A. B. Guthrie, Jr.Rezensionen

This is a wonderful book full of winds, savagery, unsullied nature, friendship, hard men, and loss. When I was young there were men who sat beneath a tree at the bottom of our garden, watching the world go by. WW2 had left them to fend for themselves. Some of them were hard men: men who said little, who had something about the set of jaw and lips that signaled pain, loss, and the toll of life. Set in the mid-1800s, Guthrie's hard men are mountain men; who are quiet, keenly observant, more at ease in open space than indoors, men who have known hardship, and men who remain calm in crisis.

The narrative arc follows Boone who is bold, too quick to anger, and instinctive; not just in his search for a better life, but in his single-minded quest for the girl/woman, Teal Eye. But living instinctively has its difficulties. Guthrie writes with a sparse precision and his use of backwoods dialogue is masterful, not only in its economy of expression but in its richness:

A dog that was all hair and bark ran from behind the house and yipped at Blue. Blue winked one eye and let a low growl out of his Phlegmy throat, and the small dog backed up, still yipping. Then he lifted his leg against a bush and scratched the ground afterwards and trotted away with his head held high as if he had made a good out of it. p 370.

The Big Sky has rhythms where we rest between passages of extreme tension, such as the theft of a horse at night, with closely observed evocations of landscape and the natural world inhabiting it. If the allegorical trajectory of the novel is the steady progression of Boone becoming part of that world as theystruggle up-stream. it is also the steady destruction of it and the over-riding sense of inevitable loss as Boone staggers towards internal and external confrontation at the very end. Summers shows us another side as he faulters in old-age. In many respects this is such a well observed book that I can also read it as the struggle today between the vanishing values of the analogue world as they are subsumed by the digital.

Summers couldn't see anything among the willows, not so much as a branch bent out of shape or the grass trampled where a man might have gone through, but he knew the Sioux were there. He brought his head back, still slowly, and turned about, to see an Indian screened in the brush only an arm's length away. Two black stripes ran down the Indian's cheeks. They pulled downward as the Indian caught his movement. There was one still instant, - a flash of seeing, in which nothing moved or sounded - and then the Indian jerked up his battle axe. (p. 119)

Fair Land, Fair Land by A. B. Guthrie is the third book in the series that he wrote about the American West. He started with The Big Sky, a story about mountain men, then moved on to The Way West detailing how pioneers followed the Oregon Trail settling and developing the region. This third book he called a finishing touch as he wanted closure for the characters of the first two books.

In Fair Land, Fair Land we once again meet Dick Summers, originally a mountain man who became a guide on the Oregon Trail. Now as he looks around, he can see and feel the end of his free way of life. More and more white people are settling, building farms and towns and changing the land. He and his friend Higgins decide to strike out and live a free life while they can. Along the way he meets and takes as his companion, Teal Eye, a young Blackfoot woman who he knew in the past. The book is leading us to his confrontation with Boone Caudill, a previous partner who owes Dick Summer an explanation for his behaviour that ended with the death of a good friend to both men.

This was my first read of Fair Land, Fair Land although I have long been a fan of A. B. Guthrie and have read most of his other books more than once. The author was well known in Montana as a conservationist and was strongly in favor of wolves being returned to Yellowstone Park. In this book he shows some of this by having Dick Summers becoming aware and pondering upon the end of the buffalo, the treatment of the Indians, and the eventual spoiling of the land by over development. This was a historically accurate portrayal but is also a moving and engrossing story.½

I read the first book in this series, The Big Sky, many years ago in an old Time-Life series of out of print books. It was very good (also a movie with Kirk Douglas, I think), and I wanted to read this sort-of sequel, especially since it is on many lists of the best westerns. However, it is not available as an e-book, so I did not read it out of principle. I recently realized that I wasn't sure what the principle was, so I bought a used paperback copy. It's quite good. I recommend that you read it with a copy of the Oregon Trail Map that the national park service has. You can download it as a .pdf file. Now I have a paperback copy that nobody wants, so if you are interested, I will give it to you.

First edition good

Loved the first 2 in the series, but this one not so much. White men bad, red men good.... enough already.

Good western historical fiction. I liked The Big Sky a little better.

Good historical novel about mountain men in the West.

A fictional account of Americans winning their way across a hostile prairie to find a prosperoue settlement in the Oregon Country. The characters contain the usual roes first established by Fenimore Cooper in "The Prairie" but the writing with an experiment in presenting dialogue, goes well enough. While expected, the charactewrs are well drawn and motivated. We are solely concerned with the affairs inside the wagon train, and the natives are treated in a very dismissive fashion. The book made a lot of money for Mr. Guthrie, who also became an early environmental invstigator. ut, i was not very impressed.½

[b:These Thousand Hills|202034|These Thousand Hills|A.B. Guthrie Jr.|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1400129419l/202034._SY75_.jpg|915053] is the fourth of A. B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series that I have read. Much to my disappointment this is an okay, but not stellar, book. It is much in the vein of the cowboy movies we watched as children, Shane and 3:10 to Yuma, the struggle of a good man in a violent world, and it incorporates almost all the standard plot lines of that time.

Lat Evans is the son of Brownie and Mercy Evans, two characters we met in [b:The Way West|202033|The Way West (The Big Sky, #2)|A.B. Guthrie Jr.|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435723309l/202033._SY75_.jpg|915042]. He is basically a good man, but he has more than his share of hang-ups, and I would call some of his decisions at the least questionable. After a very slow start, the novel did pick up, but in the end, I didn’t care enough for any of the characters to shed a tear over their fates.

Guthrie’s great strength is his ability to write a scene that comes to life under his pen. He engages all the senses, so that I can see the breath of cold air, hear the coyotes, envision the stretches of white falling mile upon mile. As here:

In the distant darkness a squaw wailed for her dead, and dogs chimed in, joined by coyotes on the hills. They sent a shiver up the spine, of chill and lonesomeness and dread and hope of things to come.

Or as here:

It had been cold before but not close to this. This was as cold as cold ever could be. Even the campfire at night was only a whisper of warmth, a promise of heat somewhere in the world, maybe far off in Texas; but here in itself was the whole world, lapped white from skyline to skyline, with no end to be seen and none to be hoped for.

I highly recommend the first three books of this series. [b:The Way West|202033|The Way West (The Big Sky, #2)|A.B. Guthrie Jr.|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435723309l/202033._SY75_.jpg|915042] won a Pulitzer, and well deserved it. But, when you have finished [b:Fair Land, Fair Land|202032|Fair Land, Fair Land (The Big Sky, #3)|A.B. Guthrie Jr.|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388257675l/202032._SY75_.jpg|195470], you are done with the story. This book was not a continuation, it was another story altogether, not as fine a tale, and not as well told.

This book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon along the Oregon Trail to the wilderness that was Oregon. Lije Evans, his wife Rebecca, and his son Brownie are one of a group of families who sign on with a wagon train to make the journey, and they represent, in my eyes, the perfect depiction of the kind of strong individuals who carved out this new land into civilization. During the journey, Lije discovers himself as a leader and we discover that a good man can be a strong man; that a quiet man can make all the noise that is needed.

There is one more member of the Evans family that I have not mentioned, but for whom I developed a great attachment, the dog, Rock. At the outset of the story, there is a move to kill all the dogs, many thinking they would be a nuisance on such a long trip. Evans figured he would have some business with the man who came to shoot Rock. That was the moment I knew I was going to love Lije, no going back.

My favorite character, by far, however, was Dick Summers. A seasoned mountain man who has been farming in Missouri, he signs on to pilot the group as far as the Dalles. I recognized right away that without men like Dick, none of the others would have ever survived to do the settling. In fact, they would hardly have known how to get where they were going. What I loved the most about him, however, was his open mind; never thinking the world should be like him or give him any particular homage.

He didn’t blame the Oregoners as he had known old mountain men to do. Everybody had his life to make, and every time its way, one different from another. The fur hunter didn’t have title to the mountain no matter if he did say finders keepers. By that system the country belonged to the Indians, or maybe someone before them or someone before them. No use to stand against the stream of change and time.

I felt I got to know Dick Summers in a way that I could strangely relate to. Of course, his lost youth was danger and mountains and the capability to survive, but wasn’t he longing for what most of us older people long for?

At the nub of it did he just want his youth back? Beaver, streams, squaws, danger--were they just names for his young time?

When I went back to review the passages I had marked while reading, almost all of them were Dick. His was the voice that spoke to me.

