Sandlappers

FIRST THE BLADE--May Merrill Miller--Knopf ($3).

In most pioneer novels it is the first long years that are hardest on the pioneers, easiest on the reader. Reversing this order is First the Blade, a 631-page novel of the "Sandlappers" who settled California's semi-arid San Joaquin Valley. For the first 150 pages, which move as slowly as a covered wagon slogging over the plains, it is the reader who suffers most. This beginning goes way back to the heroine's girlhood in Missouri; and although the Civil War figures in her adolescence, the only valid purpose in these tedious chapters is to let the heroine reach a marriageable age before she goes West. When she marries an ambitious farmer and goes to the San Joaquin Valley to settle down, the tale begins to move.

The settlement of the San Joaquin Valley is a good pioneer story. Author Miller weakens it by an undramatic style and too many devices of romantic pioneer fiction, but she follows an authentic historical outline. In the first years the Sandlappers sweated blood digging irrigation ditches by hand, only to have the water disappear into underground rivers. But their bitterest struggle came when at last they had the desert blooming. This was their fight, legal and extralegal, with the El Dorado Railroad (Southern Pacific), which enticed them with a price of a few dollars an acre, held up titles until the land was producing and then demanded superprofits. Readers will sympathize with the Sandlappers in their losing fight but will be glad that something happened to make the story move.

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