Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. First Printing of the First US Edition. A Fine crisp copy in a Fine unclipped dust jacket. In this his second book, Doig shares the life of another: James Gilchrist Swan (1816-1900), a Boston-born drifter with frontier talents and a gifted diarist of the late-19th-century Northwest. And while part of Doig's mission here is simply to introduce us to Swan-the-diarist, he is also determined to share his own feelings as the ""Winter Brother"" who discovers Swan and is somehow held by him, sharing Swan's westward urgings. Doig sifts through the 40-plus volumes of Swan's writings--a record, from the 1850s on, of the transformation of the Puget Sound region--and sees Swan's life in irregular counterpoint to his own. Swan's experiences include stints as oyster entrepreneur, Indian schoolmaster, customs inspector, Smithsonian correspondent, and ethnological registrar. (The Indians of Cape Flattery, 1870, remains the standard reference on the Makahs; his survey of the Queen Charlotte Islands was also highly esteemed.) And there's a darker side to Swan, too--bouts of drunkenness (excluded from the diaries), occasional gloom--and some familiar pioneer spirits, ""railroad fever"" among them. Above all, how-ever, he was a precise, untiring recorder, often at the heart of the action; and Doig, the habituated sojourner here as before, readily retraces his steps--in a strange and special historical/literary/personal mosaic. Item #25862
Price: $95.00