Guthrie shows us the physical hardships of the journey, which would surely be enough to defeat most of us, but which we could all fairly well imagine; but he also shows us the emotional toll that such a choice entails. Makes you wonder how anyone ever had the courage to set out, particularly with children in tow. The thought of the women, visibly pregnant, prodding the oxen while walking the trail, wore me to a bone. Guthrie’s men are both strong and weak, as are the women, and he seems to know both sexes well...what makes them the same and what makes them different, and how much both were needed to make such an undertaking work at all.

She wondered if he felt the same as she did. Did any two people ever feel the same? Did ever one soul know another, though they talked at night, though sometimes in hunger and in isolation they sought to make their bodies one, the all-mother in her loneliness trying to take back home the lost child-man?

I could picture these people, a mix of quite different backgrounds and incomes, growing closer and more understanding or more leery and wiser as the migration became a way of life. I could feel how tired and weary they felt at the end of even a good day. I could see the young faces becoming withered and crusted by exposure to wind and sun, and the older faces becoming hardened and set. At the same time, I could feel the yearning they all shared to start a new life, find a new adventure, see something they had never seen before. If they were still heading trains West, and if I were thirty years younger, I could see myself being convinced by Guthrie that the travails would be worth it; that Oregon could be home, and that a sturdy wagon and a good man might be all you would need.

There is there all right, until a man gets to it. Then it ain’t there. It’s here, and here is what you wanted to get away from in the first place.

In the third installment of A.B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series, Guthrie continues the story of Dick Summers, mountain man and wagon train guide and, now, a man searching for a way to face life in a changing west. Setting out to revisit the wild places of his youth, Summers and his friend, Higgins, stumble across Teal Eye, an Indian girl from Summers’ past.

Perhaps the tales of how the West was won have become cliches, but the plight of the Indians and the destruction that came with the taming of the West are very hard to witness in the hands of a skilled storyteller. I mourned for their way of life, disappearing before their eyes, and for the inability of the army and settlers to recognize them as human beings and offer any respect or concern.

There is a new character, a Methodist preacher named Potter, who contributes another view of the well-intended, but sorely misguided, missionary. I loved his goodness and his philosophy concerning God. Too few of those around him heeded his advice.

“I worship a glad lord,” Potter told him. “We have set our faces against sin, as indeed we must, but in doing it I fear we have lost sight of joy. Joy, Brother Summers, delight in what we are given. Often I think God not only wants us to be good but to be radiant.”

Dick Summers will go down in my ledgers as one of the most wonderful characters ever written. In a preface, Guthrie tells us this book was written much later than the earlier ones and was intended to fill a gap that had been left. I, for one, am so glad he decided to fill that gap. I would have hated to have left this part of Dick Summers’ story untold--to have just seen him wander off, seeking wilderness, at the end of The Way West, and never to have been heard of again.

So many good men who have lived have been forgotten and carried all they knew and loved to the grave. In fact, that is the case with most men, but, even unremembered as individuals, they may have had a huge impact on the shaping of a country and the lives that came after them.

“Live and Learn, they say, but don’t say all the while you’re learnin’, you’re forgettin’, too, until maybe at the last it’s just a big forgettin’.

[b:The Big Sky|202035|The Big Sky (The Big Sky, #1)|A.B. Guthrie Jr.|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441429378l/202035._SY75_.jpg|1461085] is the first in A.B. Guthrie’s series of novels about the settling of the American West. It is the story of three men, Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, each of whom braves the unknown and difficult life in the cold mountains west of civilization, for his own unique reasons. It is a portrait of what a mountain man was and what it took to be such an adventurer.

There is nothing sugar-coated in this book. It is often raw and coarse and startling.

They were a heap better than squaw meat, which men had been known to butcher and eat, probably after bedding with the squaws first.

This is a hard, cruel and unforgiving life, and the men who live it are sometimes little more than animals. Boone Caudill, fleeing an already hard and abusive life with his father, becomes a kind of savage survivalist. Dick Summers, in many ways the most skilled and intuitive of the three men, is only half a mountain man. He has altered his life, but not his soul. He likes to get to town and doesn’t mind the idea of farming, and he is the only one who still manages to fit into the world of white men.

One of the main characters of The Big Sky is the West itself. Guthrie paints it the way Ansel Adams photographed it, large and beautiful and powerful.

