The Rocky Mountains
Introduction
The Rocky Mountains
Introduction
THE SECTION which this chapter introduces deals
with authors prominently, though not exclusively, connected with six states–Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. It is a scholarly
convenience rather than a strict geological fact to call these
states the Rocky Mountain region, for Nevada contains none of
the true Rockies while New Mexico, excluded from this categorization,
does. Furthermore, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington,
like Nevada, contain numerous mountain ranges. Nonetheless, the
Rocky Mountains have a special prestige, bearing from centuries
ago a poetic, evocative image. Part of a massive cordillera stretching
from Alaska to Yucatan, the American Rockies subdivide into three
geological provinces: the northern province includes the ranges
of Idaho and Montana; the middle, the ranges of Wyoming and northeastern
Utah; the southern, the ranges of Colorado and northern New Mexico.
There is a propriety in giving their name to a major region of
the West, recognizing thus that mountainous terrain has had an
immense influence upon western culture and upon the literature
which interprets it. In describing that terrain, one is describing
not only the setting of much western literature but also the
source of its richest imagery and symbolism.
The Herculean uplift of the Pacific tectonic plate explains almost
every distinctive topographical feature of the Mountain West.
Because of it, surfaces have fractured, great expanses of rock
and soil have sheared away, crests and ridges have risen, basins
and valleys have dropped, and an entire third of a continent,
elevated, chopped, and fissured, has become susceptible to the
sculpting of water and wind. The numerous ranges are unquestionably
the most prominent feature of the Mountain West. Irresistibly
they impose themselves upon the human mind, compelling attention
and insisting upon response. Whether the ranges belong to the
three geological provinces of the Rockies proper or whether they
belong to one of the surrounding plateau or basin provinces,
they bear haunting, evocative names: Sawtooth, Bitterroot, Elkhorn,
Wind River, Absaroka, Uinta, Gore, San Juan, Sangre de Cristo,
Abajo, Toiyabe, Black Rock. To those who understand its watershed,
each range has a distinctive face, but to the uninitiated, each
is likely to seem a confusing tangle of main and lateral ridges
whose crests are serrated by peaks and saddles, and whose sides,
furrowed into large canyons, are disguised by forests of pine,
fir, aspen, oak, or juniper.
The mountain country owes much of its beauty to its chasms, some
of which, like Royal Gorge, Flaming Gorge, the Canyon of the
Yellowstone, and the River of No Return, are justly famous, while
many others, almost equally impressive, are little known. Particularly
moving are the great canyons cut by established rivers through
gradually elevated plains and plateaus. In Idaho, the visitor
comes unexpectedly upon the Snake River Gorge, whose vertical
sides have been cut into the black igneous rock of the surrounding
plain. One of the authentic wonders of the world is the massive
complex of canyons in the heart of the Colorado Plateau of southern
Utah and northern Arizona. Appropriately named Canyonlands, this
region has been cut by the Colorado and its tributaries into
a stunningly intricate maze of ravines, arroyos, chasms, and
gorges. Frequently its river courses are narrow ribbons girded
by sheer cliffs rising hundreds and even thousands of feet. At
times, they loop into goosenecks or scoop out broad basins of
slickrock punctuated by mesas, buttes, and pinnacles. Everywhere
lines,
textures, and configurations profusely overwhelm the human eye.
Equally a part of the Mountain
West are the flat places. The eastern halves of Montana and Colorado
belong to the Great Plains province. The Wyoming Basin province
is composed of high, broken plains. Further west, among the Rockies
and beyond, mountain ranges alternate with valleys whose undulating
floors are miniature plains. Although some high mountain valleys
are remarkably lush and green, most valleys are arid and dreary.
Overgrazed, dominated by invasive sagebrush and juniper, they
offer little beauty or distraction. This is particularly true
in the severely arid valleys of the Great Basin which comprises
most of western Utah and nearly all of Nevada. Driving across
interminable miles, the modern traveler can readily appreciate
the fatigue and hopelessness with which nineteenth-century immigrants
toiled their way toward California. Many plains and valleys have,
of course, been transformed into oases by human effort, for it
is upon such flat, amenable surfaces that the large majority
of the cities, towns, and farms of the Mountain West have been
established. Paradoxically, it is the heights which permit the
lower oases, for all water originates in the mountains. Their
elevation captures summer rains and winter snows and funnels
the runoff into the beginnings of great rivers destined for faraway
oceans– the Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas, the Rio
Grande, the Green, the Colorado, the Snake, the Salmon. Other
rivers like the Sevier and the Humboldt flow from the mountains
toward an eventual extinction in the sands of the Great Basin,
which has no outlet to the sea.
The Mountain West is a land of
strange contrasts, a land of rushing rivers and stern deserts,
of incredible beauty and numbing monotony. Its traits have impressed
themselves upon the mentality of its people, for many of whom
it is addictive and indispensable. Its beauties and deprivations
are integral to their character and to the literature which expresses
that character. Its variety and immensity force the fact of natural
process upon the human mind, and its infinite lines, colors,
and shapes feed the human hunger for sensation. To a population
for whom water is a precious, precarious gift, the wet, timbered
mountains symbolize youth, nurture, even life itself. Furthermore,
the mountains are barriers between the people who live near them
and the rest of the nation. Despite the integration of the Mountain
West into the national economy, despite freeways, railroads,
and jetports, it retains a provincialism, a subtle sense of separation
and distinction, induced in part by actual distances and in part
by the image of high, looming walls which the experience of mountains
leaves in the western mind.
Like other westerners, the people of the Rocky Mountains are
devoted to the frontier tradition and to modern beliefs and values
which they associate with the frontier. Ignoring the fact that
many of their present industrial and urban traits had their beginnings
on the frontier, they choose to emphasize those aspects of frontier
life which allowed for simplicity, self-sufficiency, and intimacy
with nature. The two facets of their personality, national and
regional, exist in disharmony with one another, a tension arising
from the clear need for a regional identity in some manner distinct
from the American personality at large. Selected features of
their history will illuminate the divided character of these
people and the source from which derive most of the settings
and themes of Rocky Mountain literature.
Two pairs of frontier activities–mining and railroading
on one hand, farming and ranching on the other–remain important
in the economies of the modern mountain states. Mining and railroading
propelled frontier Americans rapidly toward the urban complexities
of today, for almost instantly they became industrialized and
highly capitalized. Farming and ranching were less amenable to
an industrial pattern. Even today they retain some flavor of
their original frontier individualism and intimacy with nature.
Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana experienced major gold rushes
between 1858 and 1862, in consequence of which Congress admitted
each of them to territorial status between 1860 and 1864 (Nevada
receiving statehood in the latter year). Silver soon replaced
gold as the most important metal, inducing the mountain territories
and states to call loudly for free coinage and federal subsidies
for silver until well into the twentieth century. Copper became
lucrative in Nevada, Utah, and Montana before 1900 and
soon became much more important than either
gold or silver–so important that the Anaconda Copper Mining
Company could dominate both the economics and the politics of
Montana from 1890 to 1950. Coal has become important in Wyoming
and Utah, where large reserves promise to make these states important
sources of energy. In addition, oil has become important in Wyoming,
where at present a boom is straining the social fabric of its
southwestern counties.
