Fair Land

If you liked Big Sky you will enjoy the ongoing tale presented here. Guthrie presents a smoothly paced story of the last days of the mountain men, their challenges, their friends, and their women.

In Fair Land, Fair Land, A.B. Guthrie wrapped up the Old West part of his 6 novel series of the West. Guthrie had actually skipped over the period from 1845 to 1870 when he originally went from The Way West to These Thousand Hills. He was later convinced in 1982 to go back and finish the tale of Dick Summers. Guthrie places Summers in an extended autumn both of his own life and that of the old Indian way of life. Although Summers is over 70 by the end of the tale, he never really quite gets old - just a little 'ganted up'. Summers finds love with Teal Eye (Boone Caudill's foolishly rejected spouse) and companionship with Higgins - Hig - as they drift along in an idyllic life (if living on the prairie in the shadow of the Montana mountains can really be an idyll). Summers also meets up with his former trail mate Boone Caudill for a reckoning over Caudill's murder of Jim Deakins, but that denouement becomes almost anti-climactic. The telling is somewhat uneven (a stint living in a gold mining town seems like something stuck on to the story for no particular good reason), but Guthrie's love of Montana is evident in his description of the Bitteroot Valley. I literally was looking for an atlas to see just where this beautiful place was (and is). But the idyll does come to an end. The game gradually gets harder and harder to find, whites intrude more closely, and finally the soldiers come to establish a fort. The book ends with the Marias River Massacre. Perhaps the worst slaughter of Indians by the US Army, the history is related in Larry McMurtry's recent offering 'Oh, What a Slaughter'. Guthrie includes the shouted warning by one of the white scouts 'wrong camp!', but the soldiers don't really care and shoot down these peaceable Piegan Blackfoot because they were at hand and the hostiles had already fled. There's no way to make of this era a happy story and Guthrie doesn't try. A fine ending to the Dick Summers trilogy. Highly recommended.

A. B. Guthrie may be the most underrated 20th-century American writer and the first Big Sky trilogy is in there with _Moby Dick_ as an epic of disaster._Fair Land, Fair Land_, begins with Dick Summers deciding he doesn't like the Oregon to which he led a group in _The Way West._ Heading back to what is now Montana, he is joined by Hezekiah Higgins for reasons that are less than clear. Both marry Native American (Blackfeet and Flathead, respectively) women and live more in Native American than in Anglo Wild West society, though they cater to a boom town of gold-miners for a while.Through the first two-thirds of _Fair Land, Fair Land_ dark cloud gather and darken and pile up around the memory of Boone Caudill, the tragic brooding hero and monster of _The Big Sky._ And after the long-fated confrontation with him, other thunderheads form.Most of the book is elegaic fora wilderness being rapidly destroyed (the span of time of the novel is from 1845 to 1870) with an ending that is positively apocalyptic.Although the Blackfeet woman Teal Eye is the vortex of this novel (and of the last half of _The Big Sky_), the frequent accounts of hunting and the amount of killing make this, I guess, a "guy book," albeit one that easily could be argued to be about lethal aspects of masculinist conceptions of the physical and social worlds.