A few years back, I read A.B. Guthrie, Jr’s incredible mountain man novel, The Big Sky. An adequate description of that novel deserves more than a passing mention, but suffice to say, it truly stands as one of the best of the best in mountain man literature. The language is just fantastic, and having been written in the late 1940s, I can only imagine the author wasn’t too far removed from some folks who may have been kin to the original source material.
After having found out there was a sequel, I hemmed and hawed on it a bit, slightly less interested in the story of a mountain man leading a pioneer train down the Oregon Trail vs. a more period novel. However, I recently took the plunge and was really glad I did.
As I learned in reading the memoir, Sixty Years on the Plains, though the “age of the mountain man” was short lived (generally recognized as 1800-1840, or thereabouts), the mountain men themselves didn’t just head back into civilization once the fallen price of beaver pelts killed the rendezvous system.
In The Way West, we get a glimpse of mountain man Dick Summers, a character from The Big Sky. Whereas The Big Sky shows him as a much younger trapper, in The Way West, he’s now the “old hand,” brought out of an agricultural semi-retirement to lead a wagon train of pioneers from Missouri and points east to what’s thought of as the Oregonian Promised Land.
In one scene, the author is contrasting mountain man Dick Summer’s slim equipage vs that of the other members of the wagon train:
Evans was looking at Summers’ little pile of plunder. There wasn’t much there, not near enough by the rules – a blanket and an old buffalo robe that covered just a teensy keg of whisky, a little bit of meal, about a shirttail full of it, and salt meat and coffee and tobacco and a kettle and a couple of knives and two rifles, his Hawken ad an over-and-under double barrel with one bore big enough for bird shot. He had a little of Indian goods, too, blue and white beads and fishhooks and tobacco and a roll of scarlet strouding and some vermilion. All of his plunder put together wasn’t’ more than a couple of pack horses could carry easy. Even so, it was more than he needed. He could travel from hell to breakfast with no more than a gun and a horse, and would get there in time for dinner without the horse.
Makes me think that a pretty good challenge would be to approach an event with a similar outfit of gear, minus the trade goods of course. (Though, it may be good to trade for better vittles instead of camp dogging).
There is a cool scene where the erstwhile mountain man reminisces about his time with his former colleagues, the author noting the change in Summers’ language as he interacts with his fellows:
“How be you? Fat, I’m thinkin’.” Voices calling across the years, mouths laughing, hands slapping him on the back. “Worth a pack of beaver to see you, you ol’ bastard, and if you got a dry, here’s whisky.”
The deeper the wagon train pushes into the flat wilderness of the plains and western deserts, the more we get a sense of Summers’ sense of loss and reminiscing about the shinin’ times gone by.
Though not strictly a “mountain man” novel per se, The Way West presents an interesting look at the trials and travails which faced these travelers – both nature and man – and the hardship of the journey is adequately summed in one of the closing passages of the book:
How much would he like Oregon except for sweat and grief along the way? Grief bowed the heart, but made it richer, so that joy was rich.
AB Guthrie, Jr’s fantastic writing sure holds up after more than 60 years, and The Way West holds up as does The Big Sky as some of the more fantastic literature of the early days of the American West.