Ross covers one little segment of the story. A bird’s-eye view of the whole business, touching on everything from the arrival of the first Yankee sailing vessel at the mouth of the Columbia in 1792 down to the June night in 1942 when a Japanese submarine lay offshore and lobbed shells in at Fort Stevens, is provided in Stewart Holbrook’s The Columbia , which is a fine book to read after Ross’s book.

Mr. Holbrook undertakes to tell what happened along the Columbia River, which means that he gets pretty much all across the Oregon Country before he is finished; and he tells his story with an unpretentious ease which somehow disguises the fact that at the ancient art of spinning a good yarn he is a superbly competent craftsman.

What happened along the Columbia included a good many things, some of which of course are described in The Fur Hunters of the Far West . An American trader entered the mouth of the river in 1792, a British naval officer came in very shortly thereafter, Lewis and Clark encountered the stream at its junction with the Snake River in 1805 and the American-born Canadian Simon Fraser came down from British Columbia a bit later, and in 1807 David Thompson followed the river upstream to its source.

Thompson was one of history’s lucky men. He was in his canoe going down an unknown river; he was in a bewitched land where a man could either lose his life quickly or see things straight out of fable and the left-hand side of the Gate of Horn, and going down the Columbia in 1807 was like knowing the morning and the evening of the Seventh Day. Thompson stitched together a 25-foot canoe out of split cedar and the roots of various trees, slept in the snow while the job was being done, and finally cruised where no man had cruised before; he got to the river mouth at last, claimed everything in sight for the British Crown, and waited to watch John Jacob Astor’s boys come in and get into trouble with one another.

This sort of thing, perhaps, is the small change of history. But somehow it is interesting; somehow, through it one sees history as a moving story of people rather than as a cut and dried procession of names, dates, and mural paintings. The great events are not always world-famous men posing, hand in vest, in front of full-color canvasses; they can be men in dirty buck-skins floating down an unknown river, or tired pork-eaters trudging a wilderness road with eighty-pound packs on their shoulders, or weary businessmen in a board room trying to decide, from imperfect knowledge, whether to risk the last of a company’s capital in a dubious venture on some far-off river none of them has ever seen.

All of which