What do you think?
Rate this book
Wolf Willow: A History, a Story & a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier
Wallace Stegner weaves together fiction and nonfiction, history and impressions, childhood remembrance and adult reflections in this unusual portrait of his boyhood. Set in Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where Stegner's family homesteaded from 1914 to 1920, Wolf Willow brings to life both the pioneer community and the magnificent landscape that surrounds it. This Twentieth-Century Classics edition includes a new introductory essay by Page Stegner.
320 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 1962
136 people are currently reading
1,962 people want to read
About the author
Wallace Stegner
174books1,996followersWallace Earle Stegner was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. Some call him "The Dean of Western Writers." He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 159 reviews
February 17, 2021
I'm not sure whether to call this memoir, history, or fictional inspiration, but whatever is it, it's Stegner so it's good.
Stegner goes back to Whitemud, Saskachewan, where he spent his early childhood homesteading with his family. He is in his 50's, so this is a trip down memory lane for him. He not only remembers his boyhood in town in the winters and farming wheat and flax on their homestead in the summers, but incorporates the history of the Plains, the Native Americans, and even the Royal Canadian Mounties. He throws in a couple of short stories to illustrate the harsh life of the cowboys and the homesteaders as well.
Having read Big Rock Candy Mountain just a few months ago, I recognized a lot of the memories in this book that he incorporated into his fiction. He himself admitted he wasn't sure what was fiction and what was memory, but, as I said, it's Stegner, so it doesn't matter.
Stegner goes back to Whitemud, Saskachewan, where he spent his early childhood homesteading with his family. He is in his 50's, so this is a trip down memory lane for him. He not only remembers his boyhood in town in the winters and farming wheat and flax on their homestead in the summers, but incorporates the history of the Plains, the Native Americans, and even the Royal Canadian Mounties. He throws in a couple of short stories to illustrate the harsh life of the cowboys and the homesteaders as well.
Having read Big Rock Candy Mountain just a few months ago, I recognized a lot of the memories in this book that he incorporated into his fiction. He himself admitted he wasn't sure what was fiction and what was memory, but, as I said, it's Stegner, so it doesn't matter.
November 2, 2020
“For here, pungent and pervasive, is the smell that has always meant my childhood. I have never smelled it anywhere else, and it is evocative as Proust’s Madeleine and tea�.
“But what is it?....
“Then I pull myself up the bank by a gray-leafed bush, and I have it. The tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native smell is no more than the shrub we called wolf willow, now blooming with small yellow flowers.
“It is wolf willow, and not the town or anyone in it, that brings me home.� � Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow
When Wolf Willow was first published in 1962, it had a subtitle: a History, a Story and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, which had been added by the publisher. Wallace Stegner objected to the subtitle because he thought it made it appear that the book lacked a unified theme. Therefore, the subtitle was removed in later editions.
I know that it is rather absurd of me to disagree with “the dean of western writers,� but I think the subtitle was perfect because it served as a precise description of the book’s unique structure which combines history, fiction, and memoir.
A HISTORY
The first part of the book is a history of the area in and around where the town of Eastend, (which Stegner gives the name of Whitemud) Saskatchewan was eventually founded on the banks of the Frenchman River, an area located on the northern Great Plains, but one that is broken up by the Cypress Hills.
In this section, Stegner provides the reader with vivid depictions of place, including topography and climate, the native peoples of the area, and the metis, who are of a mixed indigenous and French ancestry. Also included is the founding of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an organization for which Stegner expresses great admiration. He applauds the success that the Mounties enjoyed in dealing with strife and conflict in the area, which he contrasts with the heavy handed methods of the U.S. cavalry on the other side of the border.
Saskatchewan is located west of the 100th meridian, which means that it is a semi-arid region that receives an average of only 10 to 20 inches of rainfall per year, a climate that climatologists identify as steppe. That lack of rainfall explains why homesteaders attempting to farm in the region experienced more failure than success. However, even though that amount of rainfall, without irrigation, made farming a tricky proposition, it was a natural short grass prairie that was conducive to cattle ranching. Consequently, a number of cattle ranches were established in the area, but its climate, while totally unreliable when it comes to rainfall during the spring and summer, can also deliver a brutally harsh winter.
The winter of 1906-07 was one of the harshest, a big freeze that devastated cattle ranching and wiped out most of the area’s ranches.