Very early in the frontier era, Rocky Mountain mining became
a fullfledged part of the industrial revolution, because the
exploitation of lodes– ore-bearing strata buried in the
earth–required massive capital, advanced technology, and
an industrial organization of investors, managers, and laborers.
From other mining regions the new industry borrowed such inventions
as the steam-powered hoist, the air-operated rock drill, and
dynamite, and it added its own inventions to world mining technology.
From the silver mines of Nevada's Comstock Lode, for example,
came the Washoe pan process of ore reduction and square-set timbering
for shoring up shafts and tunnels.
Unionization was also evidence of an international industrial
development. Rocky Mountain miners, most of them immigrants,
had ample reason for joining unions. Hours were long and wages
low. Hazards abounded– abrasive rock dust, unventilated
shafts, open lift cages–and there was little or no compensation
for the disabled or for the survivors of the dead. In the early
years of the twentieth century strikes increased in number and
bitterness, as miners formed the Western Federation of Miners
and the United Mine Workers. Some joined the Industrial Workers
of the World, an international organization advocating revolution.
Early results were discouraging. Governors called out the National
Guard to support the strikebreaking tactics of mine owners. In
1914 Colorado Guardsmen burned a tent city of striking miners
at Ludlow, killing a number of women and children. The 1915 Utah
execution of Joe Hill, an IWW official accused of murder and
robbery, was interpreted as a blow against unionism among western
miners. Nonetheless, the demands of the miners, joined with those
of other industrial workers in America, at last had an effect
in the favorable labor legislation of the New Deal in the 1930s.
The coming of the railroad sharply accelerated industrialization
in the Rocky Mountains. Wyoming received territorial status in
1867 as small but energetic cities grew up along the advancing
track of the Union Pacific. Once the continent had been spanned
by the meeting of the rails at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, railroads
grew apace throughout the Mountain West, and lode mining blossomed.
Despite the frontier conditions prevailing in railroad construction
camps, there was nothing primitive or simple about the
rolling stock and the operation of a railroad.
Locomotives, Pullman cars, and switching yards were visible extensions
of a highly mechanized, thoroughly capitalized civilization.
Frontier farming and livestock raising were also quickly pulled
into the national commercial network, yet they were rooted in
an age-old agrarian philosophy, vestiges of which they retain
even today. According to the agrarian ideal, espoused by Thomas
Jefferson and a host of lesser Americans, the most desirable
commonwealth was to be composed of yeoman farmers, free from
landlords and creditors, uncorrupted by urban luxuries, and self-sufficient
through subsistence farming and the minor industrial arts of
rural villages.
The Rocky Mountains became a farming frontier in 1847 with the
arrival of the Mormons in the valley of the Great Salt Lake,
following which, in 1850, Utah became a territory. The Mormons,
reinforced by an unceasing flow of American and foreign converts,
aggressively preempted hundreds of village sites where streams,
emerging from the mountains, provided irrigation. Non-Mormons
too began to take up farms in the territories beyond Utah. Frontier
cities and migrating settlers offered minor markets to early
farmers, but with the opening of national markets by the coming
of the railroads, Rocky Mountain farmers had a strong impetus
to abandon the austerity of subsistence farming and to enter
the national economy. NonMormon farmers adapted to market farming
more readily than did the Mormons, who for almost forty years
after their arrival adhered to the agrarian ideal of village
self-sufficiency.
Another link with the national economy was promotion and speculation
in farm land. Many farmers received free public land through
the Homestead Act of 1862, the Desert Land Act of 1877, and later
legislation, but many others bought their farms from railroads,
brokers, and other purveyors of private lands. Furthermore, promoters
were indispensable in encouraging and persuading people to immigrate
into the arid, inhospitable lands of the Mountain West. In 1870,
the city of Greeley, Colorado, had its beginning when Horace
Greeley and his friends founded an association providing its
subscribers with farm land, irrigation water, city lots, and
civic improvements. Similar promotions, often less successful,
went on throughout the frontier era. Perhaps the most pervasive
promotion was that which attended the dry farming boom between
1900 and 1918. Governors, editors, professors of agricultural
science, brokers, and railroaders theorized enthusiastically
on the potential of farming without irrigation and disseminated
the techniques for deep plowing and fall planting of wheat. Thanks
to promoters like Jim Hill, proprietor of the Great Northern
railroad, Montana saw such an influx of dry farmers on her
eastern plains that agriculture soon outstripped mining as the
state's major economic activity. Wet years and high wheat prices,
stimulated by World War I, brought dry farming to a peak from
which it tumbled disastrously in the dry, depressed years between
the two world wars.
Another important aspect of Rocky Mountain agriculture was federal
reclamation. From the beginning, irrigation was a cooperative
affair, whether developed by water users like the Mormon villagers
or by commercial companies intending to sell water rights to
prospective farmers. How-ever, convenient water was quickly preempted,
and private reclamation efforts in the later years of the nineteenth
century often failed. With the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902,
the federal government entered upon reclamation with serious
intent, constructing numerous dams, reservoirs, and canals throughout
the Rocky Mountain states. One of the most complex projects is
on the upper Snake River where between 1904 and 1959 the Minidoka,
American Falls, and Palisades dams were added to an existing
dam at Jackson Lake. As a result, the Snake River plain of southern
Idaho, originally desolate, has blossomed into a bounteous farming
region, helping make agriculture the most prominent of modern
Idaho's economic pursuits.
The modern farm is highly mechanized, equipped with air-conditioned
tractors, specialized trucks, and automated hay loaders. Despite
this fact, and despite the innumerable other ways in which modern
farmers depend upon an industrial economy, they do not fit into
an urban pattern. Their work remains an individual rather than
a corporate enterprise, having never lent itself well to the
industrial model of investors, managers, and laborers. Moreover,
their environment, the rural landscape, remains half natural,
not totally unlike the landscape of the Rocky Mountain frontier.
The same can be said for Rocky Mountain ranchers. Since frontier
times the plains and valleys have offered year-round grazing,
while the mountain ranges make excellent summer pasture. Livestock
came to the mountain country in modest numbers with the first
farmers, and territorial legislatures paid early attention to
herding, branding, and maverick regulations. The 1870s were a
turning point, for by the end of that decade, Indians were largely
restricted to reservations, the buffalo had been eradicated from
the ranges, and railroads had opened eastern markets. The free
grass of the public domain beckoned irresistibly. Promotional
literature appeared in the East and in Europe, and almost overnight
individuals and companies rushed to stock the open ranges with
cattle and sheep. Sheep eventually outnumbered cattle, but cattle
caught the fancy of the nation. Cowboys trailed in herds from
California, Oregon, and Texas and achieved a reputation for profligacy
and license. Cattlemen took what homesteads and land preemptions
they could as a home base for their operations and evolved the
cooperative roundup as a way of gathering and sorting the animals
which mingled freely on the public ranges. By 1885 the plains
of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado were grossly overstocked. The
hard winter of 1886–87 chastened local cattlemen and foreign
investors alike and started the cattle industry on a slow course
toward the fenced ranches and regulated public grazing lands
of today. Regulated grazing came first on the national forests,
created between 1891 and 1910; it came to the rest of the public
domain with the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. Both cattlemen and
sheepmen have consistently grumbled over quotas and fees, yet
as a result of regulation the public lands of the Mountain West
offer sustained grazing to millions of animals.
