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Missouri , Historical T^epiew Tublhhed bu ¥mmom April 1947 OFFICERS OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI, 1945-1948 ISIDOR LOEB, St. Louis, President GEORGE ROBB ELLISON, Maryville, First Vice-President HENRY C. CHILES, Lexington, Second Vice-President RUSH H. LIMBAUGH, Cape Girardeau, Third Vice-President HENRY A. BUNDSCHU, Independence, Fourth Vice-President RAY V. DENSLOW, Trenton, Fifth Vice-President LUDWIG FUERBRINGER, St. Louis, Sixth Vice-President R. B. PRICE, Columbia, Treasurer FLOYD C. SHOEMAKER, Columbia, Secretary and Librarian TRUSTEES OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI Permanent Trustees, Former Presidents of the Society ALLEN MCREYNOLDS, Carthage GEORGE A. ROZIER, Jefferson City WILLIAM SOUTHERN, JR., Independence Term Expires at Annual Meeting, 1947 FRANK P. BRIGGS, Macon ALBERT L. REEVES, Kansas City STEPHEN B. HUNTER, Cape Girar- E. E. SWAIN, Kirksville deau R. M. THOMSON, St. Charles WALDO P. JOHNSON, Clinton ROY D. WILLIAMS, Boonville E. LANSING RAY, St. Louis Term Expires at Annual Meeting, 1948 LUDWIG FUERBRINGER, St. Louis WILLIAM L. VANDEVENTER, Spring- PAUL C. JONES, Kennett field LAURENCE J. KENNY, S. J., GEORGE H. WILLIAMS, St. Louis St. Louis CHARLES L. WOODS, Rolla *HENRY KRUG, JR., St. Joseph G. L. ZWICK, St. Joseph HENRY C THOMPSON, Bonne Terre Term Expires at Annual Meeting, 1949 JESSE W. BARRETT, St. Louis JAMES TODD, Moberly ALBERT M. CLARK, Richmond JONAS VILES, Columbia HENRY J. HASKELL, Kansas City T. BALLARD WAITERS, Marshfield WILLIAM R. PAINTER, Carrollton L. M. WHITE, Mexico JOSEPH PULITZER, St. Louis EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE The twenty-nine trustees, the President and the Secretary of the Society, the Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, and President of the University of Missouri constitute the Executive Committee. •Deceased. ^Missouri Historical cR^view Floyd Q, Shoemaker, Editor ^Volume XLI U\(umber Three *April 1947 rfS®@8fe> The Missouri Historical Review is published quarterly. It is sent free to all members of the State Historical Society of Missouri. Membership dues in the Society are $1.00 a year. All communica­ tions should be addressed to Floyd C. Shoemaker, the State His­ torical Society of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri. The Society assumes no responsibility for statements made by contributors to the magazine. "Entered as second-class matter at the postoffice at Columbia, Missouri, under Act of Congress, October S. 1917. Sec. HI." Qontents Page MISSOURI LITERATURE SINCE THE FIRST WORLD WAR. Part III The Novel. By Minnie M. Brashear 241 THE JOURNAL OF TITIAN RAMSAY PEALE, PIONEER NATURALIST. Part II. Edited by A. 0. Weese 266 NICHOLAS HESSE, GERMAN VISITOR TO AMERICA, 1835-1837. Part III. Translated by William G. Bek.. 285 THE MISSOURI READER: THE FRENCH IN THE VALLEY. Part VII. Edited by Dorothy Penn 305 Transportation 305 HISTORICAL NOTES AND COMMENTS 315 Members Active in Increasing Society's Membership 315 New Members of the Society, November 1946-January 1947. 315 Publication of Ozarks Folksongs 317 Back Issues of the Review Wanted 318 Weekly Feature Articles of the Society 318 Activities of County Historical Societies 319 Anniversaries 322 Notes 323 Historical Publications 329 Obituaries 333 MISSOURI HISTORY NOT FOUND IN TEXTBOOKS . 337 Gone Are the Days 337 To Forgive Divine 337 A Few Words on Gambling 338 Jug Fishing 338 No More Stutterers 339 A Quick Slick Trick 339 Page Diogenes 340 For Early Risers 340 The Allsman Murder and the Palmyra Massacre 340 Stealing His Thunder 342 Frozen Assets Liquidated 342 Missouri Historical Data in Magazines 343 ( i ) Contents Illustrations Page THE INDIAN BULLBOAT. Cover design reproduced from Maximilian's Travels in the Interior of North America, in R. G. Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, Vol. XXV Plate 48. See "The French in the Valley" 305 ( ii ) MISSOURI LITERATURE SINCE THE FIRST WORLD WAR PART III—THE NOVEL BY MINNIE M. BRASHEAR* There can be discovered for the convenience of discussion, it was pointed out in the first paper of this three-part survey of writing in Missouri between the two world wars, four more or less clearly defined trends, all characteristic also of the development, during this period, of American literature in general. These are a renewed interest in the common man; a spirit of nationalism, seen especially in the revival of the novel having a period of Missouri history for a background; a tendency to find in the manners and customs of a region an escape from the artificiality of modern industrial society; and, what may be found running through any of these, a mood of disillusion and despair concerning the human situation, sometimes termed pessimistic determinism or naturalism. It was found that all four currents are discoverable in many dramas and novels of the period, sometimes running parallel with each