And that brings us to:
A STORY
Smack dab in the middle of the 300 page history/memoir Stegner does something highly unusual; he inserts a 100 page fictional story told primarily from the point of view of an English greenhorn cowboy. It is a riveting tale of eight ranch hands attempting to round-up cows and calves in early November 1906 in order to drive them to a location where they can be fed during the winter.
Their job is made more difficult by the onslaught of an early horrific blizzard. Eventually, their efforts go through a transition from a desperate attempt to save the cattle to an even more desperate attempt to save themselves.
It was writer T.H. Watkins’s opinion that the novella was the greatest story ever written about “the true nature of ranching and cowboying in the West.�
After the cruel winter devastated the cattle ranches, homesteaders moved into the area in a misguided attempt to establish a viable agricultural economy. The Stegners were among those misguided and their story is recounted in:
A MEMORY
In 1914, Stegner’s family migrated to southwestern Saskatchewan to try their luck as farmers. Their homestead was located just north of the U.S. � Canadian border. The family spent winters in the town of Eastend where Wallace and his older brother attended school. Their father moved to the shack on the homestead in the spring when it came time to plow and plant the crops and the sons and their mother joined him at the end of the school year.
Unable to overcome drought and poverty, the family threw in the towel and pulled up stakes in 1920 and left the area. However, Stegner believed that those years in Saskatchewan represented a significant chapter in his life for they were the years that corresponded to his ages between five and twelve, which he believed to be the most impressionable years in the life of a child.
Years later Stegner returned and it was the aroma and memory of the wolf willow that he encountered that produced in him a feeling of nostalgia for those years and led him to attempt to recapture the past in the coming-of-age memoir that serves as the book’s coda.
Skillfully written, meticulously researched, and beautifully evocative of time and place, Wolf Willow represents Stegner at the top of his game.
“But what is it?....
“Then I pull myself up the bank by a gray-leafed bush, and I have it. The tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native smell is no more than the shrub we called wolf willow, now blooming with small yellow flowers.
“It is wolf willow, and not the town or anyone in it, that brings me home.� � Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow
When Wolf Willow was first published in 1962, it had a subtitle: a History, a Story and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, which had been added by the publisher. Wallace Stegner objected to the subtitle because he thought it made it appear that the book lacked a unified theme. Therefore, the subtitle was removed in later editions.
I know that it is rather absurd of me to disagree with “the dean of western writers,� but I think the subtitle was perfect because it served as a precise description of the book’s unique structure which combines history, fiction, and memoir.
A HISTORY
The first part of the book is a history of the area in and around where the town of Eastend, (which Stegner gives the name of Whitemud) Saskatchewan was eventually founded on the banks of the Frenchman River, an area located on the northern Great Plains, but one that is broken up by the Cypress Hills.
In this section, Stegner provides the reader with vivid depictions of place, including topography and climate, the native peoples of the area, and the metis, who are of a mixed indigenous and French ancestry. Also included is the founding of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an organization for which Stegner expresses great admiration. He applauds the success that the Mounties enjoyed in dealing with strife and conflict in the area, which he contrasts with the heavy handed methods of the U.S. cavalry on the other side of the border.
Saskatchewan is located west of the 100th meridian, which means that it is a semi-arid region that receives an average of only 10 to 20 inches of rainfall per year, a climate that climatologists identify as steppe. That lack of rainfall explains why homesteaders attempting to farm in the region experienced more failure than success. However, even though that amount of rainfall, without irrigation, made farming a tricky proposition, it was a natural short grass prairie that was conducive to cattle ranching. Consequently, a number of cattle ranches were established in the area, but its climate, while totally unreliable when it comes to rainfall during the spring and summer, can also deliver a brutally harsh winter.
The winter of 1906-07 was one of the harshest, a big freeze that devastated cattle ranching and wiped out most of the area’s ranches.
And that brings us to:
A STORY
Smack dab in the middle of the 300 page history/memoir Stegner does something highly unusual; he inserts a 100 page fictional story told primarily from the point of view of an English greenhorn cowboy. It is a riveting tale of eight ranch hands attempting to round-up cows and calves in early November 1906 in order to drive them to a location where they can be fed during the winter.
Their job is made more difficult by the onslaught of an early horrific blizzard. Eventually, their efforts go through a transition from a desperate attempt to save the cattle to an even more desperate attempt to save themselves.
