It may take all kinds of people to make a world, but in Conrad Richter's mind one kind stands out above all others in the winning of the American Southwest. He has centered his group of romantic stories ["Early Americana and Other Stories"] around pioneer men as granite-faced as the canyon walls, as tight-lipped as the desert itself, and beside them … he has placed the same familiar breed of pioneer woman—the stoical, stiff-spined, resolute mate….

This author sets his stories in the small, outlying clusters of settlements still menaced in the last century by raiding Indians. The houses lie "like a handful of children's blocks thrown and forgotten on the immensity of the prairie," but in them are the unsung heroes of Mr. Richter's re-created West. Harte's Poker Flat and Roaring Camp and the sinks of sin which Wister's Virginian knew are outside their experience. Their eyes...