A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
H ONEST SERENDIP that he is, A. B. ("Bud") Guthrie, Jr., has a gift for making the rewards of hard work seem like mere good luck. Students of western fiction have suggested that while Guthrie was writing his first important novel, The Big Sky, he worked under a "divine afflatus." He accepts the charge. As his landlady Mary Lizzie told him when he was living in her home in Kentucky, he is "the blue hen's chick." She was invoking a belief in that part of the country that no gamecock can be invincible in combat unless he is the offspring of a blue hen. But that is the literal interpretation. Through long use the figure has acquired broader significance. The "blue hen's chick" is a person favored by the gods.
The idea that in a cosmic lottery
he has won the favor of circumstance appeals as much to Guthrie's
perception of irony as to his ready and robust sense of humor.
The notion appeals also to his modesty as a craftsman.
For these reasons he titled his autobiography The Blue Hen's
Chick (1965). In this extraordinary account he tells–sometimes
perplexedly–of times when a power beyond his knowing has
presided over crucial events. Call it serendipity if we must,
or still better "managed luck," a phrase that he coined
to account for the success of a character in his novel Arfive
(p. 305). Whatever its name, one instance of its working
is a classic anecdote in western fiction. Guthrie remembers that
while working hard to write The Big Sky, he became so
involved that some characters selected their own names. Even
when his writing ran ahead of his research, the narrative proved
historically sound. Though to his knowledge he had never seen
or heard the name Deakins, for instance, he gave that
name to a main character in The Big Sky. Two years later,
exploring Independence Rock in Wyoming, Guthrie found in the
register of names inscribed there–carved years before–the
single surname Deakins. The recurrence of these events
made him feel at last "almost superstitious" (p. 186).
But Guthrie knows that the offspring of the blue hen survives
by fending for itself, and in what he calls the "desperate
business" of freelance fiction writing, he is a survivor of the
first magnitude. Supported by a conviction that the only real
sin is to have talent without using it, and with a capacity for
self-criticism beyond that of most other professional writers,
he challenges every word and phrase he creates, until he is altogether
satisfied that he has done his best. If not, he rejects the unsatisfactory
material and begins again. His entry in a biographical
index of twentieth-century authors ends in good-natured hyperbole
that is nearer truth than most of his readers might suspect.
While he composes, he says, "I bleed." He is satisfied to
know that among all the serious writers of western fiction today
he is one of the few who live entirely by their writing.
For nearly forty years Guthrie has labored to write honestly
and with simplicity about the opening, the exploring, the settling,
the developing, and from beginning to end the exploiting of the
American West. In six chronological novels he has produced a
series of "panels" upon the "civilizing" of that unboundaried
region–of that white space upon the early maps of the trans-Mississippi
West–from about 1830 to the 1960s.
From the beginning he has tried to show that, by the process
of winning the West, the frontiersmen and the settlers have been
losing it forever. This double-edged process begins in The
Big Sky and continues through the series, implicitly to the
present day. In The Last Valley, Guthrie sums up in the
advice of the far-and clear-seeing rancher Mort Ewing one of
the most constant of the dangers: "Watch out for progress
because you can't backtrack" (p. 31).
Guthrie's devotees may think it
strange that he was not born a Montanan, but it is fitting that
his well-educated parents were seized by an impulse for westering.
As a consequence, they brought him to a section of Montana that
was almost as deep in the interior West as "civilization"
had yet penetrated. At that time the junior Guthrie had survived
for about six months from his birth on January 13, 1901. His
survival was remarkable among nine children in a family that
lost six of them in various stages of infancy. At least one remained
in a small grave in Indiana. But two boys and a girl grew up
in the frontier Montana town of Choteau, the diminutive hub of
a far-flung ranching community.
In The Blue Hen's Chick Guthrie writes of "the great
crystal reaches and the stone-blue heights" (p. 3) of that high
plains country. The plain descends eastward to form a valley,
and the jagged mass of the northern Teton mountains rises precipitously
twenty miles to the west. These are not the Grand Tetons of Wyoming
but a massive section of the main range of the Rockies–the
Montana Tetons. Other western writers and scholars have noticed
the significance of this imposing landscape in Guthrie's preparation
as a writer of extraordinary novels. Wallace Stegner makes the
point in his foreword to the Houghton Mifflin Sentry edition
of The Big Sky. Here Stegner marks Guthrie's penchant
for bringing his characters into this selfsame landscape, into
the novelist's back yard. The importance of this special place
in the whole range of Guthrie's fiction is one of the noteworthy
characteristics of his work.
In the last few paragraphs of The
Big Sky, Boone Caudill (rightly pronounced KAW'dl) h s ares
memories in Missouri with the old mountain man, Dick Summers.
Far from the West, his only homeland, he speaks of the Montana
Tetons and of a mountain "with a peak like an ear on its
side." This peak is Ear Mountain, known among early settlers
as Elephant Ear Butte. For the residents of Choteau this formation
is the most prominent feature of the countryside. Save when hidden
by cloud or storm, Ear Mountain attracts the eye from almost
any point in the countryside. To strangers wanting to find their
way along rural roads going West from Choteau, old timers say,
"Just keep going toward Ear Mountain." As a boy growing
up in Choteau, Guthrie lived in almost constant awareness of
its presence. Over the years it has dominated the westward view
from the Guthries' cabin at Twin Lakes, and in their new house
among the jack pines, picture windows frame it.
Besides the mountains, and just as important to the mountain
men, were rivers. In the Rocky Mountain rivers and their tributaries
the trappers found their reason for being in the uncharted wilderness.
They sought the beaver, whose pelts in season brought good money
to cover top hats for aristocratic heads in London. Besides,
the rivers and streams meant water for drinking and cooking.
Indians located villages there. So the mountain men tended to
recall the sequence of their wanderings in terms of rivers they
trapped and camps they made and Indians they fought. The reminiscences
of mountain men find a chronology in introductory phrases like
"when I was trapping the Roche Jaune" or "at our camp
on the Marias," or "on our way up the Teton," or "after
we reached the Three Forks." Later, wagon trains and cattle-trailing
cowboys marked their progress by "crossings" they had made.
On the eastern slopes of the northern Continental Divide all
streams flow into the upper reaches of the Missouri, and mountain
men used the Missouri as the main highway from St. Louis into
the trappers' paradise of the northern Rockies. Lewis and Clark
had travelled and mapped this highway by 1806. But before the
expedition had come back down, trappers were already paddling
upstream. A party of them hailed the men from a canoe and invited
Expeditioners to go back to the wilderness. John Colter did.
He was the first white man to see the earthly "hell" of
Yellowstone.