It was writer T.H. Watkins’s opinion that the novella was the greatest story ever written about “the true nature of ranching and cowboying in the West.�
After the cruel winter devastated the cattle ranches, homesteaders moved into the area in a misguided attempt to establish a viable agricultural economy. The Stegners were among those misguided and their story is recounted in:
A MEMORY
In 1914, Stegner’s family migrated to southwestern Saskatchewan to try their luck as farmers. Their homestead was located just north of the U.S. � Canadian border. The family spent winters in the town of Eastend where Wallace and his older brother attended school. Their father moved to the shack on the homestead in the spring when it came time to plow and plant the crops and the sons and their mother joined him at the end of the school year.
Unable to overcome drought and poverty, the family threw in the towel and pulled up stakes in 1920 and left the area. However, Stegner believed that those years in Saskatchewan represented a significant chapter in his life for they were the years that corresponded to his ages between five and twelve, which he believed to be the most impressionable years in the life of a child.
Years later Stegner returned and it was the aroma and memory of the wolf willow that he encountered that produced in him a feeling of nostalgia for those years and led him to attempt to recapture the past in the coming-of-age memoir that serves as the book’s coda.
Skillfully written, meticulously researched, and beautifully evocative of time and place, Wolf Willow represents Stegner at the top of his game.
September 24, 2024
Wallace Stegner at one time stated that Wolf Willow is “a history, a story, and a memory of the last plains frontier.� The “history� is that of the country around the Cypress Hills in Saska. And a “story� was the fictional tale of cowboys and cattle in the terrible winter of 1907. And the “memory� is Stegner’s nostalgic account of his boyhood in what he names “Whitemud� where his family migrated in 1914 to southern Saskatchewan in a homestead on the Montana-Canadian border. Parts of this book were reminiscent of his fictional The Big Rock Candy Mountain and thought to be autobiographical. This particular edition has a wonderful introduction to the book by Page Stegner, Wallace Stegner’s son. And as he speaks of any categorization 0f Wolf Willow as follows:
Since I have been reading the fictional Lonesome Dove series by Larry McMurtry, I was thrilled to savor reading this book with all of Wallace Stegner’s beautiful and poetic prose. This is a book to be read and enjoyed by those with the American West in their hearts, whether that be in the western United States or in Canada. And whether it be “a history, a story, and a memory of the last plains frontier,� it was magnificent as Wallace Stegner does best.
“But ‘Wolf Willow� is utterly atypical of conventional history. What we have here is history filtered through the evocative and judgmental mind (and memory) of the region’s most illustrious native son; Stegner’s response to his subject is a kind of stratified formation of anthropology, sociology, geography, geology, and ecology applied to a literal place—and to literal place as a state of mind.�
Since I have been reading the fictional Lonesome Dove series by Larry McMurtry, I was thrilled to savor reading this book with all of Wallace Stegner’s beautiful and poetic prose. This is a book to be read and enjoyed by those with the American West in their hearts, whether that be in the western United States or in Canada. And whether it be “a history, a story, and a memory of the last plains frontier,� it was magnificent as Wallace Stegner does best.
“But these portraits I never discussed with anyone, and the memory has to be from my own direct perception. They hang in my head unaltered and undimmed after nearly half a century, static, austere, symbolic. And if I had known all of the history of Canada and the United States I could not have picked out a more fitting symbol of what made the Canadian West a different West from the American.�
“All of it was legitimately mine, I walked that earth, but none of it was known to me.�
“On those miraculously beautiful and murderously cold nights glittering with the green and blue darts from a sky like polished dark metal, when the moon had gone down, leaving the hollow heavens to the stars and the overflowing cold light of the Aurora, he thought he had moments of the clearest vision and saw himself plain in a universe simple, callous, and magnificent. In every direction from their pallid soap bubble of shelter the snow spread; here and there the implacable plain glinted back a spark—the beam of cold star reflected in a crystal of ice.�
“Sancta Maria, speed us!
The sun is falling low;
Before us lies the valley
Of the Walker of the Snow!
February 4, 2023
My favorite of Stegner’s, rich with story and intricate prose. It really is quality writing and often enthralling.
The wolf willow has this amazing scent when it’s beginning to open and mature in the spring. Quite exhilarating. I’ve often wished it could be captured in a cologne I could splash on after shaving every morning.
The wolf willow has this amazing scent when it’s beginning to open and mature in the spring. Quite exhilarating. I’ve often wished it could be captured in a cologne I could splash on after shaving every morning.
