"THE LONG RIFLE."

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 263, 5 November 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

"THE LONG RIFLE."

FINE FRONTIER NOVEL.

There are huge gaps in the average Briton's knowledge of American history. Indeed, many a man knows little or nothing of it except the War of Independence and the Civil War. That there was another war between Britain and the United States in 1812 and that the British burned the American capital is news to him. What he knows of the vast dfama of colonisation, the steady push westward until there flew one flag from sea to sea, is shadowy and is obtained from novels. The writer of fiction has done his best, and it is a pretty good best, to bring home that drama to the mind of the world—the conquest of distance, the wars with heat and drought and Indians, the making of [a nation by means of the horseman and the covered wagon. It is a tremendous subject. Among those who have taken American pioneering as a theme the name of Stewart Edward White is well known. He is a master of out-of-door craft as well as a fine storyteller. His latest book is possibly his most ambitious. It is a long story of the advance of the pioneers from east to west, set in a period of which little is known to the [outside wprld—between 1810 and 1840. The boy hero, a descendant of a great frontiersman, leaves an unhappy home in the Eastern States to fulfil his destiny in the wilds, carrying with him the famous gun belonging to his grandfather. He falls in with a well-kftown trapper, joins a party going to New Mexico, and has many adventures before the story ends on the Californian coast to the sound of mission bells. The author has clearly taken great pains, in a labour of love, with the historical basis and local colour' of his story —the landscape, the equipment and habits of the frontiersI men, the customs of the Indians, and the urge that sent, the line of pioneers westward. It is a fascinating story in its drama and poetry, in its contest between man and Nature, in ite delineation of a savage society that was to be ruthlessly destroyed. It is a question whether boys under twenty or men with hearts still touchable by the call of the wild will enjoy the more the frontiersman's skill with gun and horse as described by this trustworthy author. "The Long Rifle" (Hodder and Stoughton) should be in much demand as a Christmas present this year, and one can easily imagine sonic grumbling because father won't let son have his book.