So heavy was river traffic within the next few years that Colter
started twice again down the Missouri to civilization, only to
meet other trappers and to go back–all the way to the head
of the great highway.
A bit more than a century later, these events were to be of enormous
significance to young Bud Guthrie as he grew up in Choteau, absorbing
the history of the region that soon seemed to him "the center
of my universe." One of the things he learned was that by 1840–when
Boone Caudill and his mountain men confreres were
supposed to be ranging there for profitable beaver waters–the
prosperous years of beaver trapping had been gone for the better
part of a decade. So in the northern Rockies the only possibilities
for profitable trapping lay in the upper reaches of the Missouri.
In big streams that flowed into the Missouri just below the Great
Falls, beavers still built their dams. But many had survived
earlier traplines, and these canny beasts were "up to trap."
They would not be caught. The little town of Choteau arose in
the heart of this region of rivers, a region otherwise semiarid.
At least two, the Sun and the Teton, are local hunting and fishing
streams as well as attractive scenic areas. About sixty miles
northwest of Choteau, near Big Horn Mountain, the Sun River begins
its hunt through mountain canyons and high plains to the Missouri.
Close by Ear Mountain the Teton slips through the northern (Montana)
Teton Range. Then it flows across Bud Guthrie's privately owned
eight hundred acres of high plains jack pine and through the
spacious back yard of his new year-round cabin,
"The Barn."
Within 130 miles of Choteau are
cutbanks and canyons of at least half a dozen others, the Two
Medicine, the Marias, the northern Blackfoot, the Dearborn, the
Jefferson, the Madison, the Gallatin. All appear again and again
in early diaries, journals, memoirs, histories, anecdotes, tall
tales of mountain men, travellers, miners, cowpokes, and ranchers.
The Missouri was an umbilical that connected settlements east
of the Mississippi with the untamed West of the explorers, trappers,
and fur traders who opened the way for all who followed; and
in some intimate way, the life and career of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.,
swings between the two great but by nature different frontiers
that lay at distant places and historically disparate times along
the same waterway. One is the Kentucky frontier of the legendary
Daniel Boone. A short way downstream from the mouth of the Missouri,
the Mississippi laps at Kentucky's western edge. The other frontier
is that of the mountain men. It lies at the farthest reach of
the Missouri in northwest Montana.
Kentucky contributed to the early exploration of the far West
more colorful and woods-wise hunters and trappers than did any
other region east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio. In
Kentucky Captain Clark had recruited the "nine young men,"
most of them Kentucky hunters born of Kentucky hunters, who contributed
much to the success of the Expedition of 1804–1806. Later,
among the hunters and trappers who were the vanguard of the mountain
men, Kentuckians young and old were widely known. Three of these–Edward
Robinson, John Hoback, and Jacob Rezner– formed a tight
Kentucky brotherhood that served with Andrew Henry's expedition
up the Missouri to the Madison and over the Divide into the northern
headwaters of the Snake River. Then they guided Wilson Price
Hunt's expedition down the Snake to the Columbia and beyond to
the Pacific Ocean at Astoria.
For such frontiersmen, as for any Kentuckians inspired by the
local tradition of Daniel Boone, the movement into the western
wilderness was a strong temptation. To them the trans-Mississippi
West was an extension of the virgin Kentucky backwoods in the
time before Boone and his followers had tamed it. The almost
untouched wilderness of the Rocky Mountains was the new frontier–the
next and last challenge to frontiersmen in America. To the present
day, one can hardly travel through a small part of Kentucky without
an awareness of the strong westering tradition of that extraordinary
land. After two decades in the Kentucky bluegrass, almost any
devoted Montanan might feel that, despite the different landscape
and climate and a mellow southern culture, his ties with the
West had never been broken. If, like Guthrie, such a man brought
with him an abiding consciousness of American westering, some
part of him would know that Ear Mountain was not nearly so distant
from Kentucky as Kentucky had always seemed from Ear Mountain.
By the workings of random circumstance, Guthrie came to a region
whose pioneer heritage and physical remoteness from the heartland
of the mountain West were to instill in him a yearning to know
how the early Kentucky frontier became at length the frontier
of the mountain men who had prowled the high plains of central
Montana. To find the answers he plundered the bookstores of everything
he could find about the history of the trans-Mississippi West.
By what remote but lucky chance did young Bud Guthrie find himself
writing for a newspaper in Kentucky? Why, too, was he content
to stay for twenty years in the land of Daniel Boone? However
unlikely Kentucky might seem in the context of Guthrie's early
years, in the perspective of an already long life Guthrie's double
decade as a resident of Kentucky appears to have been essential
to his development.
The original context of his life, however, was the frontier of
turn-ofthe-century Montana. Growing up in Choteau as the son
of well-educated parents who had transported themselves into
a small Montana ranch town that was barely out of its "Wild
West" phase, he lived in an atmosphere of imported "culture"
at home but, outside, among town and ranch children whose values
were grounded mostly in hard work and the acquisition of hard
goods. But he had little difficulty in reconciling the two sets
of values. If more sensitive and more widely read and more appreciative
of literature, history, and the arts, young Guthrie was unaware
of any social or cultural barriers between him and his friends
and classmates, one of whom became his lifelong friend. But Guthrie's
father, a graduate of Indiana University and first principal of the county
high school in Choteau, appears to have been torn between his
deep and instantaneous love for the country and his frustrations
with the rawness of the society, along with his inability to
effect singlehandedly much change in the basic values of his
charges.
His son's view of man's partnership with all things of the earth
began developing even earlier, perhaps, than had the precepts
of Methodist fundamentalism heard in childhood. Guthrie can hardly
remember a time when he did not wonder about nature. But moral
conduct along with "primitive" religious precepts were imposed
upon his mind and enforced through his conscience. They found
at best a fragile lodging in his heart, while everything natural
became to him a personal discovery.
His boyhood finding of Indian and early Spanish artifacts gave
him a view of local history as a pageant of eras when human societies
had left their mark upon the land without altering its wild,
free, and natural beauty. Today he abhors every manifestation
of "progress" that is an affront to the landscape, a pollutant
of air and water, or a violation of natural horizons. He lives
all the seasons on his rugged acreage of sage and jack pine on
the slopes of the northern Tetons. In his "little comer
on tranquility," he is happy with his wife and stepchildren.
He writes and keeps undisturbed the undisturbed land.
On his way to authorship, he was a long time finding himself.
