In these wanderings Winthrop visited the young communities of the Northwest, Portland, Salem, Vancouver, The Dalles, Olympia, Nisqually, Steilacoom, Port Townsend, Victoria. He studied its scenery, resources and people. He quickly won the regard of pioneer leaders, army officers, Hudson's Bay Company factors, and of the humbler settlers as well, by a hearty democratic appreciation of the meaning of their work in founding future states. It was just this quality, as Mr. Williams has well shown, that enabled Winthrop to understand the raw west. To a real liking for people add his well trained powers of observation, unfailing humor, a vivid imagination and a tireless love of adventure, and we have the secret of his success as a painter of the frontier and its life. In his delightful introduction Mr. Williams points out and emphasizes these qualities: "Winthrop was probably better fitted to study and portray the West than any other Eastern man who attempted to describe it. His books and still more his private letters and journals show him wholly free from that tenderfoot superiority of tone found in most of the contemporary writings of Eastern men who visited the frontier. In an age when sectionalism was fast driving toward civil war, his point of view was broadly national. His pride in his country as a whole had only been deepened by education and foreign travel. He had come home from Europe feeling the value to humanity of the struggle and opportunities presented by the conquest of the new continent. In the rough battle with the forest, in the stumpy farms on the little clearings, in the crude road that would link the infant settlements with the outside world, he recognized the very processes that had laid strong the foundations of the republic to which later he so gladly gave his life. Ungainly as was the present, this descendant of the great governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut saw in it the promise of a splendid and beneficent future. "Most of our writers in the years preceding the Civil War were either occupied with sectional discussions and local traditions, or were looking to Europe and the past for their inspiration. * * * For fiction, our people read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and reprints of the English novelists. Our literature had not yet discovered the West. Winthrop's Western books, 'The Canoe and the Saddle' and 'John Brent,' minted new ore." George William Curtis, who was Winthrop's neighbor on Staten Island and his closest friend in the years just before the war, bore similar testimony, in a conversation with Mr. Williams more than twenty years ago: