The Golden West - a book recommendation

We love the American West, past and present: its wide-open spaces, courteous folk, deep patriotism and scenic splendour, together with the resonance of its frontier past, move us beyond words. Here, men and boys alike automatically and un-self-consciously take off their baseball caps as the Flag passes by. The names of the towns - Dodge, Laramie, Ten Sleep, Cody, Buffalo, Worland, Deadwood - echo the voice of the cowboy. The buffalo again roam in increasing numbers where their ancestors once thundered. And the waitress' "y'all have a good day" rings true rather than the automaton-customer service-"trained" response of her more entitled cousin on either coast. It is a state of mind and a boast of greatness as much as a geographic location. Its iconography remains deeply rooted in the freest, greatest nation of the world.

If you would know the West, capital "W", one of its greatest chroniclers is the now little-remembered A B Guthrie. His 1947 novel The Big Sky tells of the mountain men who opened so many of its passes ahead of the wagon trains, the miners and the whole panoply of more storied heroes.

Here follows one of our favorite passages from this work:


[1837: the West is closing in, and Summers prepares to return East after
a lifetime as a mountain man]

"Two horses and a few fixin's and a letter of credit for three hundred and forty-three dollars. That was all, unless you counted the way he had felt about living and the fun he had had while time ran along unnoticed. It had been rich doings, except that he wondered at the last, seeing everything behind him and nothing ahead. 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. He wanted to fight it then, to hold it back, to catch what had been borne away. It wasn't that he minded going under, it wasn't that he was afraid to die and rot and forget and be forgotten; it was that things were lost to him more and more - the happy feeling, the strong doing, the fresh taste for things like drink and women and danger, the friends he had fought and funned with, the notion that each new day would be better than the last, good as the last one was. A man's later life was all a long losing, of friends and fun and hope, until at last time took the mite that was left of him and so closed the score."

- A. B. Guthrie, Jr, The Big Sky (1947)