But many signs pointed him along the road. From early boyhood
he read, and if his reading was not always disciplined, he was
perceptive and his range wide. He roamed among the great books
of whatever kind and time. But for pleasure he liked "gun-and-gallop"
novels and popular "whodunits." In public school and in
universities he earned excellent grades, these despite an unhappy
freshman year at the University of Washington and a traumatic
fear of speaking in public that had descended upon him during
a fraternity initiation at the University of Montana. Otherwise
he spent a happy and productive three years in this high-country
university in his home state, and he graduated with a degree
in journalism that he had wanted ever since he was a novice newspaperman
and factotum on the Choteau Acantha.
Past these classic beginnings for American novelists he spent
a quarter of a century as newsman, feature writer, and editor
before writing fiction to avoid "riding a payroll." Newsmen
hold that they are favored to write a mythical Great American
Novel, and with The Big Sky and The Way West Guthrie
authenticates also a deputy myth. As "printer's devil" on
the Choteau Acantha–the "thorn"–he learned
the inside operations and the problems of owning and running
a small country newspaper. In this he was like Mark Twain and
other "printer's devils" who eventually made their way into
literature.
Out in the world as a university
graduate in journalism, he fronted the hard knowledges that have
helped young novelists rise to the best of their order. In Mexico
he harvested wheat and rice among peons. To hidden western ranches
he went behorsed as a Forest Service census-taker. In a small
feed mill in New York State he ground grain and hefted sacks.
Then on the Lexington, Kentucky, Leader he found himself
by far chance climbing grades from cub reporter to executive
editor. Aside from the obvious reasons, the staff remembers him
as the editor who kept after young reporters to write short sentences
(author's interview with Henry Armsby, Exec. Ed., Leader,
1973).
Mortal cancer found his mother, and through timeless shock he
tended her at the Mayo Clinic. Under these pressures he began
his first novel. Its father was the popular Western; its mother,
the formula murder mystery. Together they had carried him through
the nights of this awful time. Soothing the hurt he felt but
could not show, these pulp-paper tales offered him escape through
action and suspense. Both served him well. Why not, he thought,
fuse the elements of the cowboy Western and the murder mystery?
At that time his idea was original, but for what lay deep in
him to write, his models were wrong. Sensing that the book was
a mistake, he wrote it nonetheless, and he has fretted about it ever since.
In Lexington, he bought and destroyed
every copy he found. Today, he is reluctant to think or talk
of his first novel, but privately he keeps two copies. As a literary
curiosity a single copy is now worth over a hundred and sixty
dollars. For the original manuscript Guthrie got a flat fee of
four hundred dollars.
The straight, clean prose of Guthrie's later fiction helps explain
his shrinking now from the indelible record of his first try.
But if some things in that book were bad, others were tokens
of his strengths. Only a storyteller could have written that
first novel. Only a writer with an ear for dialect and dialogue,
one who never spent long with description, one who already knew
to build character through talk and action, could have given
the book promise beyond its unrefined metal.
Most reviewers, those who noticed it at all, blew it away lightly.
Guthrie now says of it, "A writer has to start somewhere."
If his models had betrayed his first experiment, the sound historical
sources for a mountain man novel would not. In spite of early
embarrassment that could have discouraged others, Guthrie in
his embarrassment found the right way. From his path as a searching
novelist he had cleared his first deadfall, and in its place
was a hard, objective capacity for self-criticism.
Whatever his regrets, the writing of his first novel taught him
to think as a novelist has to think. Within a year he began to
write the novel which out of deep interest and long knowledge
belonged to him as to no other novelist of that time. More than
other children of the high Rockies, he knew Kentucky and its
people. As a veteran Kentucky newspaperman he had to know its
sections and its cross-sections. He knew those of soft voice
and old courtesy whom he found it impossible not to like, but
he knew also those who came hunters through the "Gap," those
who had always lived so, acknowledging no law and owned by no
man. With them to that day, nobody owned a man who owned a gun.
Ready here to Guthrie's imagination was a hero-figure for a heroic
time. The mountain man hero had already appeared in Ruxton's
mountaineer chronicles and in Stewart Edward White's four-novel
series, The Saga of Andy Burnett (1932–1942). In
this series Daniel Boone's "long rifle" was a cohering symbol
of four phases of westering that ended in the Spanish America
of southern California. But to Guthrie, White's trappers were
nice-ified beyond truth and beyond bearing. Guthrie wanted to
paint as true a picture of this near-animal race as lay within
the province of fiction, and in this his plan was original. From
Kentucky his neophyte mountain man would take his native independence
and his dark strain into the last unknown wilderness of the northwest
Rockies. He would haul the keelboat up the Missouri, seek beaver,
hunt buffalo, try skill and courage against the great white grizzly,
slaughter Indians yet marry and live among them until he and
his kind had taken it all, until none of it was left.
At the age of forty-four, harried by uncertainties, Guthrie started
work on The Big Sky. He wrote carefully and better than
ever before, but after two or three chapters he knew that he
could not let others see the pages. Beyond all, he wanted to
put behind himself the blunders of Murders at Moon Dance.
But with those horrors hunting him along every trail, he
knew it foolish to follow advice he had heard too often from
older writers. To sit in a chair and write for ten years would
surely settle in him forever the wrongs he had to escape.
That the blue hen spread her wing over her chick once again is
too easy an explanation, as it has ever been for Guthrie's life
and career. He always gave to circumstance advantages of his
own making. At this crucial time, for instance, he had the courage
to try himself successfully against a previous rejection. As
a result he was awarded a year of free study at Harvard under
a Nieman fellowship. There, Professor Theodore Morrison answered
his call for a writing tutor and gave him a study carrel in the
vast Western American section of the Widener Library. There Guthrie
lost himself in the fur trade and made another start on his novel.
But this time he had the willing help of Morrison. "Ted
was such a mild man," says Guthrie now. "He never said anything
was wrong. He kept saying this part is good and that part is
good, and after a while I asked myself, `Well, if these parts
are good, what is wrong with the rest of it?' After a while I
found out."
To Morrison he credits his success. Remembering a line written
somewhere by Eugene Manlove Rhodes–"I like a man who
pays his debts"– Guthrie has given much of himself to advise
young writers. For a few he has been able to do something of
what "Ted" did for him. Others have disappointed him. But
he pays his debts whenever he can.
With the Harvard chapters and with help unsought from Morrison,
Guthrie was accepted at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference for
the summer of 1945. There his life made a U-turn when publisher
William Sloane gave him a $5000 advance against his book's finish.
Having money and promise for spurs, Guthrie wrote the last pages
at Lexington in time to see The Big Sky published in 1946.
Four years shy of his fiftieth birthday, he became to his lasting
surprise a celebrated American author.
