Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/297

A REVIEW.

(Reprinted from the American Historical Review.)

The Mining Advance into the Inland Empire: A Comparative Study of the Beginnings of the Mining Industry in Idaho and Montana, Eastern Washington and Oregon, and the Southern Interior of British Columbia and the Institutions and Laws based upon that Industry. By William J. Trimble, Professor of History and Social Science, North Dakota Agricultural College. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 638, History Series, Vol. III., No. 2. (Madison, the University, 1914, pp. 254.)

This account of the occupation of the gold bearing placer regions of the upper Eraser, Columbia and Missouri rivers in the decade following 1855 exhibits three salient and dominating ideas of the author: This movement of population is viewed as part of the formation and advance of an eastward moving frontier. The American frontier had in the decade from 1840 to 1850 leaped from the banks of the Missouri to the valleys of the Willamette and Sacramento. Now it recoiled eastward and met half way the old frontier still advancing westward. Secondly, the writer is concerned in tracing the rise of mining camps, with many diverse elements of population suddenly congregated, to orderly, well-organized communities. His leading idea, however, has to do with the contrast between the courses of development of those under British jurisdiction and those under American authorities.

Professor Trimble's narrative is a remarkably clear, wellordered and comprehensive handling of a large and difficult subject. The physiographical features of the wilderness of the "inland empire," the Indian tribes in possession and the sources of the population that took part in the "rushes" are graphically outlined. The vicissitudes of trial and hardship in getting to the remote locations of the different discoveries with supplies