From the top Boone could see forever and ever, nearly any way he looked. It was open country, bald and open, without an end. It spread away flat now and then rolling, going on clear to the sky. A man wouldn’t think the whole world was so much. It made the heart come up. It made a man little and still big, like a king looking out.

This is God’s country, but even the men who love it and choose it, question what kind of God rules in such a wilderness. Jim Deakins contemplates his relationship with God and what God expects from him fairly frequently, and I particularly enjoyed his thoughts, because I think having such close connections to nature, but also experiencing its cruelties up close, would raise doubts and wonder.

These men are like the wildness of the country they inhabit, they are being worn away, being lost, becoming the last of their kind. The country is on the cusp of westward expansion, the buffalo are being slaughtered into extinction, Greeley is about to urge young men to go west, and the young men are going to take young women with them and build and plow.

It was strange about time; it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop--a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst.

A historical picture of life in 1830s Montana, The Big Sky is also about change--the change in the country and the change in the people who populate it. There is no room for the Indians in the society that is coming, and there is no room for the mountain men either. Both are dying breeds. Both are living on borrowed time.

I must note that the portrayal of the Indians in this book seems remarkably accurate to me. They are seen as both victim and aggressor, but neither the noble savage nor the devil’s spawn. The attitude of the white men toward them is primarily one of exploitation or dread, and only a few, like Boone and Summers, come to really know anything about them individually. There is a graphic chapter that deals with the devastating effects of smallpox on the Indian population, that is one I will find it hard to ever forget.

Wallace Stegner wrote the foreward to the volume I was reading. If you would truly like to recognize the importance and meaning of this novel, you need do nothing more than read it.

Boone Caudill is “both mountain man and myth, both individual and archetype, which means that the record of his violent life is both credible and exhilarating.” Don’t think anyone could have said it better than that.

A. B. Guthrie's Big Sky novels have always been slow-paced, but These Thousand Hills, the third in the Western sequence (or fourth, if you place Fair Land, Fair Land chronologically after The Way West), is so slow as to lose all momentum, and it stalls on the uphill climb.

It is the first book in the series not to follow the mountain men Boone Caudill or Dick Summers, and the replacement character – the rancher Lat Evans – takes a good while to become interesting. The first half of the story is a mush – it never becomes turgid, just uneventful – and we don't know why we, the reader, should be paying attention. Later, Lat's character angst is shown to be how he wants his life to be "open and solid and respectable" (pg. 244), but this pursuit of social and moral respectability is much less exciting than the slow but wild roaming of Caudill and Summers in the previous books.

There's much less of the descriptive landscape writing that could take your breath away in the other books, and while These Thousand Hills gets more interesting in its final third, it's such an unnecessarily long burn for such a small spark. Guthrie tries to morph his antagonist's angst into a sort of classical, code-driven man-of-the-West ("Carmichael watched him, thinking how lonely the right was, or what men took for right" (pg. 323)), but the novel lacks the drama to really bring that out. The only conclusion to reach, for all that the book is well-written, is that These Thousand Hills doesn't reward the reader's perseverance to anything like the extent the other books in the sequence did. It survives in reputation only by its composure and the general goodwill extended by fans towards Westerns. It reverses its stall and continues its uphill climb, but your muscles groan as you follow and the blood fails to stir.

"Had he held it once, not knowing? Did it flutter there in his hand in those gone days… Where beaver swam in every stream, and a trapper knew his foot was first on the land and he walked with the gods of the world?" (pg. 62)

The third book, chronologically speaking, in A. B. Guthrie's Big Sky series, Fair Land, Fair Land was the last to be written and published. Alas, something seems to have been lost in the 30+ year gap since the publication of its predecessor, The Way West. Nevertheless, a book that doesn't reach the heights of those two earlier books is still scaling a significant altitude, and Fair Land, Fair Land remains a rewarding read.

The biggest surprise in Fair Land was its impatience. The greatest quality in The Big Sky and The Way West was the way they went along at their own loping gait; both pace and prose took their time and this was of great reward to those readers who were willing to treat with them on their own terms. Fair Land, however, opts for a more streamlined text. There is little of the introspection or the descriptive passages that were so beautiful in the previous two books, and we don't get the sense of the land that we got there.

