The Big Sky

A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky does not belie its title. It is a novel lived entirely in the open. The big wild places are both its setting and its theme, and everything about the book is as big as the country it moves in. The story sweeps westward from Kentucky to St. Louis and up the interminable Missouri through Omaha and Pawnee country, past Ree and Sioux country, into Stoney and Big Belly and Blackfoot country, and there, riding on the boil of its own excitement, it waits out its climax. Bigness, distance, wildness, freedom, are the dream that pulls Boone Caudill westward into the mountains, and the dream has an incandescence in the novel because it is also the dream that Bud Guthrie grew up on.

   The country he takes us through with Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers is his native landscape, known since childhood. It is a sign of commitment, an evidence of love, that when he gives wildness its fleeting consummation by settling Boone Caudill in a Blackfoot lodge with the girl Teal Eye, he locates that idyllic camp on the river called variously the Tansy, Breast, Teton, or Titty -essentially the valley around Choteau, Montana, where Guthrie lived as a boy and has settled as a man. It is country of a kind I know well -at the edge of the mountains but not in them: high plains country, chinook country, its air like a blade or a blowtorch, its sky fitting down close and tight to the horizons and the great bell of heaven alive with light, clouds, heat, stars, winds, incomparable weathers. But even if I had never been within a thousand miles of Montana I could not miss Guthrie's love and knowledge of the land he writes about, and I could not avoid knowing something of what that unmarked wilderness would have meant to a Boone Caudill. The big plains and the surging ranges and the hidden valleys are a fit setting for his story of intractable liberty and violence; and in the end they turn out to be not only a setting and a theme, but also, like Caudill himself, victim. The West of The Big Sky is Innocence, anti-civilization, savage and beautiful and doomed, a dream that most Americans, however briefly or vainly, have dreamed, and that some have briefly captured.

   Serious writers about the West have often had to celebrate scenery for lack of the social complexities out of which most fiction is made. Geography, at least, is one matter in which a Westerner can excel and in which he takes pride. History is another. For in a region only three generations from the total wildness of buffalo and horse Indians, everything, including history, must be built from scratch. Like any other part of a human tradition, history is an artifact. It does not exist until it is remembered and written down; and it is not truly remembered or written down until it has been vividly imagined. We become our past, and it becomes a part of us, by our reliving of our beginnings. Guthrie's three novels, which form a loose trilogy, have as one of their justifications the creation of such a usable human memory. It is most closely focused on Guthrie's home country, but it has validity for the entire West.

These are novels, works of the imagination, and yet it is not improper to think of them as related to the trilogy of great histories that constitute the major work of Guthrie's friend Bernard DeVoto. DeVoto touched history with a novelist's imagination; Guthrie imagines his novels around a historian's sure knowledge. These two, each after his own impressions, together took the long journey up the Missouri in the wake of the fur hunters' keelboats, and their imaginative reconstructions cover much common ground. The Big Sky, a story of mountain men, pairs off naturally with Across the Wide Missouri; The Way West chronicling the trail to Oregon, goes in team with The Year of Decision, 1846. But that is as far as the parallelism extends. DeVoto goes backward, gathering up all the history of western exploration in The Course of Empire, while Guthrie goes onward in time to deal, in These Thousand Hills, with the Montana cattle empire of the 1880's.

Nevertheless both the man from Utah and the man from Montana share a characteristic western impulse: they are intent on creating a past, firming up a ground on which the present can stand and by which it can be comprehended. And both make whatever use can be made of those slight, accidental linkages by which discrete happenings become historical continuity. Thus Guthrie, completely in accordance with historical probability, returns Dick Summers to the wild country of his youth as guide to an Oregon train in The Way West; and again in accordance with probability, has Lat Evans, son of Brownie and Mercy Evans of The Way West, trail a herd of Durham cattle eastward from Oregon into Montana in These Thousand Hills. And when Lat Evans stakes out his own ranch after a career of wolfing and bronc busting, he stakes it out on that same Tansy, Breast, Teton, or Titty River where Boone Caudill had lived his idyll with Teal Eye and the Piegans of Heavy Runner's band -and where twenty years later a boy named Bud Guthrie, son of the editor of the Choteau
Acantha
, would be hanging out his ears listening to cowpunchers, sheepherders, drifters, politicians, and wandering journalists talking of a past that no one yet had begun to write down.

The Big Sky is the first, and for me the best, of the three novels that eventually came of that listening. What makes it special is not merely its narrative and scenic vividness, but the ways in which Boone Caudill exemplifies and modifies an enduring American type.

