The Big Sky & The Way West
In the world of twentieth-century Western novels, Montana writer, A. B. Gutherie Jr. looms large. Having come of age and spent roughly half my life in the Big Sky state, I am certainly familiar with his name but had never read The Big Sky (1947) and its sequel The Way West (1949)—the first two novels in a series known as The Big Sky series—until this summer. I picked up The Big Sky in my parents’ living room during a trip to central Montana in August. Within a mere page or two I quickly found myself immersed in the harsh realities of nineteenth-century frontier life and the sirens song arising from the unknown wilds of the West. This novel is at once repulsive and beautiful, compulsively readable and disturbing, just as the landscape across which its characters travelled was magnificent and wildly dangerous, majestic and fatal. The first of a six-book series, The Big Sky accompanies two young men as they follow the call from Kentucky and Missouri to the wide-open lands that would one day become Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon.
The Big Sky certainly provides readers with a love story to the American West’s landscape and its early days of fur trappers, wild men, and Natives, as they all lived (and killed) amidst the backdropped of its grandeur. Before reading this novel, readers should take note of its original publication date, and be prepared to come across highly offensive language in today’s parlance. The novel includes incredibly creative and quite possibly very realistic descriptions of the early fur trappers—French, American, and Native—who navigated the Missouri River and the mountain passes of what is now Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, yet the novel’s language will likely off-put many a twenty-first-century reader, perhaps even to the point of setting the book aside. Gutherie develops a language and dialect of the early mountain men that I found fascinating and curious. Did he invent it himself? Did he base it upon language he heard spoken by old timers as a child in early twentieth-century Montana? (Gutherie’s family moved to Choteau, Montana along the Rocky Mountain Front when he was a baby. He lived there until going to Washington for college, but returned to Montana to graduate from the University of Montana.) Regardless of origin, Gutherie’s dialogue craft is certainly noteworthy The Big Sky, even as it incorporates language that is offensive today.
The Big Sky invites its reader into the adventures and isolation of Boone Caudill and Jim Deakins, two young men who venture West from Kentucky together: the former troubled and on the run, the later amiable with nothing better to do. The novel opens with Boone, whom I knew at once I would pity and possibly despise, as his westward journey begins out of necessity, and calamity seems to follow in his wake. His luck turns when he teams up with Jim and together they join a keelboat crew heading up the Missouri River. Their luck holds as they survive Native attacks and pal up with experienced mountain man, Dick Summers, whom I immediately found a very likeable character. Gutherie’s novel includes a fourth character of note, Teal Eye, a Blackfeet Native woman whom Boone, Jim, and Dick first meet as a child. These character’s lives interweave throughout The Big Sky, as do themes of loss, adventure, love, and betrayal. Readers should be prepared for harsh subjects including murder, cannibalism, smallpox epidemic, and rape. The Big Sky is an epic story of mountain men surviving the vastness of the American West as well as the ways that landscape and its native people shaped and changed those men.
After experiencing the tragedies of Boone Caudill and his companion and best friend, Jim Deakins, alongside the level-headed wisdom of Dick Summers in The Big Sky, I eagerly reached for Gutherie’s second novel, The Way West. The Big Sky had certainly impressed me, and I looked forward to reading The Way West, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, wondering how Gutherie would continue the story. I quickly realized that Dick Summers, that wildly likeable character in The Big Sky, was to be the link. He, that is, and the land through which the characters travel. The Way West takes place a number of years after the action in The Big Sky ends. It begins in Missouri as folks gather a wagon train with their eyes set for Oregon country and their hearts warm with the patriotic call of Manifest Destiny. I currently live along the Oregon Trail route in southern Idaho (my family mountain bikes along trails still marred by the ruts of emigrant wagons), and so I immediately felt a proximity to the story and the landscape across which its characters walked.
The Way West follows Lije Evans and his family as they decide to head West, convince their friendly and knowledgeable neighbor, Dick Summers, to guide their wagon train, and maneuver the challenges, tragedies, and happy unions that occur on the trail. The novel alternates perspective through many members of the wagon train, creating a full portrait of the way West on the Oregon Trail. Early on, I found Lije, his wife, Becky, and their late teenage son, Brownie, all people I would enjoy, as they discover themselves and their grit on the great emigrant trail from Missouri to Oregon. Of course, not all the characters in this story are lovely. The families and individuals who comprise the wagon train in The Way West represent a cross-section of American society at the time. In addition to Lije and Becky, there is the power-hungry politician, the affluent Southern family, the dirt-poor swindler with his ragged wife and many children, the lustful husband and his frigid wife, and the quirky single laborers. Much of the conflict the wagon train experiences is internal, due to personality clashes, as individuals reveal their true selves on the trail west. The crafting of the novel, through alternating perspective, made these interpersonal conflicts all the more rich.
In addition to the natural trials of the trail, of which there are plenty, The Way West certainly incorporates some of humanity’s ugliness, but I found it a much more hopeful version than the one included in The Big Sky. Perhaps that hopefulness stems for the differences in subject matter: the rough-and-tumble mountain men of The Big Sky lived on edges of human society by a code of their own making while the Oregon Trailers in The Way West were families with women and children in addition to the adventure-seeking single men, who established a social contract from the outset. As such there was a civility throughout The Way West that was absent in The Big Sky. While I reveled in the landscape described in The Big Sky, I enjoyed the characters and craft in The Way West much more. I can certainly see why The Way West garnered Gutherie a Pulitzer Prize.
While I have yet to do so, I look forward to reading the third novel in this series (by the narrative chronology), Fair Land, Fair Land (1982, it was last to be published). As I understand it, this novel concludes the story of Boone Caudill, Teal Eye, and Dick Summers, and acts as the third novel in a trilogy that comprises the first half of the The Big Sky series. Previous to publishing Fair Land, Fair Land, however, Gutherie had penned and published The Thousand Hills (1956), Arfive (1971), and The Last Valley (1975) which continue the story of Montana’s settlement from the open range of the late nineteenth century through to nearly contemporaneous (to his writing) twentieth century. In time, I hope to read all six, as Gutherie’s characters—both the despicable and the delightful—and settings bring the beloved Big Sky and its history to life in vivid detail for his readers. For those not fortunate enough to experience Montana in person, these books certainly offer a glimpse of its grandeur through the lens of historical fiction.
Bibliography:
Gutherie Jr., A. B. The Big Sky. Houghton Mifflin Company: New York, 2002.
— The Way West. Sloane: 1949.
Severo, Richard. “A.B. Gutherie Jr. is Dead at 90; Won Pulitzer for ‘The Way West.’” New York Times. April 27, 1991. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/27/obituaries/ab-guthrie-jr-is-dead-at-90-won-pulitzer-for-the-way-west.html November 15, 2021.