The regulation of grazing lands also resolved much of the conflict
for which the frontier cattle trade was notorious. Violence was
particularly conspicuous in Wyoming, which still calls itself
the "cowboy state." Cattle increased in Wyoming from 8000
in 1870 to 1,500,000 in 1885. Investorowned companies and substantial
cattlemen, ambivalently called "cattle kings," dominated
the ranges. Organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers Association,
they influenced the territorial legislature during the 1880s
to remand to them the official supervision of roundups, cattle
inspection, and maverick disposal. Bluntly prejudiced in favor
of its members, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association roused
great resentment among small cattlemen–cowboys and settlers
who took out homesteads, ran their few cattle on the public ranges,
and–so claimed the cattle kings–helped themselves to
mavericks and branded cattle. In 1892, cattlemen connected with
the Association hired Texas gunmen and invaded Johnson County,
intending to kill certain suspected rustlers, exile others, and
intimidate the remaining small ranchers. Delayed by the courageous
resistance of a single rustler, Nate Champion, they themselves
were besieged and required rescue by federal troops. It was typical
of the legal chaos of early Wyoming that the invaders were never
brought to trial.
Today many cattle, fattening in city feedlots, never see an open
range, and many ranches are mechanized. Nonetheless, the tradition
of the stock raiser's frontier is strong in the Mountain West.
Many stockmen still live on remote ranches, surrounded by a wild
country. Ranges exist almost everywhere; one can travel very
few miles beyond the cities without encountering grazing cattle,
sheep, and horses. Boots and high crowned hats are common dress,
even in cities. Rodeos remain a favorite summer entertainment;
large and small, they are sponsored by dozens of towns and cities
throughout the Rocky Mountains. Like farmers, ranchers are independent
of mind, conservative in politics, suspicious of government,
and hostile toward labor unions. Most of them run their own operation
with few or no employees; like farming, their occupation has
not lent itself to the industrial pattern.
Both farmers and ranchers retain a respect and wield an influence
in the Mountain West far beyond their numbers. To their city
counterparts they smack of the frontier. They seem a little closer
to self-sufficiency and independence and on better terms with
nature. Of all modern westerners they seem the most true and
authentic, expressing most completely the distinguishing traits
of the regional identity.
The Rocky Mountains have had a literature for nearly two hundred
years. At first it was chiefly a literature of exploration, travel,
and observation. The journals of early explorers were widely
read, perhaps none more so than the journals which Meriwether
Lewis and William Clark kept during their epic expedition of
1804–1806. History of the Expedition Under the Command
of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence
Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the
Pacific Ocean (1814) is the first and most influential of
several redactions of their daily entries. As settlements appeared
in the Rocky Mountains, innumerable travelers and sojourners
maintained personal diaries, of which most are sparse and ungrammatical
but a few are abundant in detail and emotion. In 1840 Rufus B.
Sage, a literate freighter and frontier merchant, began the personal
materials published over a century later as Letters and Papers
. . . with . . . His "Scenes in the
Rocky Mountains and in Oregon, California, New Mexico, Texas,
and the Grand Prairies" (1956). Typical of Sage's acuity
is an 1846 entry concerning the eccentricity of Rocky Mountain
trappers: "A genuine mountaineer is a problem hard to solve.
He seems a kind of sui genus, an oddity, both in dress,
language, and appearance, from the rest of mankind." Another
excellent document–one among a number of remarkable Mormon
diaries–is On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea
Stout, 1844–1861 (1964), which gives a painfully honest
account of the rigors of the Mormon exodus.
Even more abundant, at least in published form, were travel narratives
and pioneer chronicles. Washington Irving's Adventures of
Captain Bonneville, U. S. A. (1837) recounts the strenuous
perambulations of Bonneville, a sometime Army man who failed
as an entrepreneur in the mountain fur trade. Edgar Allan Poe,
for his own whimsical reasons, worked upon but never completed
a spurious exploration account, "The Journal of Julius Rodman"
(1840). Claiming his hoax to be the record of the first successful
crossing of the Rocky Mountains in 1792, Poe copied passages
from genuine accounts, including extensive portions from Voyages
(1801) of the British explorer Alexander Mackenzie.
Among many Rocky Mountain books
published in foreign countries is Father Pierre-Jean De Smet's
Missions de l'Oregon et Voyages dans les Montagnes-Rocheuses
en 1845 et 1846 (Paris, 1848). The noted Belgian-born Jesuit
wrote his account as a promotion of the missions which he and
his colleagues were successfully establishing among the Indians
of northwestern Montana and Idaho. A narrative of more enduring
fame is George Frederick Ruxton's Life in the Far West (1848),
based upon the adventures of the young Englishman among trappers
and Indians of the Rocky Mountains. Of particular interest is
the distinct and colorful dialect which Ruxton's mountain men
speak. Scholars disagree whether this dialect is a faithful recording
or whether it is Ruxton's invention, but they do not dispute
its influence upon recent authors who have modeled the speech
of their fictional mountain men upon Ruxton's earthy metaphors
and startling neologisms. A thoroughly typical travel narrative
is that of Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield, Mass.,Republican,
whose journey with the speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives
was published as Across the Continent: A Summer's Journey
to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States,
with Speaker Colfax (1865). Bowles could report that in Salt
Lake City the Mormons had erected a theater where, "during
the winter season, performances are given twice a week; and the
theater proves a most useful and popular social center and entertainment
for the whole people."
Much of the literature describing the mountain country was promotional
in its intent. An unflagging boosterism was evident on the editorial
page of every Rocky Mountain newspaper in frontier times and
found expression in innumerable books and pamphlets. One of the
most prominent promoters was William Gilpin, who for a single
year served as the first territorial governor of Colorado before
plunging into promotional and speculative schemes in agricultural
real estate in the San Luis Valley. Gilpin's speeches and articles,
in which he preached the superlative potential of Colorado with
a religious fervor, were published as The Central Gold Region:
The Grain, Pastoral, and Gold Regions of North America, with
Some New Views of Its Physical Geography and Observations on
the Pacific Railroad (1860). In later writings Gilpin developed
the grandiose theory that the American West, with Colorado at
its center, would become the ultimate world empire, dominating, guiding, and inspiring all other parts of the world.
Long before the end of the frontier era, the
Rocky Mountains had generated a considerable historical literature
of an informal and polemic nature. A notable specimen is Thomas
J. Dimsdale's The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular
Justice in the Rocky Mountains (1866), the first book published
in Montana. An Oxford-educated Englishman, Dimsdale served as
Montana territory's first superintendent of public instruction
and edited Virginia City's Montana Post. Dimsdale's book
narrates the effective but controversial vigilante campaign against
Henry Plummer, who had doubled as elected sheriff and leader
of road agents preying upon travelers between Montana's isolated
mining camps. The episode left behind such turbulent feelings
that in 1890 Nathaniel Pitt Langford published a reprise of Dimsdale's
work, Vigilante Days and Ways: The Pioneers of the Rockies,
the Makers and Making of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington,
and Wyoming. A vigorous, detailed book, Langford's work,
like Dimsdale's, argues that frontier vigilante justice was a
necessary step toward a civilized state of law and order.
