms in the Nineteenth-
Century American West (University of New Mexico Press, $55) goes a
long way toward striking that difficult balance between authenticity and
amusement, elbowing its way onto the short list of entertaining texts that
nevertheless manage to make some contribution to their disciplines.

Seventeen chapters and 522 pages, heavy as a gym plate and thick as
a cheap couch cushion, there’s no curling up in bed with this sumbitch.
No, Gunsmoke is meant to be browsed, read randomly while you’re
hunched over your knees in the stacks, flipped through in the search for
a familiar, faded face (Calamity Jane, “with a Stevens pocket rifle with
detachable skeleton stock.”) or guns associated with famous names
(“This Burgess [a 12 gauge folding shotgun] passed to Pat Garrett,
famed as Billy the Kid’s killer, who served as US customs collector in El
Paso…Garrett had this gun with him when in 1908 he was gunned down
by one of his tenants…”) Despite the imposing size, the book is an easy
way to kill an afternoon, a heavy hodgepodge of distracting tidbits.
About the development of repeating rifles, for instance, Worman writes,
“Manufacture of the Henry repeater ceased in 1866, shortly before the
demise of the Spencer. Oliver Winchester and his associates
recognized the need for improvement in the Henry’s magazine design.
The solution was patented in May 1866 by Nelson King, a spring-
tempered loading gate set in the right side of the brass frame…Loading
was accomplished merely by inserting the cartridges one by one
through the gate.” For anyone with the least knowledge of firearms,
these few sentences represent a treasure trove of learned trivia. Henry’s
stopped production when? And Spencer’s? And that side loading
mechanism that you remember from Uncle Earl’s old 30.06? Turns out it
was an 1866 patent. For a firearms enthusiast or amateur historian,
anyone with the least interest in Western history, it don’t get much better.

The academic value of the book arises from Worman’s considerable,
nearly encyclopedic expertise, his thorough knowledge of the subject.
He takes a particular delight in writing captions, explaining that the
fuzzy, nearly indecipherable handgun on the hip of a drover is not only
being carried butt forward, but it’s a Colt Model 1878; that the interior of
a cow puncher’s bunk shows us a Winchester Model 1873 rifle, a
double-barrel shotgun and a holstered Colt Model 1878 revolver. “A pair
of hand weights on the floor beside the boots indicates the owner must
have been health conscious.” The various chapters, while arranged in
rough temporal sequence – chapter eight, “The 1860s,” precedes
chapter nine, “Trailing Cattle,” and chapter eleven, “The Slaughter of the
Bison” – nevertheless can (and perhaps should) be read as stand alone
essays.

This particular arena of western history, of course, is clotted with titles,
each one clamoring for its share of attention. Winchester has a book, for
instance. Colt has a couple, Remington. Under their own bargain
imprint, Barnes & Noble has released a whole scad of coffee table
browsers (A History of Arms, etc.). But Charles G. Worman’s effort
manages to stand out. A firearms specialist and, previously, the co-
author of the two volume, Firearms of the American West, a retired
deputy director of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force and a
Fellow of the Company of Military Historians, Worman is an able and
entertaining guide, a scholar with no real agenda aside from the
communication of his passion. His book is a skilled and valuable
addition to a difficult genre.