January 3, 2021
"The plain spreads southward below the Trans-Canada Highway, an ocean of wind-troubled grass and grain. It has its remembered textures: winter wheat heavily headed, scoured and shadowed as if schools of fish move in it; spring wheat with its young seed-rows as precise as combings in a boy's wet hair; gray-brown summer fallow with the weeds disked under; and grass, the marvelous curly prairie wool tight to the earth's skin, straining the wind as the wheat does, but in its own way, secretly."
Stegner is the poet and the prophet of that great, endless expanse of wilderness that floods across the US/Canadian border. Iowa, Utah, Montana, Saskatchewan, all lumped together in the American imagination in that evocative phrase: "The West". He writes of the land, of the importance of wilderness, of a certain type of hardship, of a vanished world. I have read pretty much everything he has written, and nothing in the whole bunch ever sounded a wrong note. This particular book slips between autobiography, fiction and history to tell of a particular place and a particular time (Saskatchewan from about 1906-1920). It explores that end of the pioneer culture, and the evolution of pioneer communities. It also seeks to analyze why the dream of progress failed in that hard climate:
"It is an object lesson in the naïveté of the American hope of a new society. It emphasizes the predictability and the repetitiousness of the frontier curve from hope to habit, from optimism to country rut, from American Dream to Revolt against the Village� That curve is possible anywhere in America, but nearly inevitable on the Plains, because on the Plains the iron inflexibilities of low rainfall, short growing season, monotonous landscape, and wide extreme of temperatures limit the number of people who can settle and the prosperity and contentment of the ones who manage to stick.
Stegner is the poet and the prophet of that great, endless expanse of wilderness that floods across the US/Canadian border. Iowa, Utah, Montana, Saskatchewan, all lumped together in the American imagination in that evocative phrase: "The West". He writes of the land, of the importance of wilderness, of a certain type of hardship, of a vanished world. I have read pretty much everything he has written, and nothing in the whole bunch ever sounded a wrong note. This particular book slips between autobiography, fiction and history to tell of a particular place and a particular time (Saskatchewan from about 1906-1920). It explores that end of the pioneer culture, and the evolution of pioneer communities. It also seeks to analyze why the dream of progress failed in that hard climate:
"It is an object lesson in the naïveté of the American hope of a new society. It emphasizes the predictability and the repetitiousness of the frontier curve from hope to habit, from optimism to country rut, from American Dream to Revolt against the Village� That curve is possible anywhere in America, but nearly inevitable on the Plains, because on the Plains the iron inflexibilities of low rainfall, short growing season, monotonous landscape, and wide extreme of temperatures limit the number of people who can settle and the prosperity and contentment of the ones who manage to stick.
August 26, 2022
4+📓📓📓📓
Essays and remembrances from my favorite writer. It's Stegner so there were many five star moments. I was humming Jim Croce's Time In A Bottle. . .times gone by saved in these pages.
Essays and remembrances from my favorite writer. It's Stegner so there were many five star moments. I was humming Jim Croce's Time In A Bottle. . .times gone by saved in these pages.
March 30, 2016
Description: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner's boyhood was spent on the beautiful and remote frontier of the Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where his family homesteaded from 1914 to 1920. In a recollection of his years there, Stegner applies childhood remembrance and adult reflection to the history of the region to create this wise and enduring portrait of a pioneer community existing on the verge of a modern world.
The geologist who surveyed southern Saskatchewan in the 1870s called it one of the most desolate and forbidding regions on earth.
Lots here to like and will appeal to those who know the area in real life, and those who delight in Stegner's prose. Recommended.
4* The Spectator Bird
4* Wolf Willow
4* Angle of Repose
The geologist who surveyed southern Saskatchewan in the 1870s called it one of the most desolate and forbidding regions on earth.
Speed on, speed on, good Master!
The camp lies far away;
We must cross the haunted valley
Before the close of day.
Lots here to like and will appeal to those who know the area in real life, and those who delight in Stegner's prose. Recommended.4* The Spectator Bird
4* Wolf Willow
4* Angle of Repose
May 7, 2007
This book has no right to be so absorbing. Though the topic of this forgotten book by Wallace Stegner reeks of self-indulgence-- A writer returns to where he grew up, reminisces about his youth and the history of the frontier town his transient childhood most identified as home and concludes with a 100-page fictionalized account of a the terrible winter of 1906-- he manages to tie his past inexorably to ours, linking his nostalgia for his youth with our own, and exploring the promise and inevitable waste of the American Dream lived out on our frontiers.