The heart doesn't swell as it did before, and while this makes sense somewhat – considering the characters' unspoiled West is now being settled and disrupted – it doesn't explain why plot points are cooked to a similar short-order. The coincidental way Summers meets up with Teal Eye lacks storytelling grace, and given the build-up I expected the encounter with Boone Caudill to be of greater substance. The couple of pages he is given, without much in the way of reflection, is disappointing considering he was the protagonist of The Big Sky. The way this particular plot point was resolved left me feeling a bit short-changed. The reluctance to dig deep wells is understandable, given that such things require stamina and Guthrie was by the time of Fair Land more than 80 years old, but it doesn't change the taste. There is little of the simmering that makes a soup.

That said, Fair Land, Fair Land is still plenty rewarding. The best part is being back with the main character Dick Summers, the quintessential mountain man "at home in the world" (pg. 24), as he talks with others with an "easy smile and gray eyes and all-around competence" (pg. 18). The book retains the sharp but unintrusive dialogue of its predecessors, and much of the book's grace comes from being in the company of Summers. The return of Teal Eye (from The Big Sky) and Higgins (a promising but relegated character in The Way West) are also enjoyable.

The book as a whole is enjoyable, but it carries with it a sense of obligation. This time period (1845-1870) was a blank patch in Guthrie's career-defining Western tapestry, and he's here to tie off the loose ends of Dick Summers, Boone Caudill and Teal Eye – for posterity. And so when Summers sets off from the west coast to go back east, putting "the promised land… behind them" (pg. 38) to re-tread old ground, there seems to be a sort of metatextual acceptance on Guthrie's part – as on Summers' – that it won't match up to what came before.

Fortunately, alongside its sense of obligation, Fair Land, Fair Land also carries with it great characters, pathos, and that unmatchable landscape. The story and its telling may not be on par with its two predecessors, but Guthrie can still move us considerably. "Give [me] a far reach of eye," Dick Summers asks on page 4, "the grasses rippling, the small streams talking, buttes swimming clear a hundred miles away". And sure enough he gets it, or at least enough of it to satisfy a man who knows he's reaching the end of his story. Guthrie gives it to us too, and we too are satisfied.

Kentucky runaway becomes mountain man, marries Blackfoot woman, kills best friend out of jealousy, cannot fit society.

mountie on vacation drawn in to English murder

I loved this book about the opening of the West. I got this from my father, probably a book he read years ago. I liked it so much I went out and bought the second book in the series, The Way West. I'm excited to continue the series!

"What a person wondered was, were other people like him underneath or, more likely, solider and properer and not moved by crazy notions? He wouldn't want to tell about how it was with him, not even about the way his chest filled sometimes when he came to a rise and looked over the country or how his heart turned just at the smell of camp smoke…" (pp95-96)

Despite being a Pulitzer Prize winner, back when that really meant something, and a successor to one of my favourite recent reads, The Big Sky, there were times when I wasn't sure if I loved The Way West, or saw it as a great book. I enjoyed it throughout, but there were moments when something on the path A. B. Guthrie had laid out would wobble underfoot and make me unsure of my place. But then, there's a scene where the mountain man Dick Summers (the only character to return from The Big Sky) recognises that he made the right choice in coming out West again and taking in the glorious country. One of the other characters asks him why he's smiling, and Dick replies, "Was I smilin'? Just feelin' good, I reckon" (pg. 225). It's a warm moment and I realised that, for all its minor wobbles, I too had been smiling throughout.

Those wobbles were legitimate; stones come loose from the path. The Big Sky was a slow book and The Way West is too, but more happened in The Big Sky. It seems strange to say that, as it often seemed like not much happened and the book was all landscape and thought. But though The Way West has more characters – it follows the members of a wagon train on the famous Oregon Trail – they don't sit as deeply in the memory as characters from the first book, even minor ones, sat. They do just fine, and better than most novels, but a "captain ought to know his company down to the last pup" (pg. 132), and by the end too many of the characters remain strangers. Of those who are more prominent, Higgins becomes forgotten despite having some point-of-view chapters earlier on in the book. Brownie, the teenage boy, is one that seems set up to grow into a man, but his waxing confidence ("he was more like Dick Summers all the time" (pg. 97)) is less show than tell, and by the end he remains in a bit-part role and seems to have reverted into boyishness. Furthermore, though there are storms, river crossings, hardships, conflicts within the group and encounters with Indians, we never feel as though the wagon train is in great peril. There's very little circling of the wagons.