In writing this novel, as with every other, he put himself through
a psychological preparation so thorough that he needed minimal
guidance from prepared outline or summary. He is more at ease
with his characters when they can move and develop unfettered
once he has established them. In writing The Big Sky, Guthrie
knew well enough what his young protagonist was in the beginning
and what he had to become. Boone Caudill had strong inherited
attributes and an upbringing that followed necessarily from them.
As the novel moved, he did what he had to do and became what
his kind of man had to become under the conditions of his self-made
way of life. But Guthrie found that he had little control over
the processes by which things came about. He was midwife to his
characters, but then they went their own ways.
Like other young men of his place and time, Boone Caudill approached
manhood after society, law, and custom had overgrown the world
of his wild-boy father, who had gotten broody and mean chained
to his piece of land. In the way of Boone's upbringing, when
his boy's blood boiled like a man's at slight and insult, he
struck with fist and club. One day, barely into his seventeenth
year, Boone did both. His fists broke the face of a town taunter.
At home his father tried to beat him, and with a stick of wood
Boone broke his head. Thinking he had killed one or both, Boone
took his father's old rifle and Indian hide razor strop. An outcast
of home and society, he went westward up the big rivers with
a party of trappers, into the only place where a man's knife
and gun and quick, keen senses made their own law.
From this point The Big Sky is the story of three kinds
of mountain men. Each chooses the mountain life to make his peace
between himself and society, between himself and his universe.
They have in common only their preference for living on the knife
point of danger, in trade for free choice of company and free wandering
and gratification of appetites under infinite horizons. In the
close fraternity of their calling, each is a "true" mountain
man, and by that measure each man assumes heroic proportions.
Yet no man of himself is the "complete" mountain man. To
read The Big Sky is to wonder whether any man ever was
or could be.
In the fiction of the western fur trade, none has come so close
the mark as Dick Summers. Smooth-muscled, easy-moving, seasoned
by years in the western wilderness, he is cool in a "fix"
but makes the right moves. By the flick of a horse's ear, the
flight of a bird, the movements of buffalo, he knows danger.
Everything possible he passes on to the two greenhorns Boone
Caudill and Jim Deakins, whom he takes as partners from 1830
to 1837. Yet Summers knows he is not a "real" mountain man.
His feelings tell him so when he looks into the eyes of an Indian
he must stab to save himself. Besides, he yearns to know whether
he can be happier as a "grayback farmer," and after the
1837 rendezvous he leaves for a farm in Missouri.
The warmest person of the three is Jim Deakins, an amiable redhead
who admires Boone's strength, loyalty, and lack of guile. Otherwise
a good mountain man, Jim is too fun-loving, too curious, and
too trusting. Weighing the meanings of things, he thinks instead
of acting on an instant, as Boone does.
But if Boone has imposing size and preconscious reflexes, his
Kentucky hunter independence overshadows all. Neither giving
nor forgiving, by fear untouched, he is sullen and carries near
the surface a streak of unpredictable violence that betrays him
at last. Only Jim stays to call him friend, and only an Indian
girl can love him more than he understands or deserves. She is
Teal Eye, daughter of a Piegan chief. Named for eyes of teal
wing blue, she is probably the most admirable Indian woman in
western fiction. She marries Boone, cherishes and obeys him,
is loyal to him, but bears him a blind and rust-haired son.
Crazed by a groundless notion that the boy's red hair is of Jim's
fathering, Boone finds Jim and Teal Eye together in her lodge.
Faster than a moment's thought that would show them innocent,
his gun kills the comrade he had once risked his own life to
save. His wife orders him away forever. Now, Boone is a lone
wanderer. He has destroyed everything he loved and needed, including
the mountains that he and his kind have over-trapped,
over-hunted, and opened to the wagon roads of civilization.
Today it is a worn thing to praise
the bigness, the openness, the spaciousness of this novel. Among
the novels of the early West it shows best the power of fiction
to be bigger and truer than real people, place, time. For its
bigness it has sometimes been called a sprawling book, as though
so large and free a thing precludes order. But to see only sprawl
is to miss the rounded completeness of its theme of belonging.
The theme concerns the place of people in society and in nature,
and it is present wherever Boone Caudill is.
The boy Boone casts off society and leaves Kentucky to become
an emperor of the wild, living happy with Indians until he spoils
the wild and the Indians reject him. Back in Kentucky he finds
hills and sky too low, underbrush too thick, atmosphere "smothery,"
houses full of "little stinks." People's lives seem little
and boring. He cannot treat a pretty girl like a squaw. So he
wanders back into the spoiled frontier, not a civilized being,
not a "white Indian," not a real Indian. He belongs nowhere.
The Way West appeared in 1949, after Guthrie had worked
intensely for six months to give his publishers a novel to match
his first. The main character is Lije Evans, a big, solid, common-sense
Missouri farmer with unsuspected leadership in him. For strong
if ambivalent reasons he persuades Dick Summers to leave the
farm after eight years and to guide a wagon train to Oregon.
Dick is ready, having lost his wife and finding himself "thinking
old" as a farmer. Others join for a mix of motives that are typical
of the times as well as advantageous to Guthrie's purposes. To
become a power in territorial politics, Tadlock organizes and
leads the train, but later he is deposed by Lije, who inspires
higher confidence. The Fairmans want to find a better climate
for their sick little boy, but along the way he is killed by
a rattlesnake in a tense counterpoint of movements that bring
snake and boy together. Weatherby is a sincere if self-righteous
Methodist preacher dedicated to bringing God to the Indians.
McBee is by any standard a sorry human being, sneaky, mean, and
cunning, but with a pretty daughter of superior qualities. Mrs.
Mack is a frigid wife whose husband seduces McBee's girl and
abandons her to Lije's son, Brownie, who loves her and knowingly
marries her. A remarkable and spontaneous characterization is
that of Higgins, a good-natured splinter of a roustabout who
just wants to "get where I
ain't." He is a surprising man, as Guthrie is to realize later.
Moving the train through three
segments of its trip from Independence to Oregon, the novel is
chronological and panoramic. At first the many characters required
that Guthrie live inside all of them at once, and he found the
shifting viewpoints tiring. But as distances increase and the
landscape expands, the focus narrows to the Evans family. Dozens
of trail novels have appeared since Hough's The Covered Wagon
(1922), but none has so humanized and personalized the experience
as Guthrie's.
The worst obstacles are little, grinding, wearing, no-quit things
like dust, rain, mud, heat, wind, ruts, broken wagons, ailing
animals, river crossings, search for fuel and grass and safe
camps. Tidy women cook food over "chips"–dried buffalo
droppings. Jolting wagons make their breasts
hurt, and they walk far for private calls of nature.