Taking an opposite view of vigilante justice is a book by A.
S. Mercer, The Banditti of the Plains, or the Cattlemen's
Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 (The Crowning Infamy of the
Ages) (1894). This book narrates the Johnson County War from
the bias of the homesteaders and small ranchers who successfully
resisted the invasion of the large cattlemen and their hired
Texas gunmen. Mercer, at one time president of the University
of Washington and later editor of the Northwestern Live Stock
Journal in Cheyenne, wrote with a rare and relentless invective
against prominent Wyoming cattlemen and politicians, including
the new state's acting governor and its two U. S. Senators. Officials
seized the bulk of the printing, destroyed the plates, charged
Mercer with mailing obscene matter, and saw that copyright copies
were removed from the Library of Congress. However, several hundred
copies were surreptitiously removed to Colorado and the book
went forth to inspire a number of later novelists likewise to
treat the Johnson County War from the point of view of the small
ranchers. In particular, it made a hero of the rustler Nate Champion,
who held back the invaders until they set fire to his cabin:
"No stronger expression of nerve and heroism has ever been
recorded," writes Mercer, "and coming generations will point
to Nate Champion as one of the coolest and bravest men of the
nineteenth century."
A most unusual account of frontier violence is Mormonism Unveiled,
or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D.
Lee (1877), published shortly after Lee's execution for his
part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. In southwestern
Utah a company of Mormon militiamen, assisted by Indians, treacherously
reneged on a promise of safe conduct and killed some ninety-six
men, women, and children of an Arkansas company bound for California.
The militiamen, drawn from nearby settlements, were motivated
by war hysteria rising from the invasion of Utah by the U. S.
Army, by unfortunate claims of some of the immigrants to have
helped murder Joseph Smith, and by the arcane doctrine of blood
atonement preached by Mormon leaders from Salt Lake City. Lee's
book outlines his faithful participation in the Mormon exodus
to the Rocky Mountains and in the settlement of southern Utah.
More importantly, it extends responsibility for the
massacre to Lee's military and ecclesiastical
superiors and attributes a startling incident of blood atonement
to one of Lee's colleagues. Although historians have categorized
the book with the virulently biased anti-Mormon literature common
in the nineteenth century, it remains a testimony to the fact
that frontier conditions provoked the Mormons to an uncharacteristic
bloodiness.
In addition to an informative literature of diaries, travel narratives,
and informal histories, the Rocky Mountain frontier produced
a literature with an imaginative and aesthetic intent. The desire
for literary culture was often evident in the most raw, unfinished
frontier city. Cheyenne boasted a Young Man's Literary Association
by 1867, some months before the railroad arrived in that booming
new town. Another notable Wyoming literary event, one defying
categorization, occurred in Washington, D. C., when Stephen W.
Downey, Laramie attorney and territorial delegate to Congress,
received routine permission to print a bill in the Congressional
Record of 1880; he deceitfully included "The Immortals,"
his own poem of more than 2500 lines of free verse which, in
the words of one historian,"shows considerable debt to Homer,
Vergil, and Dante and is heavily freighted with mythology, allegory,
and moral instruction."
By 1880 Salt Lake City had produced many literary groups, including
the Wasatch Literary Society and the Polysophical Society, in
which rebellious young Utahns could stretch their intellectual
wings, sometimes to the alarm of their staid elders. Two poets,
unknown beyond Utah, had considerable prominence among cultivated
Mormons. Eliza R. Snow, a brilliant plural wife to Joseph Smith
and, after his death, to Brigham Young, wrote numerous poems,
some of which appeared in a collection, Poems: Religious,
Historical, and Political (vol. I, Liverpool, 1856; vol.
II, Salt Lake City, 1877). One of her poems provides the lyrics
for a beloved, haunting Latter-day Saint hymn, "O My Father."
Originally called "Invocation, or the Eternal Father and
Mother," it alludes to the Mormon doctrine of a divine mother
which modern church authorities, in their battle against women's
liberation, find troublesome. The poetry of Orson F. Whitney,
Mormon apostle and an early chancellor of the University of Utah,
was similarly oriented to Christian themes. His Elias, an
Epic of the Ages (1904) is a lengthy poetic narrative setting
forth the Christian cosmography as conceived by the Latter-day
Saints. In an essay of 1888, "Home Literature," Whitney
predicted a flowering of Mormon literature, asserting that "the
Holy Ghost is the genius of `Mormon' literature" and that "we
will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own."
The small cities of the Rocky Mountain frontier also generated
a respectable number of magazines, most of which, like the Contributor
and Women's Exponent of Utah and the Colorado Monthly
and Out West of Colorado, had brief lives. Of particular note is
The Great Divide, published in Denver between 1889 and
1895. In this short time The Great Divide achieved a national
popularity, having 32,000 subscribers in 1893. Its stories, essays,
and poems celebrate the healthy climate and scenic beauties of
Colorado, extol the good life of its farmers, ranchers, and miners,
and emphasize the rise of obscure persons to wealth through pluck
and hard work.
Perhaps the most celebrated author of the mountain
frontier was Mark Twain, whose Roughing It (1872) covers
his stay in Virginia City, Nevada, during the Civil War and his
later travels to San Francisco and Hawaii. This book is elevated
above the status of a travel narrative, which in part it is,
by its undeviating satire of western manners and morals. Less
famous but more thoroughly of the Rocky Mountain country was
Bill Nye, a Wyoming humorist on the order of Artemus Ward and
Petroleum V. Nasby. Edgar Wilson Nye, as he was christened, practiced
law and journalism in Laramie between 1876 and 1889; afterward,
having moved for reasons of health, he continued a writing career
in the East. Nye established and edited the Laramie Boomerang,
a newspaper named after Nye's mule. This irreverent title
is indicative of the sketches he wrote of all kinds of subjects,
including local politicians, classical lore, women's suffrage,
and Chinese labor. His chief satirical method was parody–a
use of pretentious, elevated language upon common and undignified
subjects. Besides a daily column for the Boomerang, he made contributions
to the Cheyenne Sun, the Denver Tribune, and newspapers
in the East. Many of the comic sketches written in Wyoming are
included in Bill Nye and Boomerang, or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed
Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems (1890) and Baled Hay:
A Drier Book Than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' Grass" (1893).
Another writer with a minor national reputation was Helen Hunt
Jackson. An acquaintance of Emily Dickinson, Jackson was an established
author before migrating to Colorado Springs for her health. Never
identifying closely with Colorado, she made slight literary use
of the Mountain West. Her Verses (1873; 1887) offer poems
of a competent prosody in the tradition
of genteel romanticism–European and Asian
settings, domestic joys and griefs, allusions to kings and queens,
and high moral sentiment. She is best remembered for her book
of courageous protest, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of
the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the lndian
Tribes
(1881), and for an Indian novel set in the mission country of
southern California, Ramona (1884). Nonetheless, she wrote
one novel set in the Rockies, Nelly's Silver Mine: A Story
of Colorado Life (1878), which effectively describes local
landscape and depicts the patient, cheerful personality of Nelly,
the juvenile protagonist.