Stegner, like Proust, experiences an "ancient, unbearable recognition" spurred by a return to the sites, sounds, and most importantly, smells of his childhood. He dreams of this period and is "haunted, on awakening, by a sense of meanings just withheld, and by a profound nostalgic melancholy." Everyone has some awareness of a deep meaning lurking in our past that has not, or cannot, be fully interpreted.
Perhaps the best part of the book is section three, the novella length exposition on the hope and danger of the high plains that does a superb job of creating looming dread as the winter drops hard on the land. Near the end of section three, Stegner expounds on what it is to be an American pursuing the Dream:
"How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of progress? One who has lived the dream, the temporary fulfillment, and the disappointment has had the full course.... The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery and freedom of the wild. Any who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world."
Stegner, like Proust, experiences an "ancient, unbearable recognition" spurred by a return to the sites, sounds, and most importantly, smells of his childhood. He dreams of this period and is "haunted, on awakening, by a sense of meanings just withheld, and by a profound nostalgic melancholy." Everyone has some awareness of a deep meaning lurking in our past that has not, or cannot, be fully interpreted.
Perhaps the best part of the book is section three, the novella length exposition on the hope and danger of the high plains that does a superb job of creating looming dread as the winter drops hard on the land. Near the end of section three, Stegner expounds on what it is to be an American pursuing the Dream:
"How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of progress? One who has lived the dream, the temporary fulfillment, and the disappointment has had the full course.... The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery and freedom of the wild. Any who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world."
July 14, 2024
Since I grew up in Saskatchewan, I loved this memoir by Wallace Stegner of his early childhood in the town of Eastend. Later he moved to the United States and became a famous environmentalist, as well as winning the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Angle of Repose. His modest family home in Eastend is now a writing retreat, and I visited it a couple of years ago. In Wolf Willow, he describes the history of the area with passion and drama. I read the book aloud to my husband as we were driving across the prairies, and we were both captivated.
Update July 2024: I received the Wallace Stegner annual Grant for the Arts and spent the month of June 2024 LIVING in the Stegner House! What a wonderful experience � not only the atmosphere in this heritage home, but the town and its residents, surrounded by the majestic grasslands � I wrote about the house in my monthly newsletter, Letters From Windermere, if you want to know more.
As an aside, not all the good folks in Eastend love Stegner's legacy, since he wrote rather disparagingly of the town after he returned in the 1950s. I'm sticking with my five-star review because the man could WRITE, and described the prairies like no other. Oddly enough, I felt more kinship with the ghost of his mother when I stayed in the house, since Wally was only a child at the time. I even cleaned the entire house in Hilda's memory!
Update July 2024: I received the Wallace Stegner annual Grant for the Arts and spent the month of June 2024 LIVING in the Stegner House! What a wonderful experience � not only the atmosphere in this heritage home, but the town and its residents, surrounded by the majestic grasslands � I wrote about the house in my monthly newsletter, Letters From Windermere, if you want to know more.
As an aside, not all the good folks in Eastend love Stegner's legacy, since he wrote rather disparagingly of the town after he returned in the 1950s. I'm sticking with my five-star review because the man could WRITE, and described the prairies like no other. Oddly enough, I felt more kinship with the ghost of his mother when I stayed in the house, since Wally was only a child at the time. I even cleaned the entire house in Hilda's memory!
January 23, 2023
One of the gifts of my life is a large dollop of curiosity. When I read, I look up words, listen to videos of the author, and locate geography. I root out recordings of songs. But how does one track down an unknown smell? When Stegner revisits Saskatchewan, he recognizes the aroma of his boyhood, the odor of the wolf willow shrub. I want to sniff it!
About "Genesis," a novella in the center of this quilt of history, memoir, geography, and fiction, Larry McMurtry said it "is as good a short novel as anybody has done about the West or any part of it." I concur. If only to read the novella, Wolf Willow is worthy.
I reveled in Stegner's prose. Glorious metaphors and similes. Vibrant verbs.
spring wheat with its young seed-rows as precise as combings in a boy's wet hair.
...history is a pontoon bridge.
The town dump was our poetry and our history.
the calluses of a life of hardship
The 49th parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two.
Time acts like a great slow cream separator.
Reading Intersections:
Grace Olmstead's memoir Uprooted about Emmett, Idaho, covers similar territory of small western towns who lose their best and brightest to the cities.