All that said, Guthrie's path is still a sturdy one even after some of those stones have come loose. The prose style is a good example of this; there are moments when I thought some of the sentences were strangled or overcooked, and others where I had to re-read a paragraph to get the sense of it, but then every time I thought this, Guthrie would go on to produce some astonishing piece of writing or touching dialogue between characters or some well-staged scene, and I would forgive the moment where things had drifted slightly. It's as though Guthrie is a prize-fighter who has feinted with his left hand, the better to knock you down with his right.

As in The Big Sky, the great redeemer in The Way West is the American landscape, and the thoughts it evokes in the characters and in the reader. I wrote in my review of The Big Sky that the book demanded you take it slow, and The Way West is the same in that it rewards those who are willing to treat with it on its own terms. The prose, like the West's prairie air, has "a taste to it" (pg. 126), and oftentimes you can tell Guthrie is writing a character towards an outcrop or a stream, solely to provide them a moment of solitude so they can paint the land they see with their eyes and Guthrie can deliver his potent inner monologue on how it makes them feel. In a lesser book, this would seem manipulative or writerly, but in The Way West you can easily imagine these characters wanting to steal away for a moment and look out on the mountains or the plains or the stars or the mighty rivers. Like them, the reader gets the wanderlust where he just wants to say 'goddamn', or moments where he "felt he couldn't speak for the crowding in his chest" (pg. 318). Guthrie's ability to do this is unmatched and it's the most compelling reason to invest in one of his books.

I began to value this all the more highly as it is rare, particularly nowadays, to find a book which does its own thing rather than pandering to a target audience. In fact, I don't know of many books which grant themselves this extent of license, and like the unbroken Western landscape our characters traverse, we're sometimes overwhelmed by its extent but grateful for the sense of freedom such space provides. Like one character realises at the very end, for all the tough moments, the "hardships, sorrows, partings… the heart [was] still ready to beat high" (pg. 340). Wagh!

A wanderer helps homesteaders fight cattlemen.

2/4 (Indifferent).

It's 30 minutes too long, and often irritating.½

"This was the way to live, free and easy, with time all a man's own and none to say no to him." (pg. 201)

The Big Sky is a book that demands to be taken slow. Prose and plot have a loping gait that mirrors the mountain men it brings to life, and if this seems irregular to a modern reader conditioned to pace and pandering, it is all the better for that. Taken slow, the book grounds the reader, and its quiet confidence vindicates author A. B. Guthrie's singular approach.

The prose is excellent – Hemingway was an admirer – and a good thing too, for the book must succeed or fail based on its evocation of the untapped American West of the 1830s and 40s, the 'big sky' of the title. Guthrie paints these scenes astonishingly well, evoking not only the sights and sounds and the harsh beauty of the land, but the sense of freedom it brings to the main characters, and the sense of loss and wanderlust that serve as counterpoint to that freedom. The sentences are simple but rich, in the manner of the afore-mentioned Hemingway, providing all the room Guthrie needs to let his mountain men, and the reader, roam at will. The prose, like the western land it evokes, is "country a man could get his breath in" (pg. 21).

But the book is more than just weather and landscape and country; these fine traits are allied to strong characterization and many well-taken dramatic scenes. The mechanics of the storytelling are quietly strong, with every scene and setting providing texture to Guthrie's purpose without being consciously literary. All three of the main characters – Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins and Dick Summers – stay with you, and even those readers who don't want to engage with the deeper textures of the story will still enjoy their adventure.

That said, it is the American West itself which stirs the reader most profoundly, and when it is said of the solitary, taciturn Boone Caudill that it was "as if he talked to the country for company, and the country talked to him" (pg. 185), we can believe it, for the reader is experiencing that too. "There was the sky above, blue as paint, and the brown earth rolling underneath, and himself between them with a free, wild feeling in his chest" (pg. 123). This book shines with my soul.

"The Way West" is a classic tale of American pioneers traveling the wilderness to seek a better life in the year 1836. North America has just acquired Arkansas and Michigan as official states and is still claiming new colonies west of Missouri. With visions of miles upon miles of unsettled land, fertile pastures, blue skies, clear lakes, and majestic mountains, citizens are encouraged to make the voyage to Oregon to ‘occupy the land’ that is free for the taking.

