Glenn Sample Ely - Southwestern Historical Quarterly CXXVIII, no. 3 (January 2025): 319-320.
Immediately after launching into this work, the reader is confronted with a vexing question. How does one write a successful biography when there is a paucity of information about their subject? This is the conundrum that author Timothy E. Green faces when he first considered writing the fantastical story of his ancestor Isaac Slover (1777-1854). Slover, a quintessential American mountain man, was illiterate and left behind no journal or letters to help provide an intimate glimpse into his makeup and mettle. His biographer Green is left to assemble a composite portrait of this restless and reckless individual from scraps and snippets in the historical record. As a result, this work contains many suppositions to flesh out context and detail about Slover’s life. Green employs phrases such as “probably,” “may have,” “we are left to informer,” and “we do not know for sure” throughout the narration.
With all that said, Green should be commended for his impressive and substantial scholarship, including sixty-two pages of detailed notes and an extensive bibliography. He leaves no stone unturned in his determined search for information about Slover and his various frontier incarnations as farmer, Indian fighter, woodsman, wanderer, grizzly hunter, trapper, soldier, loyal friend, husband, and father. Throughout the story, the reader is constantly amazed at Slover’s unslakable thirst for westerly wandering and his predilection for danger and the unknown. He sets forth on trapping expeditions lasting months at a time, occasionally doing very well but at other times losing thousands of dollars in furs and pelts because of unforeseen circumstances. Eventually, the reader loses count of Slover’s numerous scrapes with death, which includes battling Native Americans, grizzlies, interlopers, and harsh elements.
Besides his harrowing and sometimes death-defying experiences, Slover’s story is compelling because of its larger regional and national context that includes the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, life in the American Southwest under Spanish and American control, the Mexican War, and the Gold Rush. Green notes that Slover is “both witness and denizen of multiple frontiers.” (p. xiii) His life provides new perspectives and explorations of American identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with “its ethnic and racial turmoil, its exploitation [of natural resources and the environment], . . . [and] its revelation of humanity’s capacity for courage and endurance and savagery.” (p. xiii)
Green is a South Plains native who now lives in Austin, Texas. He earned his Ph.D. from Texas Tech University and subsequently taught writing and literature at various universities and colleges for almost 50 years. He retired from his last position, at St. Edward’s University, in 2015. While The Edge Rover has only a few references to the Lone Star State, it contains much that will captive the aficionados of southwestern history. Green clearly has taken much of his long experience teaching literature and writing to heart. He is an accomplished writer and this polished, well-crafted work shines throughout. It is highly recommended.