Near trail's end, Summers knows
he is an alien among people who yearn for goods, crops, property,
order, permanence. With all their toughness and determination,
they are different from the mountain men, who had all their wants,
and freedom to enjoy them. Job done, he says to Evans, "I
just like my country high,"and with autumn in the air, he turns
back alone to see what is left in the Upper Missouri.
The Way West won the Pulitzer Prize for 1949, but Guthrie's
creative energies were understandably drained. He had already
revealed his plan to write at least a four-novel sequence upon
the western experience, but he had not decided which phase of
the experience would follow The Way West. Seven years
intervened before his next novel appeared, but it was over thirty
years before he settled the final shape of his series.
In 1956, Guthrie published These Thousand Hills, a novel
of the Montana cattleman era of the 1880s. The fourth novel was
Arfive, set in a small Montana cowtown just before World
War I. Responding to his publishers, he gave the series a fifth
novel, The Last Valley (1975). A sequel to Arfive,
it goes from World War I to the end of World War II. Then,
wanting to write a sixth novel for the series, he realized for
the first time that he had left a forty-year gap between The
Way West and These Thousand Hills. So at eighty-one
he wrote Fair Land, Fair Land (1982), a sequel to The
Big Sky and The Way West.
Fair Land, Fair Land opens with Summers walking from the
wagon train. Up the Columbia he finds Higgins with the drovers,
and since Hig still wants to "get where he ain't," he goes
along with Summers. As they climb, Summers sees everything differently
from the old way. Now he cherishes what he had squandered before
the settlers began crowding a free, hidden country that seemed
uncrowdable. All that remains grows more precious with its fading.
Instead of killing a huge dying grizzly, he gives it water and
leaves meat along the trail. The bear follows, and its presence
makes the two men a legend among the Indians.
In the Ear Mountain country Teal Eye is living with her blind
son, Nocansee. Recognizing Summers, she takes him into her lodge.
For twenty years he lives there with her, part of the mountains
and rivers, flowing with the seasons, hunting only to provide.
He finds Boone Caudill, now only a buffalo hide hunter going
in a stinking hide-wagon to the California gold fields. Attacked
by Boone, Summers refuses to press an advantage and is saved
by Higgins, who coolly shoots Caudill through the head. Over
the years Summers gets a fine son and is married by a Methodist
preacher, as is Hig to a pretty Shoshone girl. They have good
lives together. But surveyors come, gold strikes bring men and
towns, an agency fort is built nearby, soldiers move in. Higgins
goes to live with his wife's people, and Summers takes Teal Eye
to her father's camp on the Marias. The boy Lije becomes an army
interpreter but cannot prevent the soldiers' murdering his father
and stepbrother in their lodge. Teal Eye escapes and runs away
alone.
This is a sad, quiet, compelling book about an old mountain man's
return to country that he has always loved more than he knows.
Nearly fifty, having spent most of his years a mountain man and
now regretting that he has guided settlers into the secret wild,
he wants only to live out his life in clear air with bright waters
in the mountains he loves. Twenty years later, he is one old
mountain man who has lived it all and has seen it go finally
and forever. He was a good man, and he died in a strange world.
Fair Land, Fair Land is a memorial to his way of life
and a keening for its passing.
After thirty years Guthrie has altogether rearranged a series
that we have all, without the least right, taken as a fixture
in western literary history. And his series is better for its
new order and balance. His quintet is now a hexad that begins
with a close-knit trilogy about the westward expansion from 1830
all the way to 1870 or beyond. The hero of the trilogy is Dick
Summers, who achieves symbolic force as mountain man, farmer,
wagon train guide, squaw man, avenger, gold camp meat hunter,
keeper of the wild, Indian spokesman, seer, anachronism, and
sacrifice to "progress." In closing the door on the trilogy,
Fair Land, Fair Land is a strong warning. If in this fair
land a few decades can end the unpeopled fastnesses of Dick Summers's
world, what cobweb of time sustains the last natural refuge of
man in the fading decades of the twentieth century?
The trilogy has so tightened the series that the action of These
Thousand Hills (1956) follows by only a decade. Though the
novel is identified with the trilogy through its antagonist,
Lat Evans, son and grandson of Brownie and Lije Evans of The
Way West, it now belongs with the later novels. The mountain
men and wagon trains are only memories. In a time of farms and
ranches, Lat leaves the family place in Oregon, retraces the
old trail into Idaho to join a cattle drive going to the open
range of central Montana, and lives as trail hand, horse breaker,
and wolf skinner on his way to respectability and social consciousness
as a rancher in the Teton country.
Like all novelists who commit themselves to a trans-era series,
Guthrie with These Thousand Hills had reached a historical
crux charged with difficulties he could not escape. It was the
"cowboy" era. The spectre of Murders at Moon Dance was
with him again, and he must give depth and significance to materials
long petrified into a romantic myth. But by using the worn myths
to show how they moved beyond themselves into law and legislation,
order and social consciousness, he transcended the mythic materials.
How could a young, intelligent trail hand, upon his head all
the indiscretions of his kind, rid himself
of moral stain in order to become the civic and political force
he is capable of being? Lat Evans finds that he cannot do so
without sacrificing old attachments. But he pays his debt in
kind–to Tom Ping for saving his life and to the prostitute
Callie Kash, whom he had loved and who had given him her life
savings to start his ranch. He makes public revelations of his
past, and so perhaps damages his aspirations. But he keeps his
integrity. His socially prominent wife accepts him for what he
is, and in time maybe his public constituents will also.
No other novel so effectively portrays
the dawn of modern ranching as does These Thousand Hills.
Seeing far, Lat knows that stock must be fenced and winter-fed
to survive, and he locates his ranch where the chinook keeps
grass free of snow. With him and his like the time of open range
fades away, and with his trail-hand phase the age of natural
heroes is gone. Its last echo is an aged buffalo bull, maybe
the last of his kind, vainly making his stand against the wolves.
As a protagonist, Lat brings into the series a manmade hero,
a man of town and society torn by clashing fidelities. Those
to follow are of the same cast.
The last two novels, Arfive (1971) and The Last Valley
(1975), trace the lives and fortunes of three main characters–"Prof"
Benton Collingsworth, a high school principal from Indiana; Tom
Ewing, a rancher; and Ben Tate, a newspaperman. All are important
people in a small Montana ranch town named for an old cattle
brand, R5, recently acquired by Ewing. Meeting first in Chapter
I of Arfive, Collingsworth and Ewing help to steer the
town through the late stages of its evolution from "first
lawlessness, then loose law and order, then churches and schools
and social sanctions and, finally, a town, not a camp" (Arfive,
p. 29). Arfive, Moon Dance, Tansytown, and later Midbury
are all fictional names for Choteau.