The opening scene takes place as 8 or 9 families from Missouri prepare for the journey gathering horses and wagons loaded with all their worldly personal possessions and meager supplies, cows, oxen, dogs, pregnant wives, a few teens and children, a preacher, and Dick Summers, a rugged experienced guide with a few hired hands. They set off for the 2000 mile trek with a total count of twenty-two wagons and 30 armed men.

The wagon train must brave flooding, desert heat, mosquitoes and snakes, peaceful Indians and hostile Indians, sometimes unpassable terrain of narrow rutted paths up steep mountain sides, and crossing raging rivers. This is the story of humble men and adventurous courageous men, strong supportive wives, and optimistic children told in simple but poetic prose. Anything can happen, and many unexpected things do. But it wasn’t all high drama and heart-thumping action. Sometimes it was days upon days of tedious repetition, as one pioneer says, “Watch the stock. Fix the wagons. Unload, load, unload. Sleep dead like a brute while the wheels keep turning in your head, and then up and go. Drove, plod, push, tug. Damn the bugs. Damn distance. Damn gullies, streams, trees. Keep going. Three cheers for Oregon.”

One of the themes is a coming-of-age tale of 17 year-old Brownie Evans, and 15 year-old Mercy McBee. A poignant scene occurs when Brownie is troubled about the future and asking Dick Summers for advice. “Dick tried to put himself In Brownie’s place- put there the him that used to be, not the him of now, worn hard and doubtful by the knocks of living. You couldn’t tell a boy how few were the things that mattered and how little was their mattering… The dreams dreamed and the hopes hoped and the hurts felt and the jolts suffered, they all got covered by the years. They buried themselves in.” Dick may be the most experienced, wisest man on the journey but he seems to be pondering his own troubled past- you get the feeling he didn’t necessarily follow his own advice and has regrets. Dick is the most interesting character of the story and Guthrie could have cashed in on a sequel.

A. B. Guthrie was born in 1901 and was a historian, journalist, and penned several novels. Guthrie grew up in the mid-west and his storytelling has an authentic early American flare. "The Way West" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950.

One of my all-time favourite books, The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr was originally published in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. It is part of series of novels that the author wrote about the American West and is an entertaining and inspiring classic.

One character from his first book, The Big Sky returns to this book and becomes the guide for a wagon train travelling from Independence, Missouri to the Willamette River Valley in Oregon. This novel brings to life the hardships and adventure these hardy souls endured on their difficult journey. The author delivers his story in straight forward prose, and saves his dramatic flair for the stark and beautiful scenery through which they travel.

Although the book starts out being driven by men, as they move along the trail, the women eventually come to the forefront as well and we learn of their strength, fortitude and grit. They are the backbone of the party and share the work alongside their men as well as fulfilling the traditional woman’s roles. I originally read this book over forty years ago and it is one of a handful of books that made historical fiction so important to me. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves historical fiction and wants to read about American expansion.

Does Shane die in the end?

Possible "spoilers" for those who have not seen the film, nor read the book

I read this book not too long ago (after watching the 1953 film).

The film's ending imagery suggests that the character "Shane" dies in the end of the film. The final few seconds of the film show the title character slumped in his saddle, about to fall off, as he rides through a cemetery towards a bright light in an otherwise dark, midnight sky . The night is almost pitch-dark, there is no moon, just this heavenly-bright stretch of sky.

Shane is riding directly towards this light, indicating his spirit is about to enter heaven.

Final image of the film (look quickly, it is only a second or two) shows Shane and his horse *descending* into the ground, between two of the tombstones in the cemetery, until both are lost from view.

Shane's mortal body is being returned to the earth.

Pretty unmistakable what is happening here, for those who care to look carefully and think about it a bit.

The book ends differently.

In the book, we know from Bob's description that Shane has been shot in the torso, as he rides away into the dark, soon lost from view. The book doesn't end there, though, but goes on to state that when Bob's father, Joe, finds out that Shane is still alive after the gunfight, he (Joe) is surprised and happy at this news.

And yet. . . and yet. . .

Although Joe, Bob's father, having been informed that Shane has been critically injured in the gunfight - most likely fatally - Joe never bothers to go out to look for Shane, not to help him, not even to, perhaps, find his body to bury him. A man in those days - any days, really - with a gunshot to the torso would not be able to ride a horse very far at all.

