Books: Writer Meets River

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GREAT RIVER (2 vols., 1,020 pp.)—Paul Horgan—Rinehart ($10).

The Rivers of America series is one of those publishing projects that always seems better as an idea than in execution.

Except for a few (e.g. The Monongahela, Everglades), the books have seldom risen above the level of scrappy regional history. When New Mexican Novelist Paul Horgan began to do his book on the Rio Grande, it was meant to be one of the series. But in the end, the publishers decided not to include his book, for it towers above the others as a Prescott towers above cracker-barrel chroniclers. Great River is not only a fine job of historical research. It fuses the imagination of a good novelist (The Fault of Angels) with a remarkable sense of a region's character.

Author Horgan begins in the dim past before recorded history, with a graceful account of primitive Indian existence. He believes that "they solved with restraint and beauty the problem of modest physical union with their mighty surroundings." At this distance in time he sees them as living "like figures in a dream, waiting to be awakened."

They were "awakened" by the Spaniards, who brought with them both Christianity and visions of wealth. What the incredibly brave and selfless friars brought in the way of spiritual enlightenment was sometimes more than offset by the greed and rapacity of the Spanish governors. For 200 years the Spanish slaughtered and the Indians massacred, but by 1700 the Pueblo Indians were finished as warriors. The Rio Grande enjoyed few stretches of real peace. What with the Indians, the U.S.-Mexican war and the raids of Pancho Villa, Horgan's pages are seldom free from violence.

Great River could easily have drowned in a torrent of blood, but Horgan's interest in the people and the land is always deeper than any temptation to deal with adventure. There are excellent descriptions of Comanche Indian life, of the cowboy, of frontier towns. But the real triumph of Horgan's book is his own intense love for the Rio Grande country, which he has woven into his fine prose.