Fabulous Americana

MEMOIRS OF GOVERNOR MURRAY AND TRUE HISTORY OF OKLAHOMA--Meador ($21).

With a dedicated air, rather like the Angel Moroni revealing the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith, ex-Governor William Henry ("Alfalfa Bill") Murray, 76, has published his Memoirs of Governor Murray and True History of Oklahoma (1,683 pages; weight: six pounds). The title is a generous understatement. The three volumes are not only a history of Oklahoma, but a history of the world (often somewhat original).

Into his memoirs Author Murray has packed practically everything he knows or has ever heard. There are humorous dozens of cracker-barrel stories. There are shrewd estimates of hundreds of obscure people, cowhands, politicians, maiden aunts, Indians, legalites, buffalo hunters, dirt farmers. There is a bloated recapitulation of human knowledge (all set down as revelation), from casual botanical observations ("a three-leaf plant, like the poison Oak, is usually poisonous [but] a five-leaf plant like ... the Virginia Creeper is never poisonous") to startling historical discoveries (Egypt's "pyramids were constructed in order to satisfy groups and blocks").

The book is also a sprawling monument to Author Murray's career as president of Oklahoma's constitutional convention, speaker of its first state legislature. Congressman in Washington, D.C.. successful lawyer in Indian territory, where he married the niece of a Chickasaw governor, negotiator of Indian treaties, colonist in South America (he headed a colony in Bolivia), governor (1931-35) of Oklahoma.

So massive a work, couched in the Murray style (the ex-governor is largely self-taught and his book is one of the longest literary rambles on record), poses certain problems for the lay reader. So Author Murray included a guide through the labyrinth. "First, read 'Post-Logue' at end of Book IX, Volume III; Second, then begin at Chapter A, Book IX, Volume III, and read all that Book; then, Third, begin first Chapter Volume I, keeping in mind parts first read."

"In Style and Arrangement," he explains, "I have followed the Classical Writers of the Roman Empire Period: Dividing by 'Books' with Chapters subdividing each Book. ... It is believed," he adds, "that some Chapters alone are worth the price of the Work to any worthy ambitious person, such as the Chapter on 'How to Be Governor.'. . ."

For readers with fortitude and staying power the three volumes are certainly worth the price as a 1) folksy, firsthand account of the making of the 46th state and the unmaking of one of America's last big frontiers; the description, told with disarming simplicity, of Murray's rise from boy cotton picker to governor; 2) for a homespun insistence on the dignity of the individual man, the value of personal enterprise and the danger of increasing Government power; 3) the Murray version of Oklahoma's troubled politics. The three volumes are also a fabulous item of Americana.

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