" [Footnote: "Proceedings American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1893-4," 29:439.] I have never read "The Oregon Trail" with the same keen
enthusiasm as his other books, largely, I think, because it is a mere
report of personal adventure and not a composition fused of his
imagination. It is an excellent photograph by the side of a master's
painting.
But all this accuracy of detail, this revivifying of dead Indians,
knights, voyageurs and soldiers, this painting of prairie, forest, and
mountain, was not in itself to put him among the world's great historians.
And, indeed, there are those who, appreciating the artist's skill, have
expressed regret that he gave this skill to no great theme. It is as if he
were (they would doubtless say) writing of the labors of sacrificing
missionaries in Africa, or of colonial administration in Indo-China, or of
forest adventure along the Amazon. In the Boston Public Library I found
that every work of his had duplicate copies in the boys' department. (And
how great the reading is to this day is intimated by my inability one
evening to get a copy of "Pontiac's War," though there were several copies
in the possession of the library.
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