This may be the closest thing to a true "Western" on the list--in fact it is a Western, albeit one that also has, or had, some literary cachet in its time. There is a lot to comment on in this, both good and bad, so it is going to be an extra long post. I will try to make it interesting. As always when there is anything in it worth investigating, I will start with the IWE's own introduction:
"This is a minor classic. Set against a geographical and historical background that is depicted with great fidelity are characters that live and action that is never slow or obscure. The Big Sky is both educational and interesting, a rewarding experience for every reader."
So far nothing that I strongly disagree with. The second paragraph takes some decidedly more controversial positions:
"The outline that follows may at times make the principal character, Boone Caudill, seem like a belligerent and callous man. He is not. He is peaceable and conscientious, and he never violates the rights of others (ed.--this is untrue). But he is quick-tempered, and if he seems to defend his own rights somewhat violently it must be remembered that the times and the country were violent."
To put it in contemporary terms, Boone Caudill, mountain man extraordinaire, is a problematic hero, and a man in whom even I cannot find much (anything?) that is agreeable, though perhaps his type was once, and even still is, necessary to a degree.
p.3, the first actual page of text, begins the story in 1830, and the writing right away alerts the reader that he is not in the company of anyone with a 2010s mindset anymore:
"In her mind's eye she was seeing him, that day when he got back from Tippecanoe with a ball in his thigh and the bloody hide of an Indian in his knapsack. he had kept the scalp and tanned the skin and made himself a razor strop out of it."
The n-word--you know the one--is used profusely not only in the dialogue of rough men but in the narrative itself. The frontiersmen frequently use the expression "this n***er" when referring to themselves. The Summers character did it so much that I wondered for a hundred or so pages whether he was not in fact black. But he wasn't.
p. 75 "A man might have thought the country was saying something to him." My note: "Western language" Only three notes in 75 pages, I was on my way to a modest report. But it was not meant to be.
p. 98 Humor. "God is some busybody. You'd think He had enough to do, just mindin' the world and the stars and such and keepin' an eye on the devil, so's not to be tricked. But no. He pokes his nose into every piddlin' thing. Even go to the backhouse, and there's God, lookin' spang through the roof or peekin' through the moonhole, bein' almighty curious about what you're doin'."
p. 115 The violence of a scalping described: "His knife cut into the scalp and made a rough circle, from which the blood beaded. He got hold of the Indian's short hair and tore the circle loose, leaving the piece of skull naked and raw."
p. 116 "Sometimes Jourdonnais felt ashamed for his people, who had neither bravery nor pride like Americans." Jourdannais's people were French-descended and speaking, but it was not clear to me whether they were native to the North American continent or not. There is some dispute at present over how much genuine pride these old white American men could possibly have had since they were so generally awful and had nothing of substance to be proud of--even I have been persuaded to have doubts on that account--but it was definitely building up to something, especially in the heady years after World War II, that is itself difficult for us to grasp any longer.
p. 136 Sexualization of a 10-12 year old Indian girl. "She was just a kitten...not truly old enough to interest a man that way...the front of her beginning to look like a woman sure enough." Likely not a hit with the current generation of literary authorities.
p. 150 Uncle Zeb, who would undoubtedly be a Trump voter today, on the waves of people pouring into the lands along the Missouri River (at the time the expedition came upon Uncle Zeb, they had not seen any non-Indians for about a month, I think). "Not sp'iled! Forts all up and down the river, and folk everywhere a man might think to lay a trap...greenhorns on every boat, hornin' in and sp'ilin' the fun. Christ Sake! Why'n't they stay to home? Why'n't they leave it to us as found it? By God, she's ours by rights."
p. 155 Unconscious and unashamed of attitude towards animals, naturally. It is incredible how foreign and difficult to summon this bloodthirsty instinct seems to be to civilized people now. "Mon Dieu, what a place for game! The Kentucky hunters could not be restrained. They awakened eager every morning, to shoot more bear, more buffalo, more elk and deer and bighorn, coming in later with the red meat slung all around them and maybe with the head and claws of a bear or the rough roll of a rattlesnake with the head smashed flat."
I determined around this point that Summers was not black, as Uncle Zeb also resorted often to the "this n-word" expression copiously, and Zeb has to be the whitest name of them all.
p. 169 The frontier spirit. "What did a man want as long as he had marrowbones and hump ribs and a fire to keep him warm and a free country to move around in? It took something to beat a place where you could kill a buffalo every day and not half try and take just the best of it and leave the rest to the wolves. What more could anyone want, unless maybe it was a good squaw to keep camp and to lie with him at night?"
p. 179 Paleo diet? "...straight meat and river water were good enough. They kept up a man's strength and never made him sick, no matter how much he ate, and made his blood good, too. A mountain man never got a running sore or a toothache or shook with a fever--or almost never, anyway. After a while he lost his taste for salt and bread and greens and such."
p. 232 "An Indian wasn't a match for a white man, not for a real man with two good arms. The Crow stiffened and went limp, and his knees folded under him...Before he ran the circle with his knife and ripped the scalp away, he studied the land again."
