Oregon Historical Quarterly

 Reviews The second half of the book details the conflict that erupted as diverse interests attempted to turn the border to their advantage. Wadewitz ’s sweeping narrative encompasses a labor force divided along multiple lines of race and ethnicity as well as competing capitalists and corporations on both sides of the boundary. While fishers fought among themselves over questions of access and acceptable gear, they also tangled with packers over fish prices and trans-border sales to rival companies. Cannery employees also crossed the border in pursuit of higher wages and better working conditions; Asian immigrants faced the greatest risk in doing so. Cannery owners tried to restrict worker mobility but often undercut each other’s efforts, especially by purchasing salmon from “fish pirates” who pilfered traps and easily slipped across the border to evade capture. In the mold of Karl Jacoby and Louis Mann, Wadewitz uses poaching to illustrate local resistance to conservation laws that favored larger enterprises over smaller producers. The precipitous decline of salmon runs during the early 1900s prompted abortive international attempts to tighten the border and save the salmon. By 1918, when the industry crashed,“Americans and Canadians faced each other across the forty-ninth parallel and perhaps for the first time understood how the nature of the border both divided and united them”(p. 145–46). They continued to wrangle over the fishery for decades, though, and the agreements reached in the mid twentieth century failed to stop salmon’s slide toward extinction. Wadewitz concludes with a call for regulations reminiscent of the aboriginal fishery, including the cessation of high-seas harvesting and the creation of smaller management areas that can be effectively policed. Her epilogue oddly neglects the emergence of Northwest tribes as co-managers of the resource, but overall, she provides an inclusive and innovative introduction to the spatial politics of the modern salmon crisis. Taking a transnational approach to a problem that must be understood transnationally, Wadewitz also crosses disciplinary boundaries and employs multiple categories of analysis with aplomb. The result is an important scholarly contribution to a conversation that concerns everyone on the shores of the Salish Sea. Andrew H. Fisher The College of William & Mary Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850–1920 by Anne M. Butler University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 448 pages. $45.00 cloth. Anne Butler’s Across God’s Frontiers is a work intended to deepen readers’understandings of the history of the American West, women in the West, and the largely ignored story of the region’sreligioushistorybyfocusingonRoman Catholic women religious. This prodigious undertaking is the culmination of Butler’s many years of research and articles devoted to the topic. Thus, the archival, printed primary source materials, and secondary readings she employed in writing the book are impressive. Particularly noteworthy is how Butler shows the ways Catholic women religious and the Western landscape interacted to shape and redefine each other. In coming into the West, and in light of Western contexts, challenges, and new contingencies, Catholic sisterhoods constructed religiouslivesand behaviorsaswell as ministry opportunities somewhat different from their European and Eastern predecessors. One of the most significant of those changes was the geographical space that moved nuns from European monastic enclosures to sisters of theAmerican convent where they interacted in unanticipated and unexpected ways with the  OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 non-cloistered world.The shift in religious life began with the demands of travel to the West that was extended by a relative poverty in many Western locations that did not allow for support of traditional monasteries. That shift also included the necessity for active apostolates to provide financial support, and the Church’s need for the vocational activities of public ministries. This is not to say the cloister was not maintained, but the sisters’ contemplative life was a challenge to maintain with the demands that active ministry placed on them, so necessary allowances were made for unduly cumbersome ordinances and observances in community life. The physical and emotional hardships encountered by courageous sisters in the West are inspiring. No less remarkable, however, is how those Catholic sisters and nuns influenced community building throughout theWest...