Mari Sandoz has written one good book after another, including "Old Jules," "Cheyenne Autumn" and "Buffalo Hunters." These are solid studies of the Old West, displaying not only great knowledge of an area and a period but a great sympathy and an intuitive understanding; at times this has seemed almost a personal involvement, as if the author had actually lived through the times she described and experienced them at first hand. These books, though listed as fiction, hardly seem like novels at all, but more like memoirs of the time. The story is allowed to take care of itself while incident follows incident—chaotic, seemingly pointless at times, but all contributing to a vivid, naturalistic, almost hallucinatory picture of the times.

In "Miss Morissa, Doctor of the Gold Trail," Miss Sandoz has tried to write a more conventional type of fiction. I am sorry to say that, in my opinion, she has failed.

The story she has to tell is a simple one: an intelligent young girl (discovering, under the most embarrassing circumstances, that she is illegitimate) leaves the man she is to marry, buries herself in studies, emerges as a pioneer woman doctor, and goes West to the then remote frontier of the North Platte River in Nebraska…. This was the time of the great gold rush to the new Eldorado called Deadwood Gulch, the gathering of "great wagon trains of mine machinery and equipment, trains of whisky too, and mahogany bars and roulette tables, guns and ammunition, mirrors and couches for the fancy houses." With Miss Morissa, we watch these bizarre pioneers cross the rugged buttes and the timber-flanked mountains, where the trails were "lined by tents and low buildings, mostly log and sod, and little taller than the bearded, sunburnt, waiting men."

So far, so good. We become interested in the problems of a woman doctor mingling with cutthroats and bandits, involved with Sioux and Cheyenne, and the war between settlers and cattlemen. Unfortunately, as she faces this plethora of material, Miss Sandoz reverts to her normal method of writing, memoir-style. The potentially interesting story of the young woman doctor gets lost completely, while one unrelated, or barely related, incident after another is told, about freighters, cattle thieves, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, even Calamity Jane.

It was Sainte-Beuve, I think, who wrote that in Flaubert's "Salammbo" the pedestal was too big for the statue. In "Miss Morissa" there is hardly any statue at all—but the pedestal is enormous…. Like all of Miss Sandoz' books, it is beautifully written and full of striking images and masterful descriptions. As a novel it doesn't succeed.