The "Prof" is as capable of quoting Latin as of knocking
down the toughest bully. He is impressed with the high skies
and far distances of Montana, but his dark moods and sudden rages
make him a loved and respected stranger to his wife, May, and
his daughter, Mary Jess. Against the odds he gains and keeps
the respect of the town. But in time he wears out his wife with
his demands on her energies. She has repeated miscarriages and
eventually dies in childbirth, leaving him with only an infant
son and Mary Jess. In The Last Valley he becomes a lost,
lonely old man living with a pretty and intelligent daughter
who has been emotionally scarred by his stern morality. At length
he dies of cancer of the prostate.
Ewing, his strongest ally, is a local rancher of respect and
influence. Seeming a practical man, Ewing commands broad knowledges
that belie his rancher's exterior. Against his better judgment
he saves a young girl from a brothel and persuades the "Prof"
to accept her as a student. When the arrangement causes trouble
for the "Prof," Ewing uses his influence to defeat the opposition.
The girl, Julie, is a first-rate student. After paying her way
through the university, Ewing marries her despite the wide difference
in
age. The marriage is good for both of them.
Together Ewing and the "Prof"
help the town grow from the horse-and-buggy time to that of automobiles,
indoor plumbing, electric lights, and builtin kitchens. By the
end of Arfive there is a sense of greatly accelerating
change, of time-compression, of science and machinery as new
gods, of "progress" overwhelming.
With the progress young Ben Tate comes into The Last Valley.
When he buys the Advocate from old country editor
Mack Cleveland, Ben has to learn town and business together.
Soon he hires Mary Jess Collingsworth and falls in love with
her despite her fear of sex, a fear she loses after several years
of marriage to Ben, though she remains barren. Together and with
others they have a continuing debate over the value of progress.
The town gets sidewalks, natural gas, good telephone service,
a library, and a hospital. Automobiles and trucks have mostly
replaced horses, but the town stinks of exhaust and is covered
with dust. Land is overgrazed and overcropped, timber overcut,
bringing erosion and flood danger. The land is now irrigated,
but the new dam overflows and creates a long, slow flood that
drives the townspeople to high ground. Though built for flood
control, the dam has created a worse kind of flooding than the
free-running river might have done.
By the end of the novel Mary Jess is happy as a freelance writer,
but without children Ben is saddened to know that all he has
done will end with him. Now he feels that "progress leaves
us no retreat" (p. 284) and that no one will carry on his fight.
But from before his marriage comes his old mistress, Mattie Murchison,
to tell him that she had borne a son by him after she left town,
a son who is unaware that Ben is his father, but a son who wants
to go on where Ben stops. It is an unexpected twist but a satisfying
ending–for the novel as well as for the series that has
covered over a hundred years of western development, from 1830
to the 1960s.
This series, which could well be called The Big Sky Series, is
by common assumption Guthrie's major contribution to American
literature. But by 1960 the author had written and published
some remarkable short stories, no more than a dozen, but of a
quality that more than compensates for modest production. In
that year Guthrie brought them together under the title of one
of the most successful stories in the collection, The Big It.
Expanded from an anecdote in These Thousand Hills, this
story is famous for its last line. A sober-faced Indian chief
watches an army mule bucking while a small cannon, tied to its
back, slips down the mule's backside and fires into the ground.
The chief, supposed to be impressed by army power and ingenuity,
says only,"Paleface jackass poop!" "Ebbie" is the touching
story of a lovable female setter clubbed and
then put to death by a tortured man whose morals were outraged
by the dog's behavior in heat. Most of the stories demonstrate
Guthrie's extraordinary capacity for expanding incidents and
anecdotes into short stories. One of the best of these is "Mountain
Medicine," a fictional treatment of John Colter's famous race
from the
Indians. All the stories are crafted with care and control.
The Blue Hen's Chick (1965)
is now distinguished as a "random autobigraphy," though
a similar management of chronology had been used before, notably
by Mark Twain. But in Guthrie's hands the technique is peculiarly
appropriate to the author's capacity for spinning anecdotes.
He uses the anecdote as narrative, as character revelation, as
self-discovery, as example, as information, and as mere good
fun. For all these purposes the method succeeds, and in the tone
of informal talk Guthrie reveals himself as an independent and
engaging man, firm but gentle, intelligent but unpretentious.
Above all he is a man who loves a good story well told, one who
loves to laugh, but one who does not suffer fools gladly.
In 1973 he surprised his longtime devotees with a change of pace.
Wild Pitch is a short western "whodunit" and suspense
novel that led to a pair of equally well-written and entertaining
sequels, The Genuine Article (1977) and No Second Wind
(1980). The series becomes a continuing initiation story
in which Jason Beard, a rather sheltered high school boy in Midbury,
Montana, begins working as a "flunky" for Sheriff Chick
Charleston and grows up year by year as he learns the world from
the sheriff's office.
In Sheriff Charleston Guthrie creates a character who, like protagonists
of his other novels, is a man to match the time and place. Dressed
well in cattleman's hat, western shirt, and frontier pants, he
is part of the town but apart from it. Pleasant but firm, he
manages the most outraged citizen and the most volatile situation
with good manners and a cool head. In each of the three novels
his rare understanding of human nature leads him to the culprits.
Without fully comprehending what is happening to him, young Jase
gradually acquires the same qualities. When he first goes to
work, he is seventeen, the sheriff in his early forties. As Jase
grows older, the sheriff appears to him to be getting younger.
In Wild Pitch, Jase cannot understand how a fresh, young
girl can show serious interest in so "old" a man as the
sheriff. But in The Genuine Article, only two years later,
he feels that a similar prospect is "perfect." In the third
novel, nearly two years later, he has
become a young man almost too wise and mature for his years.
Guthrie enjoyed writing these three
novels, partly because to do such books an author has to come
to grips with his materials quickly in order to tell a story.
He agrees with his friend Robert Frost's argument that all true
art must first tell a story. Besides, these novels have won him
a whole new group of readers, and in general reviewers have been
well disposed toward the Chick Charleston Series.
In 1973 Guthrie again proved his versatility with Once upon
a Pond, a collection of animal tales for children, illustrated
by his wife Carol. Main characters are based upon real animals
that lived in or near the Twin Lakes ponds and upon stuffed toys
that lay around the house. Eastern publishers said that humanized
animals were out of fashion, but Guthrie published them through
a small but highly respected Missoula firm. A most attractive
book, Once upon a Pond has found favor among readers who
are unaware that they go against a trend.