Also notable was Charles King, whose more than sixty novels and
two hundred stories did much to establish the Indian-fighting
cavalryman as a recognized American hero. Reared in Milwaukee
and educated at West Point, King served as a cavalry officer
in the Civil War and in the Indian wars of Arizona, Wyoming,
and Montana; retiring from the regular service because of wounds,
he continued to serve in the National Guard while pursuing an
active literary career. Typical of the many novels King set in
the mountain territories and states is Marion's Faith (1886),
which treats cavalry life from the perspective of an officer's
wife. Depicting events culminating in the Custer Massacre, this
novel emphasizes the decency and decorum of both cavalrymen and
the wives who wait behind in the forts. Trooper Ross (1895) also
touches upon an actual historical event of Wyoming, the Fetterman
Massacre. It features the pluck and bravery of an officer's son,
who, unable to compete academically at West Point, joins the
cavalry as a common trooper determined to work his way up through
loyal service.
The most remarkable woman writer of the Rocky Mountain frontier
was Mary Hallock Foote, the pattern for Susan Ward in Wallace
Stegner's Angle of Repose. A genteel eastern Quaker, she
married a mining engineer who took her to Leadville, Colorado,
to Mexico, and to the Boise Valley of Idaho before settling permanently
in California. Exploiting her frontier experiences with verve
and insight, Foote was highly successful in the eastern press
as both an author and an illustrator. In her first novel, The
Led-Horse Claim (1883), a young man and woman learn to love
each other despite the violent claim disputes dividing a Colorado
mining camp. In The Chosen Valley (1892), set in the Boise
Valley, romantic love again triumphs over the hatred roused when
an unscrupulous engineer attempts to construct an irrigation
dam by profitable but dangerous methods. In Coeur d'Alene
(1894), love flourishes against the violent backdrop of a
laborers' strike at the Idaho mines of Coeur d'Alene. Foote paints
the striking miners as malicious, even villainous, while she
depicts the owners and managers as heroic and magnanimous. Although
modern readers no longer relish her sentimentalized fiction,
her posthumously published autobiography, A Victorian Gentlewoman
in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (1972),
is most readable. It is detailed, observant, and
energetic and shows her to have been affectionately engaged by
the frontier West in which she lived.
Neither life nor literature in the Rocky Mountains changed abruptly
with the coming of the twentieth century. Numerous people continued
to live under near-frontier conditions until World War II. Nonetheless,
by 1900 the frontier had clearly become a tradition. Many authors,
among them Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister, lamented with
great nostalgia the passing of the frontier, which Frederick
Jackson Turner had underscored in his scholarly paper of 1893,
"The Significance of the Frontier in American History."The
people of the Rocky Mountains, like other westerners, cheerfully
accepted their national role as curators of the frontier tradition.
Their westernness would remain inextricably associated with the
fact that their land had been the locale of the last great American
frontier.
Perhaps the best western book published in the first decade of
the new century was Wister's The Virginian: A Horseman of
the Plains (1902). It remains one of the best novels set
in Wyoming and despite its subtitle it also takes its reader
into the mountains. Undoubtedly it contributed to the nascent
formula cowboy novel by depicting the Virginian as superlative
and by creating one of the first of the stylized shootouts between
hero and villain that would become a stock feature of the formula
Western. But it also has a humorous vein, depicts manners of
the Wyoming frontier with a vivid realism, and conscientiously
studies the tensions between eastern tradition and western innovation.
The new century also saw the appearance of cowboy novels by a
number of other authors, who unlike Wister made permanent homes
in the Rocky Mountain region. One of these was Andy Adams, who
lived in Colorado Springs; his novel, The Log of a Cowboy
(1903), set upon the Great Plains, is prized for its historical
authenticity. Writing for a widespread popular audience was William
MacLeod Raine, one of the foremost early practitioners of the
formula cowboy novel. Born in England, Raine taught school in
Seattle, took a position with the Rocky Mountain News of
Denver shortly after 1900, and soon settled into a prodigious
writing career–over eighty novels, which in original and
reprint have sold millions of copies, two hundred short stories,
and a handful of historical books and articles. Among his novels
set in the Mountain West are Wyoming (1907), Ridgway
of Montana (1909), The High Grader (1915), and Colorado
(1928).
A similar author was Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, who under the pen
name of B. M. Bower wrote ranch Westerns for three decades. Living
most of her life in Big Sandy, Montana, Bower set many of her
novels in Montana and other parts of the Mountain West. Chip
of the Flying U (1904), her most famous novel, adds a new
wrinkle to frontier romance. The good-natured cowboy, Chip, injured
by a bronco, takes up oil painting at the advice of a
lady doctor from the East. His untutored primitive
paintings stun all who see them, and in the end the unlettered
Chip and the sophisticated lady doctor marry. This novel is interesting
not only because it substitutes artistic expression for heroic
violence in its cowboy protagonist but also because that protagonist
is obviously modeled on Charles M. Russell, whom Bower knew well
and whom she persuaded to illustrate a number of her books.
Hamlin Garland, generally known for his Great Plains fiction,
became an important Rocky Mountain writer during the early years
of the new century. Abandoning the grim realism of Main-Travelled
Roads (1891), Garland mined a profitable vein of romance
in such works as The Captain of the GrayHorse Troop (1902),
a novel about a cavalry action against renegade Indians in eastern
Montana. Having first visited the Rockies in the winter of 1892–93,
Garland thereafter traveled widely in the mountain country and
spent many summers in Colorado. At first he was an enthusiastic
admirer of the energy and vigor of the mountain frontier, but
gradually he became disillusioned by the squalor that fell upon
its towns as the boom spirit died away. The newly organized Forest
Service salvaged his admiration by bringing into the mountain
forests a decent, purposeful group of professional men. He wrote
a number of Forest Service novels of which Cavanagh, Forest
Ranger: A Romance of the Mountain West (1910) is best known.
Garland described this novel as "a love story with a federal
forest for historical relief." Its protagonist, an ambitious
young forest ranger, helps the woman he loves resurrect a sense
of decency in her mountaineer parents.
Frank B. Linderman was the most important writer to emerge during
the second decade of the twentieth century. Linderman came to
Montana in 1883 as a youth, lived the isolated life of a trapper,
and later became legislator, newspaper publisher, and insurance
agent. He turned naturally to writing as a means of commemorating
the fading frontier to which he had a passionate attachment.
Particularly interested in the Indians of Montana and Idaho,
he assembled respectable books of myth and legend, including
Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagle's Lodge Fire (1915),
Kootenai Why Stories (1926), and American: The Life
Story of a Great Indian, Plenty-coups, Chief of the Crows (1930).
In addition, Linderman wrote fiction. Lige Mounts: Free Trapper
(1922), one of the earliest of mountain man novels, makes
an authentic reproduction of the trapping frontier.
