The hero [of "Bright Journey"] Hercules Dousman, is a historical character. He was a 12-year-old boy in Mackinac when the British took Fort Michilimackinac in one of the early campaigns of the War of 1812. Later, when he grows up, he paddles up the Fox and down the Wisconsin River to assume charge of the Prairie du Chien post of Astor's American Fur Company…. Mr. Derleth's Dousman is almost Sir Galahad on the frontier. He marries the half-breed girl who dies in giving birth to his daughter; always he is the Indian's friend; when the woman he loves leaves [her husband] because of his drinking, he urges her to return to her husband. Realizing that the fur trade is bound to decline, he buys land the value of which went up with every new settler. He foresees that Prairie du Chien will some day become an important grain shipping center….
Mr. Derleth tells his story simply and directly in the calm pace and timeless manner of the old historical novel. He describes with convincing detail the growth of the small trading village into a river town, the retirement of the animals and Indians and the great brigades of French-Canadian trappers before the steady advance of hordes of tree-felling, land-hungry settlers. When he remembers what the greed of men has destroyed, the carrier pigeons and the buffalo, for instance, he regrets that the Dousmans are so few and the slaughterers so many. The sense of place and the sweep of historical events are here better realized than the collision of character with character. As is so often the case with contemporary historical novels, the love story seems a little mechanical and contrived: the private fortunes of Dousman and the woman he eventually marries seem much less real than the public history of the old Michigan Territory. That is well set forth.
Horace Reynolds, "The Fur Trade," in The New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1940, p. 7.
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