This probably isn't the great novel of the Missouri River, but it is the first one I remember reading, and it definitely heightened my interest in going out to that part of the country someday, which could actually happen.
p. 254 This postwar generation really could not write about love:
"With another woman he would have made the sign of lying down...and afterward he would have got up and gone on and forgotten her, as he had forgotten a heap of squaws in his time. With another woman he would have acted like a natural man. His eyes would have been bold and his tongue limber and his hands forward. What was it made him hold back? What was it made him sit wondering, like a boy who hadn't had a taste of women?"
"Could it be she had been waiting for him all this time, saying no to others? Could it be...she never had taken herself a man?" Of course she alone could not have been whoring it up like every other Indian woman in the book. "He wanted her to come to his lodge and be his woman and make his moccasins for him. He would raise meat aplenty; their lodge would have a galore of meat, and scalps hanging by it that he would life from the enemies of her people."
Good Lord.
I noted that I always like it (in this series) when a book has a large map either for its endpapers or covering two of the introductory pages.
Some America/Yankee stuff pp. 277-9:
"You appear to think, because the Indians haven't made use of this great western country, that nobody can." This was the strident, cocky Boston entrepreneur dismissing Boone's arguments that the region would not be amenable to bourgeois settlement and economic development. "When country which might support so many actually supports so few, then, by thunder, the inhabitants have not made good use of the natural possibilities...That failure surely is justification for invasion, peaceful if possible, forceful if necessary, by people who can and will capitalize on opportunity." "That question aside, do you think the United States of America will let the company, or even the British army itself, stand in the way? Nothing shall stop us. British? Spanish? Mexicans? None of them. By every reasonable standard the land is ours--by geography, contiguity, natural expansion. Why, it's destiny, that's what it is--inevitable destiny." This sounds like one of Ronald Reagan's speeches--I wouldn't be surprised if he had read this. It is worth noting that the area under discussion is for the most part still for the most part the most sparsely populated area of the lower 48 states. Also the character making these speeches is an intruder upon the world, and Guthrie's mountain men, and one supposes he himself, are more inclined to view more favorably the idea of the land continuing to be Indian territory with a handful of intrepid white adventurers such as themselves following what they consider to be a somewhat similar lifestyle.
Still from the 1952 movie version directed by Howard Hawks and starring Kirk Douglas, who has been turning up a lot here lately. I had long been under the impression that the film was in Technicolor and directed by William Wyler and starring Charlton Heston, which sounds more immediately exciting, but that movie was called The Big Country. I am aware that Hawks is very well-respected and I usually like the black and white versions of these books made close to the original publication anyway.
p. 285 "Boone could be a difficult man, even a dangerous one...One of gentler breeding sometimes felt uncertain and impotent in his presence, as if the strength and forwardness and primitive masculinity of the man dwarfed any disciplined powers. Peabody shrugged that feeling away...A Yankee could hold his own in any company, by wit and courage and perseverance, as Yankees had demonstrated through generations. Caudill would be a penniless white renegade among the Indians long after his own enterprise and vision had made him comfortable and important."
It is worth noting that at the beginning of the book Boone is a runaway teenager who is a tough kid but definitely vulnerable when dealing the hardened men he inevitably encounters, and the main story in the book is his development into the ruthlessly self-reliant, almost invulnerable he-man that he has become by the later chapters of it.
p. 354 Boone is back east--or at least in Missouri--after shooting his best friend whom he believed had betrayed him, insulting a soft, weak, domestic sort of man for having the temerity to express an interest in lighting out for Oregon:
"You got no business in Oregon...Ought to stay home and not spoil a country as wasn't meant for the likes of you...Stick to your bed and your birthin' (the man has many children by his one wife)."
p. 357 "When he came to a town, though, it wasn't any better, with fools staring and wagging tongues and thinking as how one man ought to be like another and all knuckling under to rules and ways and work and sheriffs and judges, and calling themselves free." I had to admit that I was finding this guy kind of tiresome at this point.
The ethos of the Western is completely opposed to the social order promoted by the likes of the Google corporation, to say the least. These guys (in the book) won't stand for any hint of rules or laws.
p. 374 "This was how it was with a white woman. She put talk in the way and made up piddling dodges, pretending all the time not to know the prime thing that brought a man and woman together."