Joe does not go to find Shane, even though Shane, by his selfless act, has saved Joe, Joe's family, Joe's homestead and likely the entire homesteader community at large. Whew!

The whole of the story is extremely well written, but this last bit to me seems illogical, and at odds with the previous body of the work. True, Joe and Shane have just engaged in fisticuffs, but considering the kind of man Joe has been portrayed as throughout the book, I don't think this would have stopped him from going to search for his friend Shane.

It seems to me like a betrayal - of both Shane and of Bob - that he does not do so.

This has been bothering me quite a bit, and I would be very interested to know how other readers look at how the book ends.¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬-

Does Shane die in the end?

May be spoilers below for those who have not seen the film or read the book

I read this book not too long ago (after watching the 1953 film).

The film's ending imagery suggests that the character "Shane" dies in the end of the film. The final few seconds of the film show the title character slumped in his saddle, about to fall off, as he rides through a cemetery towards a bright light in an otherwise dark, midnight sky . The night is almost pitch-dark, there is no moon, just this heavenly-bright stretch of sky.

Shane is riding directly towards this light, indicating his spirit is about to enter heaven.

Final image of the film (look quickly, it is only a second or two) shows Shane and his horse *descending* into the ground, between two of the tombstones in the cemetery, until both are lost from view.

Shane's mortal body is being returned to the earth.

Pretty unmistakable what is happening here, for those who care to look carefully and think about it a bit.

The book ends differently.

In the book, we know from Bob's description that Shane has been shot in the torso, as he rides away into the dark, soon lost from view. The book doesn't end there, though, but goes on to state that when Bob's father, Joe, finds out that Shane is still alive after the gunfight, he (Joe) is surprised and happy at this news.

And yet. . . and yet. . .

Although Joe, Bob's father, having been informed that Shane has been critically injured in the gunfight - most likely fatally - Joe never bothers to go out to look for Shane, not to help him, not even to, perhaps, find his body to bury him. A man in those days - any days, really - with a gunshot to the torso would not be able to ride a horse very far at all.

Joe does not go to find Shane, even though Shane, by his selfless act, has saved Joe, Joe's family, Joe's homestead and likely the entire homesteader community at large. Whew!

The whole of the story is extremely well written, but this last bit to me seems illogical, and at odds with the previous body of the work. True, Joe and Shane have just engaged in fisticuffs, but considering the kind of man Joe has been portrayed as throughout the book, I don't think this would have stopped him from going to search for his friend Shane.

It seems to me like a betrayal - of both Shane and of Bob - that he does not do so.

This has been bothering me quite a bit, and I would be very interested to know how other readers look at how the book ends.

"By day Boone could get himself on a hill and see forever, until the sky came down and shut off his eye. There was the sky above, blue as paint, and the brown earth rolling underneath, and himself between them with a free, wild feeling in his chest, as if they were the ceiling and floor of a home that was all his own."

First published in 1947 and set between 1830 and 1843, A.B. Guthrie's classic novel of mountain men and the opening of the west to white settlement is both a tribute to the breathtaking beauty of the vast northern plains and Rocky Mountains, and a eulogy for the territory in its unspoiled state. His descriptions of the landscape are like the best of paintings; they evoke the images, the light, the sounds, and the feeling, the precious loneliness of the landscape.

Guthrie also creates memorable characters: Boone Caudill and Jim Deakins and Dick Summers will live forever in my mental cast of favorites. These are not completely idealized heroes, although they do lean in that direction. They are tough and, to greater or lesser degrees, stone-hearted. But they each have redeeming qualities to balance out the brutal self-determination. Boone, too quick to judge, is nonetheless deeply loyal and unflinchingly honest. Jim is optimistic and warm, never underestimating the risks inherent in the adventures to which he is inexorably drawn. Dick, the father figure (Boone's own callous and vicious father failing to serve), is the quintessential hunter: he understands the land, its human occupants, and the creatures that roam her vast expanses.

Sexism and racism run deep in the narrative; it is a product of its time. And yet you get the sense that Guthrie knew things would change, that they must change. You can also sense that he grieves the invasion of white civilization into a territory that was never perfect, never fully peaceful or easy, but untainted and beautiful in the simplicity of its seasons.