Through all the fiction, especially through the Big Sky Series,
rings the spirit of change, necessary and inevitable change,
not good or bad of itself, but hard for those who must bridge
the canyon between the gone and the coming. Always through the
series flows the Teton or the Breast or the Tansy–same river,
different names–flowing across the high plains of Montana
to the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the great ocean gulf. Always
there is the steep pile of mountains to the west and always Ear
Mountain reaching above the others like aspiration or eternity,
whatever the looker needs to see. And always there is the chinook
blowing through the memory or over the snow, baring grass for
starving cattle, breathing life into winter-kill, singing spring in chilblained hearts.
In the sunset shadow of the mountains
lives the man whose first important novel gave its name to the
country. For a long time, one could drink Big Sky Beer. Universities
compete in the Big Sky Conference. Montana vehicle licenses say
"Big Sky Country." There are Big Sky restaurants, bars,
laundries, barber shops, motels, dealerships and on almost past
numbering.
In a house called "The Barn" for the loft where he writes,
Guthrie lives quietly with Carol, the intelligent and talented
wife to whose devotion he owes a resurgence of energies that
seemed to him uncertain in 1968. (Since then he has written Arfive,
The Last Valley, Once upon a Pond, the three novels of the
Chick Charleston Series, and Fair Land, Fair Land.) When
he works, he types all drafts on yellow sheets of paper on a
portable typewriter. Save for pages just done, his desk top is
always clear. He works intensely for short periods of time now,
and is capable of complete concentration. He revises each sentence
several times, moving each time toward greater compression, and
over the years his work has been characterized by shorter sentences,
shorter paragraphs, shorter chapters, shorter books. But in each
case he has achieved greater complexity in smaller space.
More than any other western writer's, his prose has the quality
of "curious felicity," Coleridge's term for those writers
who can use the limited number of words in any language to create
new, startling, fresh-seeming effects–the sense that words
have never before come together in these peculiar ways. The feat
is the more remarkable because, as Guthrie has said, "I
don't use big words. I know them, but I don't use them." The
result has been that among the worn trails of English prose he
has made new paths.
Note All page references are to the first editions of Guthrie's books. Unless otherwise indicated, all substantive material has come directly from Guthrie.
Selected Bibliography Primary Sources
1. The Big Sky Hexad (novels)
The Dick Summers Trilogy:
The Big Sky. New York: William Sloane, 1947.
The Way West. New York: William Sloane, 1949.
Fair Land, Fair Land. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.The Settlement Trilogy:
These Thousand Hills. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956; rpt. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979.
Arfive. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.
The Last Valley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.2. Western Detective Mysteries
Murders at Moon Dance. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943. Guthrie's first experiment in the genre.
Wild Pitch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. This and the following two books comprise the Chick Charleston Series.
The Genuine Article. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
No Second Wind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.3. Autobiography
The Blue Hen's Chick. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.
4. Short Stories, Collected and Uncollected
The Big It and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Paperback reprint as Mountain Medicine, Pocket Books, 1961; rpt. Boston: Gregg Press, 1980. Contains "The Therefore Hog," "The Big It," "Independence Day," "The Wreck," "Old Mother Hubbard," "Ebbie," "Bargain," "First Principal," "Last Snake," "The Moon Dance Skunk," "Mountain Medicine," "The Keeper of the Key," and "The Fourth at Getup."
"Loco." Esquire 68 (November 1967): 123, 165.
Once upon a Pond. Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press, 1973. Children's stories.
5. Articles
"Action, Sir, Action." Saturday Review of Literature, April 12, 1958, pp. 56–67. (Review of Owen Wister Out West: His Letters and Journals.)
"The Badlands Are Still Bad." Saturday Evening Post, November
22, 1952, pp. 34– 351 139–140, 142–143.
"Characters and Compassion." Writer 62 (November 1949): 359–362.
"DeVoto–A Memoir." Nieman Reports, January 1958, pp. 3–6.
"The Historical Novel: Tramp or Teacher?" Montana Magazine of History 4 (Fall 1954): 1–8.
"How to Live at Fifty-Eight Below." New York Times Magazine, January 31, 1954, p. 18.
"How to Stock a Pond." Atlantic Monthly, June 1949, pp. 93–94.
"I Know Where I Am From." Saturday Review of Literature, November 8, 1958, pp. 19–20. (Review of David Lavender's Land of Giants.)
"Nothing Difficult About a Cow." Harper's Magazine, January 1953, pp. 73–76.
"The Peter Rabbit Library?" Nieman Reports, April 1958, pp. 17–18. Rpt. in First Freedom, edited by Robert B. Downs, pp. 284–286. Chicago: American Library Association, 1960.
"Roads Running West." Harper's Magazine, May 1954, pp. 68–70.
"Sheep and Goats." Atlantic Monthly, April 1945, pp. 113–114.
"Snakes for the Squeamish." Atlantic Monthly, February 1948, pp. 87–88.
"The West as a Magnet." New York Times Book Review, April 2, 1950, pp. 7, 24. (Review of Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land.)
"The West Is Our Great Adventure of the Spirit." Life, April 13, 1959, pp. 78–80, 93–94, 97–98.
"What Every Family Needs–A Hideaway from Life's Pressures." Family Weekly, January 26, 1969, pp. 6–7.
"Why Write About the West?" Western American Literature 7 (Fall 1972): 163–164.
"Wilderness Washington." Saturday Review of Literature, October 18, 1952. (Review of Joseph Kinsey Howard's Strange Empire.)Secondary Sources
1. Bibliography
Etulain, Richard. "A. B. Guthrie: A Bibliography." Western American Literature 4 (Summer 1969): 133–138. A good basic bibliography that includes theses and dissertations not found elsewhere. See also the bibliographies in Ford's Twayne volume and in the theses and dissertations at the end of this listing, and the valuable "Survey of Criticism" by Fred Erisman in Erisman and Etulain's Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, pp. 168–171 (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1982).
2. Books
Ford, Thomas W. A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1968. A pamphlet in The Southwest Writers Series. A good summary of Guthrie's life and writing to 1967, but largely superseded by Ford's Twayne volume.
Ford, Thomas W. A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1981. To date, the only book-length study of Guthrie's life and writing. There are three main tendencies in Guthrie's most important fiction: (1) ultimately it is not so much "regional" as universal because it embodies "human qualities not restricted to a region," (2) though Guthrie's historical purpose is big, history is secondary to the fiction, and (3) Guthrie combines in his writing the factual and the spiritual aspects of the westward expansion.
3. Articles and Sections or Portions of Books
Astro, Richard. "The Big Sky and the Limits of Wilderness Fiction." Western American Literature 9 (Summer 1974): 105–114. Because Boone Caudill is isolated from society, the novel is neither nostalgic nor tragic.