Caudill is an avatar of the oldest of all the American myths -the civilized man recreated in savagery, rebaptized into innocence on a wilderness continent. His fabulous ancestors are Daniel Boone, who gives him his name, and Cooper's Leatherstocking; and up and down the range of American fiction he has ten thousand recognizable siblings. But Caudill has his own distinction, for he is neither intellectualized nor sentimentalized. He may be White Indian, but he is no Noble Savage -for the latter role he is not noble enough, and far too savage. Though he retains many mythic qualities -the preternatural strength and cunning, the need for wild freedom, the larger-than-life combination of Indian skills and white mind- he has no trace of Leatherstocking's deist piety. His virtues are stringently limited to the qualities of self-reliance, courage, and ruthlessness that will help him to survive a life in which few died old. Guthrie clearly admires him, but with reservations enforced by the hindsights of history. Boone Caudill's savagery, admirable and even enviable though it is, can lead nowhere. The moral of his lapse from civilization is that such an absolute lapse is doomed and sterile, and in the end the savagery which has been his strength is revealed as his fatal weakness.

For Boone's course leaves him nowhere to go. By midnovel, having fled the settlements and the settlements' law and the authority of a harsh father, he has cut himself off so utterly that he can hardly stand the civilization of so remote an outpost as Fort Union, on the Yellowstone. He elects the wild, he symbolically marries the wilderness when he brings Teal Eye into his tepee on the Teton. But that too, the one thing he wants, the one thing he is fit for, will be his only a little while. He is a killing machine, as dangerous to what he loves as to what he hates, and what the logic of his ferocious adaptation demands, the novel's action fulfills. In the same moment when he shoots Jim Deakins, the one friend who has bound him to the past and to civilization, he breaks his bond with Teal Eye and the Blackfeet; and the son who might have represented continuity and a compromise between the two ways of life has been -how properly for both the historical rightness and the fictional inevitability of his theme!- born blind.

No compromise is possible for one who, like Boone Caudill, has given himself all the way to savagery. He cannot go to farming as Dick Summers does, and he would be too intractable ever to lead out a wagontrain to Oregon. As Fenimore Cooper realized as early as The Pioneers, in 1823, the true White Indian, whether woodsman or plainsman or mountain man, is doomed. Caudill is as incapable as Leatherstocking of becoming a venerable relic in a tamed community, but neither does Guthrie apotheosize him as a mythic Untamable facing into a western sunset and uttering a firm "Here!" in response to the ultimate Voice. Boone's end is less literary. Gloomy and guilt-ridden, possessing neither the security of the settlements nor the animal contentment of the wild, he simply fades out, disappears. It is not he, but the gentler Dick Summers, the white man who has adopted Indian ways without ceasing to be white man, who serves as the link between the world of beaver and the world of the western wagons.

This is to say that while Boone reveals all the large outlines of the myth, he retains a degree of realism, a marked quality of harshness and violence. In his temperament which is what Guthrie had added to the myth to create him -he is less like the standard frontier leading man than like the degenerated border type that in reality created and populated the frontier, the men whom Hector St. John Crevecoeur described as early as 1782: men "no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank .., dependent on their native tempers, and . . . remote from the power of example, and check of shame." "Once hunters," cried Crevecoeur in a tone between philosophical disapproval and personal disgust, "farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable . . . Eating of wild meat, whatever you may think, tends to alter their temper."

Ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable, decivilized by the eating of wild meat. Boone Caudill might almost be a gloss on Crevecoeur's observation. But it is his special excellence that he is something more -he is both mountain man and myth, both individual and archetype, which means that the record of his violent life is both credible and exhilarating. And he has one tender and attractive thing about him: an inarticulate but powerful love for the sweep of plain and peak and sky, the intimacy of cutbank and wildrose island, the free distance shaped by butte and hogback and aspenblotched mountainside. It is the thing he most clearly shares with his creator, the thing that can make a taciturn, bloodthirsty, unwashed, gut-eating white savage a character whom we follow with excitement and often with acute sympathy. For this part of him we share too, and we grant, if we are honest, that the dream of primitive innocence is likewise, and simultaneously, a dream of violence and unrestraint. However inappropriate to the civilization with which we have infected Boone Caudill's mountains, it is a dream that dies hard.
 
 

Serena Caudill heard a step outside and then the squeak of the cabin door and knew that John was coming in. She kept looking at the fireplace, in which a hen was browning.

"Where's Boone?"

"Around, I reckon." She looked up then and saw him shut the door against the rain, saw him shut it behind him without turning while his eyes took in the murky kitchen. He limped to the wall, making an uneven thump on the puncheon floor, started to hang his coat on its peg, thought better of it and hunched it back around his neck. In the warmth of the room the smells of cow and sweat and drink and wet woolens flowed from him.