Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - December - 2006 Issue
Western Books From Gene W. Baade
Gene Baade issues Catalogue 1106.
By Michael Stillman
Gene W. Baade has issued Catalogue 1106 of "Books on the West." Baade regularly offers modestly priced material pertaining to the American and Canadian West of another era, though some of the books are more modern. You can find a recent publication next to one a century and a half old in this catalogue. Baade always offers an interesting mix of the familiar and obscure, heroes and villains remembered and forgotten, cowboys, Indians, lawmen, railroad men, explorers, trappers, poets, and artists. Just about anything that pertains to the Old West may show up. Here are a few books Gene Baade is offering for sale this time.
Item 98 offers a record of the Nez Perce War of 1877 and the removal of that tribe from its ancestral lands from the view of the last of the Nez Perce warriors. The book is Yellow Wolf: His Own Story, by Lucullus McWhorter. Yellow Wolf was around 21 years of age when the war broke out. A band of Nez Perce, unwilling to be pressed into smaller reservations or accepting the Christian faith, fought back, but were overwhelmed by American forces. They attempted a retreat from their Oregon land to the Montana home of the Crow Indians, a 1,600-mile flight with U.S. soldiers attacking along the way. Yellow Wolf fought in numerous skirmishes with U.S. troops, before the tribe was finally forced to surrender just short of the Canadian border. Yellow Wolf did make it across the border, but returned a year later and was sent to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, and finally back to the small reservation they were granted in Washington State. It was from there he told his story to McWhorter, an amateur historian who, appalled by the treatment of America's natives, endured his neighbors' antipathy to help tell the story of the Indians of the area. The Nez Perce story is one of uncommon courage against impossible odds. This copy of McWhorter's book is a second printing from 1948. Priced at $75.
John Leakey is not one of the major figures of the old west. Leakey was born in Texas in 1873, but his book recounts not just his own memories, but much he was told by his grandfather of the same name from days before. The book is The West That Was From Texas To Montana, by Leakey as told to Nellie Snyder Yost, and you will learn about early Texas, cattle, Indians, and then on to North Dakota and finally Montana as the younger Leakey moves along. The town of Leakey, Texas, west of San Antonio, is named for the elder John Leakey. Item 83. $47.50.
It is easy to drive to Mount Rainier today, but a century ago, this was not the case. Item 106 is Road to Mount Rainier National Park... a 1905 report from the Secretary of War to the House of Representatives about the construction of such a road. It includes survey reports, cost estimates, and a map of the proposed route, showing wagon routes, trails, and railroads in the area. $200.