Then on the next page the main character flat out rapes the woman referred to here. I wasn't ready for that (neither was the character). My encyclopedia in its outline refers to this incident as "a brief affair". I am fond of this publication, obviously, but this is not one of their better judgements, even by the standards of their time. I suppose if I had read this as a teenager I wouldn't have understood what was happening and I would have been confused by it in my 20s since the author doesn't exactly condemn the conduct but views it as an illustration of how a man living long outside of civilization would naturally behave, and that perhaps being capable of this kind of dangerous behavior would be desirable. But now it really is shocking to read about in such a matter of fact manner.
p. 376 "'We got to be married', she said, and he thought he heard the quick sound of scare in her tone. 'We just got to be married.'...He couldn't abide Kentucky longer, couldn't abide the little boresome life...or this girl that thought she owned him...He left her sobbing in the grass."
My note immediately after reading this passage says "This frees me not to like this guy now--before there was an indictment on my deficiency of masculinity (influencing my responses). What does A.B. Guthrie think? He is so taken with the idea of this free man, that perhaps he considers this the way a free man would behave. He is not approving, exactly, but he is not condemnatory--moreso of killing (his friend) in hot-headed pique."
p. 379 "Boone looked at the ground, feeling the blood stir in him. It wasn't right for a woman to plague a man..." At' Summers's farm. Still on that kick. He also insults another passerby who is going to Oregon for being ruled by his wife. The messaging over the last 15 pages on this subject is strong. The point is that he is too raw and untamed even to live in the soft world of 1843 Missouri now. I forgot to mention that when he came he was looking for some men who had done him wrong earlier in the story when he was younger in order to kill them, but they were already dead.
This book was the first of a six novel sequence involving, for three of the volumes anyway, Caudill, Summers and other of the characters introduced here. The second book The Way West, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, though neither it nor any other Guthrie books made it onto this list, and the last entry, which is chronologically the third and features the characters talked about here, was published in 1982! Guthrie was alive well into my lifetime, dying at the age of 90 on April 26, 1991, a Friday. I was a freshman in college, I wonder if it was the night before the Croquet Match? If so I remember that weekend well, the Saturday especially.
The Challenge
1. Daniel Keyes--Flowers For Algernon...………………………………..1,902
2. The Joy of Cooking...…………………………………………………...1,785
3. Stephen King--Salem's Lot...…………………………………………...1,610
4. Shirley Jackson--The Haunting of Hill House...………………………..1,254
5. Peter Cozzens--The Earth is Weeping...………………………………….286
6. Michael McDowell--The Elementals...…………………………………...282
7. Lisa Jewell--The Family Upstairs...………………………………………122
8. John Mack Faragher--Daniel Boone...……………………………………..68
9. Amy Webb--The Signals Are Talking...……………………………………40
10. Erin Morgenstern--The Starless Sea...……………………………………35
11. Paul Griffin--Saving Marty...……………………………………………..25
12. Mitch Albom--Finding Chika...…………………………………………..21
13. Tabitha Barrett--The Third Throne: Angel of Death...……………………16
14. Boone & Crockett Club--Hunting in Many Lands...……………………….9
15. James Mooney--Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians...………………...2
16. Indians of North America: The Blackfeet...………………………………...2
1st Round
#1 Keyes over #16 Indians
#15 Mooney over #2 Joy
The cookbook had to go as soon as possible.
#3 King over #14 Boone and Crockett Club
I believe this is Stephen King's first appearance in the Challenge. While he seems to be getting more respect as the more forbidding ranks of literary critics either die off or lose the power to impose status as absolutely as they once did, I have never been able to get much into his writing. I did read a book by his son, who writes under the name of Joe Hill, for this program, which I quite liked. The elder wins here because the Boone and Crockett book is a statewide library no-show.
#4 Jackson over #13 Barrett
#5 Cozzens over #12 Albom
The new book by best-seller machine Albom hasn't been released yet, which must explain why it hasn't found its way into any libraries.
#11 Griffin over #6 McDowell
No analytic explanation here. The McDowell book just looks like something I really have no interest in reading.
#10 Morgenstern over #7 Jewell
Quite a few of these selections appear to be newer books that haven't arrived in libraries yet. The Morgenstern is available in one so far, which gives it the win.
#9 Webb over #8 Faragher
One kind of book I do not read much of are full length biographies. They are too long and contain much more information in them than I am usually interested in knowing. Also Webb's book appears to be a fairly recent (2016) futurist type of thing, which I might be persuaded to look into if it advances deep into the tournament.
Quarterfinals
#1 Keyes over #15 Mooney
#11 Griffin over #3 King
Griffin is a young adult book, but I think I will take over even a shorter (439 pages) Stephen King opus.
#4 Jackson over #10 Morgenstern
#9 Webb over #5 Cozzens
A big modern book about the tragedy of the Indian wars is something I probably should read but don't particularly want to if another option presents itself.
Semifinals
#1 Keyes over #11 Griffin
#4 Jackson over #9 Webb
In close contests the older book usually is the tiebreaker.
Championship
#4 Jackson over #1 Keyes
This was extremely close, as these books are from approximately the same era, are around the same length, and both hold some interest for me. In the end I decided I had slightly more interest in Jackson. There can only be one winner in these contests.
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