An author whom readers rarely associate with the West is Upton
Sinclair, a socialist reformer who fought against the industrial
exploitation of workers and the poor during a fervent, energetic
career of some fifty years. His most famous novel, The Jungle
(1906), dramatizes the brutality of the owners and managers
of the Chicago meat packing industry. Judging the Rocky Mountain
mining industry to be similarly exploitative, Sinclair supported the miners in the unsuccessful and violent
coal strikes of 1914. He wrote The Brass Check: A Study of
American Journalism (1919) to denounce the Associated Press
for obstructing his efforts to give national publicity to the
plight of the striking laborers. The title of the work, derived
from the token often used in houses of prostitution, suggests
the prostitution of the press by big money. Sinclair made fictional
use of the Rocky Mountains in Mountain City (1930), a
novel which follows the rise of a Colorado farm boy to a position
of corrupt wealth in a city modeled on Denver.
The 1920s were notable for the first appearance of a stern realism
in Rocky Mountain fiction. Hitherto, it had portrayed frontier
life in heroic, romanticized terms. Plots ended in triumph, and
protagonists were idealized. Sexual matters were veiled in accordance
with genteel inhibitions: it will be remembered that the Virginian
and Molly, camping out on their honeymoon, bathe on different
sides of the island which splits a mountain stream. Suffering
from cultural lag, Rocky Mountain authors did not take up a dark
realism until almost a quarter of a century after Crane, Norris,
and Dreiser had begun to employ it in their naturalistic fiction.
From its beginnings in the 1920s, Rocky Mountain realism would
grow until by the 1940s it would become the major mode among
those authors destined for the highest critical accreditation.
Characteristic of such authors is a willingness to portray protagonists
as victims, to deal in frontier tragedy, and to weigh the losses
of the frontier experience.
Three authors destined for critical acclaim began their careers
in the 1920s–Bernard DeVoto, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, and
Vardis Fisher. A native of Ogden, Utah, DeVoto chose to reside
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he pursued a distinguished
career as editor, freelance writer, literary critic, historian,
and social commentator. Although some of his novels– for
example, The Crooked Mile (1924)–are set in the Mountain
West, his major works relating to this region are historical.
Across the Wide Missouri (1947) is widely considered to
have the greatest literary merit of all histories of the mountain
men. Unlike DeVoto, Ferril has chosen to remain in his native
city, Denver, to which his ancestors came as pioneers. Ferril's
first collection of poems, High Passage (1926), demonstrates
the competent free verse, the obliqueness of statement, and the
feelingful appeal to the western scene which have continued to
characterize his poetry. Vardis Fisher, turning his back on a
university position in the East, returned in the twenties to
begin a literary career in his native Idaho. His first novel,
Toilers of the Hills
(1928), paints a harsh, unflattering picture of the dry farming
experience. It is the most remarkable early example of a dark
realism in Rocky Mountain fiction.
The 1920s also saw the publication
of Charles M. Russell's stories, Rawhide Rawlins (1921),
More Rawhides (1926), and Trails Plowed Under
(1927). Like Linderman, Russell migrated to Montana in his youth.
Possessing an extraordinary talent for painting, he preserved
the landscape and people of the frontier in representational
paintings which today are highly esteemed. Turning to writing
late in life, he tried, as he said, "to write some of these
yarns as nearly as possible as they were told to me." Told in
the fractured grammar of frontier cowboys and containing numerous
digressions, the tales come to humorous and ironic endings and
reflect the irreverent exuberance of the young fugitives from
civilization whom Russell so much admired.
Another fascinating author
is Gwendolen Haste, whose modest production of poetry demonstrates
a high competence and an earnest calculation of life's rigors
on the Montana plains. A native of Wisconsin, Haste spent most
of the years between 1915 and 1925 in Billings, Montana, assisting
her father in editing The Scientific Farmer. Afterward
she moved permanently to the East. Montana figures in many of
the poems published in The Young Land (1930) and Selected
Poems (1976). "The Ranch in the Coulee," which shared
The Nation poetry prize in 1922, is about a Montana ranch
woman who in seasons when no travelers come by goes mad from
isolation. "The Reason," a brief but skillful poem, gives
the real reason an acquitted killer–a farm wife–has
had for shooting her husband: "She saw the withered field
beyond the door, / The rotting barns, the filth, the broken
fence, / And all her faded days, robbed of delight."
The 1930s mark the first publications
of Frank Waters, who like Ferril and Fisher has come into high
critical esteem. Although much of Waters's best work is set in
the Southwest, his childhood in Colorado Springs gave impetus
to several works associated with Colorado. A trilogy of novels,
The Wild Earth's Nobility (1935), Below Grass Roots
(1937), and The Dust Within the Rock (1940), traces
the evolution of Waters's family in frontier Colorado. Waters
also wrote Midas of the Rockies (1937), a biography of
Winfield Scott Stratton, a prospector of the Rockies who struck
it rich.
A phenomenon of a different sort also affected the literary scene
of the Mountain West in the 1930s. Funded by the WPA of the New
Deal, the Federal Writers' Project produced useful historical
and descriptive guides to each state of the Union. A spectacular
state effort was that of Idaho, carried forward by Vardis Fisher,
whose $2300 yearly salary subsidized his other literary ambitions
as well. Idaho, a Guide in Word and Picture (1937), printed
by Caxton Printers of Caldwell, Idaho, was the first such work
completed in the nation and served as a model for those that
followed. In Utah, the project gave a start to Juanita Brooks,
a historian who in later years wrote Mountain Meadows Massacre
(1950). This definitive work compelled Brooks's fellow
Mormons to recognize the tragic fact that good
Mormons, rather than renegades, had planned and carried out the massacre of 1857.
The 1930s produced stirrings of
an indigenous critical recognition of Rocky Mountain literature.
Western Prose and Poetry (1932), an anthology compiled
by Rufus A. Coleman, professor of English at Montana State University,
was a harbinger of the serious study of western literature in
Rocky Mountain colleges and universities. Another promising event
was the 1937 founding of the Inter-mountain Review in
Salt Lake City. Subsequently the journal changed locations some
six times and underwent two changes in title–first, the
Rocky Mountain Review; later, the Western Review. Founder
and editor Ray B. West, Jr., pursued the policy of publishing
unestablished authors whose only common denominator was what
West perceived as high literary ability. However, for many years
West maintained a specific interest in Rocky Mountain literature
and must be esteemed as one of the first to give important critical
and editorial attention to it. He compiled an anthology, Rocky
Mountain Reader (1946), and wrote a critical statement, Writing
in the Rocky Mountains (1947). Predicting with remarkable
accuracy the authors whom later critics would certify, West developed
the thesis that Rocky Mountain literature serves to impose meaning
upon the otherwise blank and inchoate events of frontier history.
An early associate of West's was Alan Swallow, who came to have
an even greater editorial impact upon Rocky Mountain literature.