Attebery, Louie. "The American West and the Archetypal Orphan." Western American Literature 5 (Fall 1970): 205–217. The Big Sky owes much of its extraordinary complexity and impact to three archetypes: (1) the theme of the lost Eden, (2) the character of the wise old man, and (3) the archetypal orphan.
Breit, Harvey. "Talk with A. B. Guthrie, Jr." New York Times Book Review, October 23, 1949, p. 39. An important early interview. Guthrie sets forth his aims, purposes, and personal relationship with the West–information much used by Guthrie scholars. Guthrie says that (1) he plans to write at least four "panels" on the westward movement, (2) a good historical novelist cannot rely on history as the main substance of his work, (3)he retains authentic historical back-grounds but uses as few historical personages as possible, preferring to create his own characters, and (4) because Montana has always offered him the vast distances and the solitude that lie at the heart of the West, his section of Montana is the center of his universe.
Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. "Emigrants on the Oregon Trail." Saturday Review of Literature, October 8, 1949, p. 39. The Way West is a better novel than The Big Sky for two main reasons: (1) The Way West successfully moves from a multiple point of view to a single one, that of the Evans family, and (2) its pacing is perfectly attuned to the movement of the wagon train.
. "When Settlers Began to Take Over." New York Times Book Review, November 18, 1956, pp. 1, 54. Guthrie's sequence of novels embodies in each novel the peculiar kind of hero demanded by the historical era. Guthrie demonstrates a serious purpose in his use of history and fiction.
Coon, Gilbert D. "A. B. Guthrie, Jr.'s Tetralogy: An American Synthesis." North Dakota Quarterly 44 (Spring 1976): 73–80. The first four novels synthesize early American experience and create continuity through recurring narrative elements.
Cracroft, Richard H. "Half Froze for Mountain Doin's: The Influence and Significance of George F. Ruxton's Life in the Far West." Western American Literature 10 (Spring 1975): 24–93. Parallel passages show that Ruxton's book has had a direct stylistic influence upon the mountain man novels that were to follow.
Erisman, Fred. Introduction to Guthrie's These Thousand Hills. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. Because the novel is at the chronological midpoint between the first two and the last two novels of the tetralogy it functions as a transition from old to modern West.
Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel, pp. 64–76. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Guthrie's use of history is better than Cooper's, and The Big Sky is a better book than the next two novels because its tragic vision transcends the best things in them.
Hairston, Joe B. "Community in the West." South Dakota Review 11 (Spring 1973): 17–26. The first four novels in Guthrie's series show that each novel develops a different phase in the settling of the West, with the characters forming a more and more complex social system in which the individual must find ways to be responsible for others.
Hood, Charles E., Jr. "The Man and the Book: Guthrie's The Big Sky." Montana Journalism Review 14 (1971): 6–15. Useful and unique material from interviews with Guthrie and with his friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and associates.
Kohler, Dayton. "A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and the West." College English 12 (February 1951): 249–256. An important early article on Guthrie's stature as one of the best of our historical novelists. The Way West is more complex and its style is better controlled than are the same elements in The Big Sky.
Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Chapter 5, "Guthrie and Manfred: The Historical Inheritance," uses the first five of Guthrie's novels to conclude that Guthrie has an ironic view of the advances of civilization.
Morrison, Theodore. "Reader Unburdens and Comes Up with Some Sound Criticism." Nieman Reports, April 1950, pp. 3–7. The Harvard professor who tutored Guthrie through early chapters of The Big Sky praises Guthrie's aptitude for fiction-writing and his concern for other writers.
Putnam, Jackson K. "Down to Earth: A. B. Guthrie's Quest for Moral and Historical Truth." North Dakota Quarterly 39 (Summer 1971): 47–57. To the historian, These Thousand Hills is the most important of Guthrie's novels because Lat Evans is able to reconcile the frontier life with civilization.
Stegner, Wallace. Foreword to the Sentry edition of Guthrie's The Big Sky. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. An appreciation by an important western writer who knows the Guthrie country intimately. The Big Sky succeeds because its lead character succeeds as both myth and individual.
Stewart, Donald C. "A. B. Guthrie's Vanishing Paradise: An Essay on Historical Fiction." Journal of the West 15 (July 1976): 83–96. The first four novels in Guthrie's series present distinct phases in the history of the West wherein civilization gradually destroys a primitive Eden.
Stineback, David C. "On History and Its Consequences." Western American Literature 6 (Fall 1971): 177–189. These Thousand Hills is the best of Guthrie's series because it relies upon action. Sentiment about the past is futile in the face of advancing civilization.
Walker, Don D. "The Mountain Man as Literary Hero." Western American Literature 1 (Spring 1966): 15–25. Like other writers of western fiction, Guthrie had to overcome some difficult problems in his attempts to make a literary hero out of the historical mountain man.
Williams, John. "The `Western': Definition of the Myth." Nation 193 (November 18, 1961): 401–406. Among other leading western novelists, Guthrie has written well but has not realized that he has tried to deal with aspects of the western myth as though they were epic.
Young, Vernon. "An American Dream and Its Parody." Arizona Quarterly 6 (Summer 1950): 112–123. Praises Guthrie for the high literary quality of his writing and for his respect for historical detail in the first two novels of his series.
4. Theses and Dissertations
Academic interest in Guthrie's work has increased impressively in the past twenty years. During the twenty years between the publication of The Big Sky (1946) and that of The Blue Hen's Chick (1965), only one dissertation appeared. But in the twenty years from 1965 to the present, eight others have been done, making nine in all. They are arranged here chronologically by degree. M.A.: (1965) Armand Falk's "The Riddle of Experience," University of Montana; (1965) Merilyn Kite's "A. B. Guthrie, Jr.: A Critical Evaluation of His Works," University of Wyoming; (1965) Mildred Mitchell's "The Women in A. B. Guthrie's Novels," Southwest Texas State University; (1968) Peter M. Stephan's "Fact, Interpretation, and Theme in the Historical Novels of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. ," North Texas State University; (1968) Charles E. Hood's "Hard Work and Tough Dreaming: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.," University of Montana. Ph.D. : (1957) Francis E. Hodgins, Jr.`s "The Literary Emancipation of a Region. . . ," Michigan State University; (1972) Gilbert D. Coon's "A Study of A. B. Guthrie Jr. and His Tetralogy," Washington State University; (1972–73) Jared Rulon Allred's "A. B. Guthrie, Jr.: The Artist in the Wilderness," University of Utah; (1974) Charles Eugene Ray's "An Interdisciplinary Study Based on Four Selected Novels of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. ," Middle Tennessee State University.
[Contents] [Index] © Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.