Following the Swiss Family
Robinson, we have here an English Family Robinson, which might as well
be called an American Family Robinson; and although ostensibly meant
for the holiday recreation of youth, it proves to be a production
equally well suited for children of six feet and upwards. The author
is personally familiar with the scenes he describes, and is thus able
to give them a verisimilitude which in other circumstances can be
attained only by the rarest genius; and notwithstanding the
associations, of his last book, the _Scalp-hunters_, there is only one
bloody conflict in the present one fought by animals of the genus
Homo.
The local habitation of the lost family is a nook in the Great
American Desert--a nook in a desert twenty-five times the size of
England! But this wilderness of about a million square miles is not
all sand or all barren earth: it contains numerous other features of
interest besides mountains and oases; it includes the country of New
Mexico, with its towns and cities; the country round the Great Salt
and Utah Lakes, where the germ of a Mormon nation is expanding on all
sides; and it is traversed in its whole breadth by the Rocky
Mountains.
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