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BOOK REVIEW

 http://www.calendarlive.com/books/20000224/t000018072.html
 

Historian of Native Americans Tells His Own Story With Spirit
 A WALK TOWARD OREGON; A Memoir; by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.; Alfred A. Knopf;
$27.50, 336 pages
 

By ANTHONY DAY, Special to The Times

     "Of all the qualities of mind and character, that which is paramount in
the development of students is a zest for living. For them life must be a
great adventure, an always setting forth and an always discovering. . . ."
     Historian Alvin M. Josephy Jr. takes these words from Alfred Baruth,
his former English teacher at Horace Mann School in New York, and it is
fitting that he has, because in his charming and instructive memoir, "A Walk
Toward Oregon," Josephy shows himself to have had just such a powerful
appetite for life during all his 85 years.
     Josephy devotes less than a third of "A Walk Toward Oregon" to the
post-1951 works for which he is best known, as author of "The Patriot
Chiefs," "The Indian Heritage of America," "Now That the Buffalo's Gone" and
"The Civil War in the American West." As one of the few non-Indians most
responsible for bringing the Native American toward the forefront of
contemporary America's consciousness, Josephy was an editor of American
Heritage magazine and the founding chairman of the Smithsonian's National
Museum of the American Indian, now underway on the Washington Mall.
     Most of his book, in fact, is the story of his life as a privileged
young New Yorker, a Harvard student (until the lack of money in the
Depression made him drop out), a young student politician active against the
Louisiana demagogue Huey Long, a scriptwriter in Hollywood in the 1930s
(briefly), a reporter for the Herald-Tribune in Mexico City (where he
interviewed Leon Trotsky), a correspondent for the Mutual radio network, a
propagandist for the U.S. government after the war began and, most notably,
his year as a Marine combat correspondent in Guam and Iwo Jima.
     His descriptions of the combat he endured (and took part in: He shot
and killed at least one Japanese) are at the vivid center of this book, as
they are, one must surmise, of his life. He wrote to his parents from Iwo
Jima that being among men who are fighting the enemy with you is "one of the
greatest moments of living, the moment of supreme companionship. . . . It is
one of the greatest thrills of life." By this time he had gone ashore with
the first wave of invaders at Guam, broadcasting as he waded through the
water and crawled up the beach. For this he was awarded the Bronze Star.
     Josephy takes his book's title from a quotation from Thoreau: "Eastward
I go only by force, but westward I go free. . . . I must walk toward Oregon,
and not toward Europe." He first imagined what Oregon was like as a little
boy living in upper-middle-class comfort on Riverside Drive and gazing at
the Palisades across the Hudson, wondering what adventures and what wild
country lay beyond them. His father was a moderately successful businessman;
his mother's father was a rich man with a Rolls-Royce and a French
chauffeur.
     Josephy's uncle was Alfred A. Knopf, whose eponymous house published
this book, as well as some of Josephy's others. Knopf's friend H.L. Mencken
encouraged the high school student to write and sent a letter of
recommendation to Harvard. Josephy's student days and his personal
experience of the Depression made him a life-long New Dealer, proud enough
of his government to be, at first, dismayed at the anti-government protests
a generation later against the war in Vietnam.
     Reluctantly at first, then with increasing ardor, he joined some of the
protests at the same time as he was taking a more radical approach to Indian
affairs. He became interested in American Indians while at Time magazine,
for which he worked happily for a decade. It was a chance encounter in Idaho
with some Nez Perce that led him bit by bit to become one of the leading
chroniclers of Indian life and history and one of the principal non-Indian
promoters of the Indian drive for self-sufficiency and self-government.
     Josephy came to believe that the Indians' side of history must be told,
and he reports with satisfaction that the new Museum of American Indian
History must have, by charter, a majority of Indians on its board and an
Indian as director. In uncommonly vivid prose, he recounts for us in "A Walk
Toward Oregon" a life lived with much gusto and zest during a time of
tumult, change and great achievements in the life of America and its people.

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