A native of Wyoming who made a career of commercial publishing
in Denver, Swallow encouraged a host of aspiring western poets
and fiction writers and often risked his own money by publishing
their works. In addition, his own poetry and criticism are respectable
and stimulating. XI Poems (1943) and The Nameless Sight:
Poems 1937–56 (1956) give a sampling of his poetry,
which often treats Rocky Mountain themes. An Editor's Essays
of Two Decades (1962) contains Swallow's critical views on
a variety of national and western literary subjects. One essay,
"A Magazine for the West," reveals his doubt that the West
can produce a magazine of national circulation because of "distance,
isolation, colonialism of dependence upon what is the fashion
outside our region"; yet it expresses a hope that westerners
will "rally round the voices, little and great, which we
have."
With the 1940s Rocky Mountain literature came of age. No other
decade has seen the appearance of so many early works by authors
whom time would prove to be of first rank. The OxBow Incident
(1940), first novel of Walter Van Tilburg Clark of Nevada,
received national acclaim for its realistic treatment of miscarried
vigilante justice. In Clark's The Track of the Car (1949)
a ranch family of the Sierra Nevada acts out an allegory of transcendental
good and evil. In 1947 A. B. Guthrie, Jr., published The Big
Sky;
esteemed by many as the finest of mountain
man novels, this work is infused with a haunting nostalgia. Guthrie's
The Way West (1949) is one of the best novels of the Oregon
Trail. Wallace Stegner emerged as an important Rocky Mountain
author with the publication of The Big Rock Candy Mountain
(1943), a novel interpreting the frontier experience as a
futile search for an impossible bonanza. Jack Schaefer also began
his career as a western author with the publication of Shane
(1949), a sensitive, symbolic novel in the tradition of the
heroic cowboy.
The 1940s also date the emergence of Dorothy M. Johnson, a popular
Montana writer whose works are presently growing in critical
esteem. Raised in Montana, Johnson returned there at mid-life
to continue a successful career as journalist, commercial editor,
and freelance writer. A skilled craftsman in the popular short
story, Johnson placed numerous stories in national magazines
such as Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, Collier's, and
Cosmopolitan. Some of her Rocky Mountain stories have
been collected in Flame on the Frontier: Short Stories of
Pioneer Women (1948), Indian Country (1949), and The
Hanging Tree (1951). The title story of the latter collection,
perhaps her most noted work, turns upon the decision of a tarnished
woman to ransom her lover from hanging by relinquishing a rich
mining claim.
Very worthy of mention is Jean Stafford, an eastern expatriate
from Colorado. Among her notable American short stories are a
number which treat the cultural disharmony of East and West.
Her most impressive Rocky Mountain work is The Mountain Lion
(1947), a novel about the experiences of two California children
on their uncle's Colorado ranch. The wild Colorado country and
the mountain lion that the children occasionally see symbolize
the vanishing childhood of the sister and brother. Despite an
improbable ending, the novel is excellent because of its careful
rendering of the children's lonely eccentricities.
Since the 1940s, the literature of the Rocky Mountains, like
that of other parts of the West, has multiplied enormously. Previously
established authors have continued to publish, and new authors
have appeared in such numbers that the concluding pages of this
chapter will not pretend to survey all who deserve attention.
Instead, a few authors and events of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
will be cited as examples of the growth and thematic complexity
which have come to the recent literature of the Mountain West.
Rocky Mountain authors continue to write popular Westerns with
a traditional emphasis upon heroic action and romantic love–with
the added feature of a new sexual explicitness. Serious authors
continue to examine the frontier experience with an effective,
compelling realism which often turns toward tragic or disillusioning
subject matter. However, in the writing of some of the best contemporary
authors the frontier is no longer
the single great matter of Rocky Mountain literature.
Most Rocky Mountain authors now live in cities. Many of them
have received a cosmopolitan education, are well traveled, and
are thoroughly conversant with national and world issues. As
a result, recent Rocky Mountain literature often provides startling
juxtapositions between the frontier past and the urban present
or between traditional regional concerns and unfamiliar exotic
themes.
In 1954 appeared The Last Hunt, a very competent first
novel by Milton Lott, native of the Snake River Valley of Idaho.
Set on the buffalohunting frontier of northwestern Montana, this
book offers an authentic reconstruction of the hide hunter's
way of life and a sensitively characterized conflict between
blood lust and compassion. Two hunting partners act out an allegory
of damnation and salvation: one, a bloody-minded man, dies frozen
in a green hide during a blizzard; whereas his more conscientious
partner, guilt-stricken by the wanton destruction of the buffalo
and of the Indians who depended on them for food, finds a saving
penance. Lott also wrote Dance Back the Buffalo (1959),
a very readable novel about an abortive Indian revolt associated
with a ghost dance among the Lakota Sioux. His Back Track
(1965) is an effective novel of the cattle trade.
A native Nevadan of Basque descent, Robert Laxalt, also came
to prominence in the 1950s. His Sweet Promised Land (1957)
is a touching reminiscence of his father, who after a long life
of herding sheep on the Nevada slope of the Sierras returns for
a visit to his native Pyrenees. Laxalt vividly describes both
the Sierras and the Pyrenees and effectively evokes his father's
intense personality. The old man yearns to stay in the Pyrenees
among the people of his childhood; but finally he departs again
because Nevada, the new land long lived in, has claimed him.
Laxalt thus exploits a venerable western theme: even in the twentieth
century, the West transforms immigrants into Americans. Laxalt
also authored The Violent Land: Tales the Old Timers Tell
(1953), a collection of anecdotes from Nevada's history;
In a Hundred Graves: A Basque Portrait (1972), a collection
of stories and sketches about Basque peasants in the Pyrenees;
and Nevada
(1976), the bicentennial history of that state.
In 1960 appeared Butcher's Crossing,
an extraordinary Rocky Mountain novel by John Williams, professor
of English at the University of Denver. Its youthful eastern
protagonist joins a buffalo hunt in a high Colorado valley; following
a wasteful slaughter, he suffers a snowbound winter and returns
to town to discover that the entire venture has been made futile
by the failure of the hide market. These events are given philosophical
dimension by the fact that the protagonist enters upon his experience
expecting to find God and bliss in the wilderness, but finds
instead vacuity and meaninglessness. The novel thus figures forth,
against the senseless destruction of the buffalo,
the evolution of the American mind from the
transcendentalism of the nineteenth century to the existentialism
of the twentieth. Among other works, Williams also authored Augustus
(1972), a novel set in ancient Rome, for which he received
a National Book Award.
Robert A. Roripaugh is a Wyoming author who, having ranched and
rodeoed in various parts of the West, became a professor of English
at the University of Wyoming. His novel A Fever for Living
(1961) is about the tragic love of an American soldier and
a Japanese woman during the occupation of Japan. More typically
western, his novel Honor Thy Father (1963) features a
son who because of moral conviction refuses to side with his
father in the Johnson County War of frontier Wyoming. In addition,
Roripaugh has published a collection of poems, Learn to Love
the Haze
(1976). One poem, "Elegy for an Indian Girl," is about a
reservation girl who, raped, commits suicide with the revolver
of the policeman who is taking her home to her parents: "Quiet
girl, your face keeps floating up / From mountain water / In
dark dreams."
