Expanded novel based on five-part serialization in JACK AND JILL MAGAZINE (Jul-Nov 1959).

This is a story that I remember so very fondly from reading the serialization when I was seven-to-eight years old, and my re-reading of it in JACK AND JILL editions that I've managed to buy (all five of them) on-line doesn't do any damage to my fond memories. In some ways, it's a sort of Tom Sawyer, Detective except that Tom's an eleven-year-old tomboy named California "Callie" Dean who, in a role-reversal from Tom Sawyer, gets herself a licking in school and in trouble at home because she won't tell on the boy (who finally fesses up to Callie's mother, so that Callie escapes with simply going to bed supperless). It's the kind of gender-reversal that one wouldn't necessarily have expected from conservative Curtis Publishing in the late 50s.

The adventure element involves solving the mystery of a stagecoach robbery so that a young Indian man (whose whole family and especially his mother are friends of Callie) escapes being wrongfully accused and possibly lynched. While there's some stereotyping of Native Americans, it's what would probably have to be expected from most mainstream writers of that era, and Garthwaite attempts to provide a sympathetic portrayal of Indians dispossessed of their lands by unscrupulous whites. Garthwaite's children's books often involved California history, and in this case the story is set in "Hardpan," a small California town where by 1862 the gold mines are starting to run out and settlers are slowly beginning to turn to agriculture and a more settled life.

The JACK AND JILL illustrations by Joy Troth are extraordinarily bright and colorful, adding an interesting dimension to the story, although their very colorfulness tends to make the characters appear a bit like 1950s suburbanites. In the novel, however, a substantially expanded version of the serialization, the black-and-white line drawings by Leo Summers give a grittier view of the characters, making Callie's mother appear more hardscrabble and Callie and the boy Andy a bit older than in the serialization.

Out of print, unlikely to be found in most current-day libraries, and the old magazine serializations are nearly impossible to find anywhere, but the book itself can be found (generally in ex-library copies) on sources like AbeBooks. A charming reminder -- and example -- of some of the best in children's literature of the 1950s. ( )