other, as in Harry Harrison Kroll's1 Fury in the Earth (1945), which shows how the New Madrid Earth­ quake of 1811-12 affected the inhabitants of that border town. The points of view of the river rat, the primitive school mis­ tress and evangelist, as well as the village idiot and the land shark are presented. If not quite in the mood of pessimism and despair, human nature is seen in its more cruel and dis­ couraging aspects. The novel is a historical and regional study. *MINNIE M. BRASHEAR, a native Missourian, was assistant professor of English in the University of Missouri until her retirement from teaching in 1944. She attended Radcliffe college and received an M. A. degree from Mis­ souri University. In 1930 she received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina. She is the author of Mark Twain, Son of Missouri, and pub-, lished a series of articles in 1924 in the Missouri Historical Review on "Missouri Verse and Verse-Writers." xMr. Kroll is not a Missourian. Born in Indiana in 1888, he is now a member of the English Department of the University of Tennessee. In 1930 he turned free lance writer and book reviewer, and in 1942-43 gave a course in creative writing at an artists* colony near Henderson ville, N. C. ( 241 ) 242 Missouri Historical Review And it was found, also, that any attempt to follow this classification consistently was confused by a constant over­ lapping; that when specific plays or novels are analyzed, all four currents are sometimes found to merge into one pre­ possession, a desire to get the spirit of the age, especially since the Depression, expressed, with an emphasis on the social background out of which the characters come. The struggle of political systems for existence, the shifting of the economic bases of society, the problem of government planning for a good life for individuals have received such insistent attention in all sorts of literary experiments that a modern novel that follows detached literary standards is hard to find. It must be noted, furthermore, that one dare not speak of any of these tendencies as belonging only to the second quarter of this century. Fifty years earlier Mark Twain made clear the possibilities of the common man as literary material in Huckleberry Finn (1884); and in The Gilded Age (1873) he exhibited the value of Missouri history as back­ ground material.2 Winston Churchill3 in The Crisis (1901) did likewise a little later. James Newton Baskett in his pic­ ture of central Missouri agrarian ideals, At You All's House (1898), anticipated Homer Croy's novels of northwest Mis­ souri farm life; and John Montieth, in his regional study Parson Brooks (1884), anticipated Frances Grinstead's por­ trait of a Baptist preacher in the Ozarks. More famous than these latter, was E. W. Howe's4 Story of a Country Town (1880), the forerunner of all recent novels that have sought to debunk the idea that the small town of the Middle West was the seed­ bed of all the virtues. It was a less cruel but not a less dis- 2Mark Twain's short stories, "A Private History of a Campaign that Failed," (CenturyMagazine, December 1885), Vol. 31, and "A Scrap of Curious History," (In What is Man? 1917) are historical fiction with Missouri of the Civil War period for a background. ?Born in St. Louis in 1871, Winston Churchill was a leader in the revival of the historical novel of the '90's. 4E. W. Howe, known as the Topeka newsman, Missouri born, spent his formative years in Harrison County in north Missouri. See Dr. Jean Taylor's doctoral study, Main Currents in Regional Literature in the Lower Middle West from 1870 to 1927 (Thesis, University of Missouri, 1927), p. 93. Missouri Literature Since the First World War 243 illusioned and pessimistic picture than Henry Bellamann's King's Row (1940)5. 1 The first of these tendencies, a predilection for the lives of humble folk, appears in several phases: in a conviction concerning the importance of the workers, the proletariat, and, in a preference for the agrarian element in our culture, in contrast to standards of our later industrial society. The broader interest in simple folk and their ways in contrast to the sophisticated will be reserved for the discussion of regional studies among Missouri novels. The Missouri writer who has received most extensive recognition in the controversial field of the proletarian novel is Jack Conroy of Moberly, Missouri. Because of the social unrest in the nation when his story, The Disinherited, appeared in 1933, and because writers of the type of novels and short stories that draw their inspiration from the cause of the workers were seeking acceptance in the field of belles lettres* this novel became something of an exhibit of its kind. In it are to be found the virtues and shortcomings of the type. A compara­ tively untrained writer offers here a somewhat autobiographi­ cal study of social conditions in a northeast Missouri mining town.

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