A notable Mormon poet is Clinton F. Larson, a Utahn, whose works
include The Lord of Experience (1968) and Counterpoint
(1973). Larson's poetry demonstrates closely rendered image
and sound, an abundance of oblique metaphor, and a diction ranging,
often in the same poem, from the precisely concrete to the obscurely
abstract and allusive. Some of his poems touch upon frontier
themes; almost all of them exploit the mountain landscape. His
most characteristic poems are religious; their conscientious
form and constant allusion to other intellectual and religious
outlooks raise them above mere Mormon sectarianism and place
them in the general tradition of Christian poetry.
The novels and poems of James Welch, a Montana Indian author
appearing in the 1970s, effectively depict what eastern literary
critic Leslie Fiedler has called "the ghettos of the reservation."
Fiedler, who came for a stint of teaching in Montana with a romantic
expectation of finding people living in a moral, happy proximity
to nature, found instead that a sterile landscape had overwhelmed
Montana society and that white Montanans have continued to sequester
and suppress the Montana Indians.
A view of social disorientation among modern Montana whites appears
in Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
(1976). The author returned to his native Montana following
retirement as professor of English at the University of Chicago.
The title work of his collection, a novella, is about the sons
of a Montana clergyman who has indoctrinated them in fly fishing
as a ritual of perfection. One of the sons, the narrator, has
migrated; the other has elected to remain in Montana, work for
a newspaper, frequent bars, fornicate, and devote himself intensely
to fly fishing on wild Montana rivers. His life has a hopeless
beauty and ends abruptly when he is beaten to death in an alley
after a barroom quarrel. The novella, lucid in its prose and
finely etched in detail, is at once humorous, tender, and tragic.
Another work of note is Gino Sky's Appaloosa Rising: The Legend
of the Cowboy Buddha (1980), a ribald, unstructured novel
fielding a confusing array of cowboys and cowgirls in modern
Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. These impoverished but happy souls
spend their days driving pickups, riding in rodeos, drinking
in bars, having sex, undergoing drug-induced fantasies, and rationalizing
their lives by a garbled Buddhism. A few of them travel between
Idaho and Tibet by psychic projection. The novel is remarkable
for two things: its marriage of Oriental religious ideas and
the frontier tradition of the Mountain West, and its unrelenting
violation of ordinary American proprieties.
A final author to be considered here is Richard Hugo. Born in
Seattle and educated at the University of Washington, Hugo first
emerged as a poet of the Northwest, where his poetry received
a number of regional awards. By 1965, Hugo had migrated to a
teaching position at Montana State University. Later, following
study abroad, he taught at the University of Colorado. Two of
his collections, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973)
and What Thou Lovest Well Remains American (1975), show
the diversity of theme and setting in his poetry. While some
of his poems allude to Great Britain and Europe, others relate
to Montana and other parts of the Mountain West. Hugo's poetry
is precise in detail and oblique in metaphor; its major tone
is sombre, suggesting miscarried purpose and overshadowing grief.
It tends to treat the open stretches of the mountain country
affirmatively, as in "Driving Montana,"and its towns and
cities with disillusionment, as in "The Only Bar in Dixon"
and "2433 Agnes, First Home, Last House in Missoula." There
is an intriguing originality about his 31 Letters and 13 Dreams
(1977), a book composed of alternating dreams and versified
letters to his friends. Surrealistic imagery
abounds in the depressed, incoherent dreams. The poetic letters
are personal and full of feeling. Typical is "Letter to
Welch from Browning," in which Hugo writes to James Welch
about a visit to his friend's home town on the reservation: "A
scene of raw despair. Indians sleeping on the filthy floor.
Men with brains scrambled in wine." And later: "I'll never
see you the same."
Covering a period of almost two hundred years, this survey of
Rocky Mountain literature necessarily has left unmentioned an
enormous number of authors and books. The literature it has reviewed
has often been of a personal or expository sort or, if imaginative
and creative, of a popular rather than an aesthetic quality.
That literature has remained preoccupied with the frontier experience
and with the modern mountain landscape. Much of it has been optimistic
and heroic; on the whole, citizens of the mountain country, like
other westerners, remain cheerful about themselves and their
future, as Wallace Stegner remarks in his essay "Born a
Square– The Westerner's Dilemma." However, thematic profundity
and artistic competence are evident in an encouraging number
of Rocky Mountain works. In many of them, life in the Mountain
West is transcribed as problematic and tragic; its small cities
produce intractable tensions, its Indians remain incarcerated
on their reservations, its intellectuals absorb the anxieties
of the world at large.
What of the future? Possibly the urban experience will supplant
the frontier as the predominant matter of Rocky Mountain literature.
Possibly western writers–well traveled, conversant with
the intellectual tradition of Euro-America and the Orient–will
make their westernness a matter of mere location, writing books
that could as easily be set in New York, Paris, or Tokyo as in
Denver, Reno, or Missoula. But possibly not. The land remains
a conservative factor. The farms and ranches, the grazing cattle
and sheep, the vast stretches of sagebrush, pinyon, and juniper,
the unfathomable canyons, the high, bare ridges are still there,
just beyond the edge of the Rocky Mountain city.
LEVI S. PETERSON, Weber State College
1. Wayne R. Kime, "Poe's Use of Mackenzie's Voyages in `The Journal of Julius Rodman,"' Western American Literature 3 (Spring 1968): 61–67.
2. T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 137.
3. M. James Kedro, "Literary Boosterism!", The Colorado Magazine 52 (Summer 1975): 200–224.
4. Leslie A. Fiedler, "Montana; or The End of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau," in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, Vol.
I (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). First published in Partisan
Review, December 1949.
Selected Bibliography
Primary Sources
Bower, B. M. Chip of the Flying U. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904.
Bowles, Samuel. Across the Continent: A Summer's Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States, with Speaker Colfax. Springfield, Mass.: Samuel Bowles & Co., 1865.
Brooks, Juanita. Mountain Meadows Massacre. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970. First published 1950.
Coleman, Rufus A. Western Prose and Poetry. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932.
De Smet, Pierre-Jean. Missions de l'Oregon et Voyages dans les Montagnes-Rocheuses en 1845 et 1846. Paris: Poussielgne-Rusand, 1848.
Dimsdale, Thomas J. The Vigilantes of Montana, or Popular
Justice in the Rocky
Mountains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953. First
published 1866.
Foote, Mary Hallock. The Chosen Valley. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892.
Garland, Hamlin. The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop. New York: Harper &. Brothers, 1902.
Gilpin, William. The Central Gold Region: The Grain, Pastoral, and Gold Regions of North America,
with Some New Views of Its Physical Geography and Observations
on the Pacific Railroad. Philadelphia: Sower, Barnes, 1860.
Haste, Gwendolen. Selected Poems. Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1976.
Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's
Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1881.
Johnson, Dorothy M. Flame on the Frontier: Short Stories of Pioneer Women. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967. First published 1948.
King, Charles. Marion's
Faith. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911. First published
1886.
Langford, Nathaniel Pitt. Vigilante
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Sunshine for the pale and palsied,
Sunshine for the chilled and weak,
Giving pallid lips the rubies
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