What I'm Reading This Month
By Nadine Holder
August 2007
Wolf Willow, A History, A Story, and A Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, by Wallace Stegner, Penguin Books, 2000 (first published 1962, first copyrighted by Stegner in 1955)
Being a ranch girl born and raised, I am fascinated by early western US History. Last month I read and reported on "Lazy B" by Sandra Day O’Connor, a story of her being born and raised a ranch girl not far from us in Cochise County.
Stegner's writing is pure poetry and absolutely uncanny for taking you directly into scenes that ring true.
She often quoted Wallace Stegner in her book. I was familiar with his writing, having read his Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West a few years back as part of a reading program at the Sierra Vista Library about the water problems the West is facing. Although I have since read much about these problems (while keeping one eye on my well production every single day of my life), his is one of the very best explanations about why we have the problem in the first place (It boils down to something called "Big Government that doesn't have a clue what it is doing").
Stegner was the son of immigrants and grew up moving about rural areas in the West with his family before finally settling in Montana, just south of the Canadian Border where the wolf willows grow in plenitude (and not much else!). He grew up with a hard scrabble life and little education but ultimately obtained a doctorate and founded the creative writing program at Stanford University (probably how Sandra Day O’Connor knew him as she is a Stanford graduate.) "Wolf Willow," in addition to being the story of his boyhood, contains the history of the laying out of the 49th parallel that separates Canada and the United States and how that perpetuated mistakes made all over the West in forcing land surveys to go against nature and ultimately dooming much of the West to failure as a reasonable home for human beings. Stegner's writing is pure poetry and absolutely uncanny for taking you directly into scenes that ring true. I grew up in Wyoming, though in a place not quite as harsh as the borderlands he writes about, and am not sure if that background is what makes his words ring so true to me or if it is just his skill as a wordsmith.
Stegner paints pictures of the last dying out of the Indian tribes in North America, the coming of the Canadian Mounted Police, and the differences between the CMP and the wildcat law enforcers on the U. S. side of the border. The early fate of the Mounties is one of his most poignant descriptions as he describes them in their grand uniforms, with pikes and helmets, and with each separate group mounted on a different breed of English purebred horse. English horses born and bred on the misty moors of England and now transplanted to a harsh and unforgiving climate in the North American West. He describes the only transportation for feed for the horses and the men coming in huge carts with huge solid wooden wheels that squawked every foot of the way as they turned and turned - moving hundreds of tons of supplies to a land that provided no food for man or beast. The fate of the English horses is especially sad as they had no idea that hay was a food and could not abide either the extreme heat or the extreme cold and died to the very last one. Stegner barely dips into the respect the Indians had for the Mounties as opposed to US lawmen and what a difference that made in the so called"winning of the West." The pageantry of the Mounties seemed to be what truly won the hearts of the Indians.
Stegner's descriptions of the thousands of heads of cattle that died as well due to man's ignorance of the land and despite the heroic efforts of early cowboys is heart wrenching as well. His one chapter on the cattle is tagged by himself as "fiction" but it covers nearly the whole history of the cattle industry in the harsh northwestern US and western Canada. From his description of the English lad, proud of landing a $2 per month job as a cowboy and ever wondering if he could earn respect, to the grizzled cook who had survived many years in that land and who made fires from "cow pies" (letting us know this is a fuel in a land with no trees) at every opportunity in order to make gruel to keep his cowboys from freezing to death. The young, inexperienced cattle died too, forming cold, dead heaps on the prairie, but the experienced cattle found the sheltered draws where the wolf willow grew and sustained themselves to make it to the spring cattle drive to the slaughter pens and kept the scattered ranches going for at least a few years.
Stegner left the area of the wolf willows very early in his life and went back to visit late in his life and chased down the history of the area as he looked for memories that he could not find in his visits. The result is a tremendously beautiful and moving rendering of the change from pioneer days to the "modern world (1950's)." In his long life, Stegner produced some two dozen works of fiction, history, a biography, and essays, winning several prestigious prizes along the way. And many of his students at Stanford went on to become respected writers. If you have the least interest in history of the American West, don't miss reading a Stegner book!