Book Report--The Big Sky

It's hard for me to remember deeply enjoying a novel that's quite so difficult to describe. I loved The Big Sky, which, I suppose, shouldn't be shocking, given my preoccupation with the American West in the last decade. I didn't pick the novel up because A. B. Guthrie won a Pulitzer; besides, his prize came for The Way West, his subsequent novel of a subsequent moment, the greatest American migration of all, much of it occurring on what we call today "the Oregon Trail."

The Big Sky's story, broadly speaking, is the yarns of the mountain man, an immensely important character who may well have received short shrift, even when "Westerns" were a popular obsession. If they did, their exclusion may have been occasioned by the fact that there were so few--and, perhaps, because many were French. The Oregon Trail is American a rhapsody from a multitude; the mountain man, often as not, worked with just a few trusted friends. Their numbers never amounted to much. Tens of thousands, at its height, traveled the Oregon Trail; all tolled, there weren't all that many trappers. Go ahead, name one or two: John Colter, Hugh Glass, Jedediah Smith, and the guy with the knife--Jim Bowie. That's about it.

The Big Sky concerns the adventures of a threesome--two youngins, Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and an old trapper named Dick Summers, who's soon to leave his last rendezvous. Guthrie gives them each his moment at the helm as they move up and down the rivers of the American West; but more than the others, the novel's real story is Boone Caudill, who leaves a fractured home in Kentucky and lights out for the west, as so incredibly many did throughout the entire 19th century.

In much the same way as Shane is considered among the finest "westerns" Hollywood ever produced, The Big Sky has to be ranked among the finest novels in the genre. The thing is, The Big Sky transcends its genre, even though all the characters sound like Gabby Hayes, even though trapping beaver and killing buffalo are mainstays, even though drinking whiskey and getting it on with Injun' girls is the company standard.

In the censoring madness going on today, it's not impossible to imagine The Big Sky being kept off library shelves, although by the libs among us, not our MAGA types. To say the language Guthrie uses is objectionable is plain understatement, and the outright misogyny goes without saying; the boys gets their annual jollies when Native fathers sell their daughters for whiskey or ribbons and baubles, and all, or so it seems, go away happy.

The wilderness is a place where sheer physical strength is as necessary to life as oxygen. It was a man's world, where going without food or shelter for days on end wasn't rare, where the immensity of the natural environment made a solitary man pay a price for what was, undoubtedly, a hardscrabble kingdom of freedom.

If Guthrie is to be believed, the only way to get by in the wilderness was by learning to live with it, and the very best teachers were Native. By the time Boone Caudill returns to Kentucky, the locals who don't recognize him think he's Indian. After all, he dresses, wear his hair, and keeps silence like an Indian. He looks Native, talks Native. After a dozen winters, the uncolonized American west has fashioned him to be, like the woman he treasured, a Piegan.

The language of the novel is extraordinary, sometimes as breathtaking as the wilderness it attempts to offer a reader. There's this, for instance, a view he might have taken from atop Spirit Mound:

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. It occurred to Boone that this was the way a bird must feel, free and loose, with the world to choose from. Nothing moved from sky line to sky line. Only down on the river he could see the keelboat showing between the trees, nosing up river like a slow fish. He marked how she poked ahead. He looked on to the tumble of hills that closed in on the river and wondered if she could ever get that far.

There are similar remarkable passages on every page, sometimes maybe a little cartoonish, but more often stunning reveries etched with detailed descriptions in that odd and colorful language. You can't help but wonder how it is that book wasn't written until the 1940s. A. B. Guthrie had to be a mountain man himself. He wasn't.

Boone Caudill might well have learned to kill back in Kentucky or Missouri, but he doesn't do it deliberately until, by the law of the jungle wilderness, he feels he has to, in one case to protect a Native friend from abuse, in another, like an Indian, to steal a horse he needed for survival.

He could well have learned to love back in Kentucky too. In fact, the jealousy which finally and insanely consumes him has no wilderness earmark. In the end, when Boone Caudill kills that which he loves, he's just, sadly enough, another Othello.

A. B. Guthrie's Shane transcended its genre by presenting character who isn't at all bigger-than-life, who isn't mythic, isn't just another John Wayne, but instead a real live human being who happened, once upon a time, to be a gunslinger. Like Shane, The Big Sky is about three Jim Bowies, but none of them make a big deal out of some kind of iconic knife.

There are n-words on almost every chapter, even though the vast majority of usages are by white men referring to themselves as such. I don't know that I can say it more clearly than this--not a single page of The Big Sky is properly politically correct. It's a liberal's nightmare, a MAGA man's bread and butter, but, finally, it's a great novel.

I loved it. This forsworn lib just plain loved it anyway.