In Beyond the Hundredth Meridian Stegner writes about John Wesley Powell and the problems of settling an arid landscape.
About "Genesis," a novella in the center of this quilt of history, memoir, geography, and fiction, Larry McMurtry said it "is as good a short novel as anybody has done about the West or any part of it." I concur. If only to read the novella, Wolf Willow is worthy.
I reveled in Stegner's prose. Glorious metaphors and similes. Vibrant verbs.
spring wheat with its young seed-rows as precise as combings in a boy's wet hair.
...history is a pontoon bridge.
The town dump was our poetry and our history.
the calluses of a life of hardship
The 49th parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two.
Time acts like a great slow cream separator.
Reading Intersections:
Grace Olmstead's memoir Uprooted about Emmett, Idaho, covers similar territory of small western towns who lose their best and brightest to the cities.
In Beyond the Hundredth Meridian Stegner writes about John Wesley Powell and the problems of settling an arid landscape.
February 12, 2021
Feb 9, 2am ~~ Review asap. This was wonderful!
Feb 11, 11pm ~~ Although 'officially' this is just my second Wallace Stegner, I have read most of his novels in pre-GR years, borrowing them from the library back in the years when our local library was more rounded than it is now.
So I was familiar with Stegner's work, but I had not known about this 1965 volume and when I noticed it while browsing a few months I snapped it up, then decided to read it for a Literary Birthday challenge in one of my groups. Stegner was born on February 18, 1909. Literary Birthday authors are read during their birthday month so this was a perfect time to slip this book to the top of the bedside pile.
The subtitle actually tells you most of what you need to know here: "A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier". Stegner not only talks about his personal history, he tells us about the history of an area of the country that was still a frontier long after most other frontiers had become 'civilized'.
Stegner's family spent six years homesteading in southern Saskatchewan Canada, just north of the international border. The town he calls Whitemud is actually Eastend, and the book opens with the way the town and country seemed to him as a child. But he is actually looking back as an adult: he has returned to see how life has treated 'his' town, and to try and recapture the sensations he lived through there as a boy. I have never gone back to the town where I lived at that age (Stegner moved to 'Whitemud' at age six) and I cannot imagine the shock of seeing the changes that would have developed over the many years since I left. Stegner was most surprised about the trees. He said there had been no trees in the town back then, they had always up and died whenever anyone tried to plant them.
So he wanders around the town pondering, getting a new feel for the place, but refusing to go out to the homestead acres. They would have been swept clean of any sign that his family had been there at all, and that he could not face. Stegner never feels at home in the town during his wanderings until he tracks down an aroma that triggers all his boyhood memories to return in a rush: the scent of the wolf willow plant.
This is a personal story, but more than that it is the history of the region. We see the first Europeans arrive, we witness conflicts between the Native People and the white man. We see the law appear in the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. We follow the surveyors along the 49th parallel. We see the cowboys arrive, and suffer through the terrible blizzards that made men wonder what they thought they were doing there. We see the homesteaders show up. It is all fascinating, and told in such a way that I never felt as though I was reading a school text book, which could have been the case with a less talented author.
The subtitle mentions a story, and the story comes in the section called Genesis. This is where Stegner imagines a young Englishman who has arrived in the country and hired on at a cattle ranch. He is thrilled at the romance of it all, and can hardly sit still while he and his new co-workers set out on their roundup. But what none of them realize is that this winter of 1906-1907 will be known forever as the worst storm season in a lifetime. (That is true.) This section is given as an offering of what it must have been lie to be a cowboy during that awful year which brought ruin to so many ranches in the area and cleared the way for the homesteaders to try their luck. A little bit of historical fiction within the history. And if you can read this Genesis without wrapping your blanket around you while you shiver, you are tougher than I am!
I also liked the vision of the Mounties setting off on their cross country trip to their new territory: each troop with their own distinct color of horse. I was amazed at the tortured journey of the surveyors plotting out the international boundary. Who knew there was more to it than holding up a tape and having some other person make signals at you?
Well, I suppose I could go on and on but I will spare you. This book was just incredible. Anyone interested in Canada should read it. Just keep that blanket close!
Feb 11, 11pm ~~ Although 'officially' this is just my second Wallace Stegner, I have read most of his novels in pre-GR years, borrowing them from the library back in the years when our local library was more rounded than it is now.
So I was familiar with Stegner's work, but I had not known about this 1965 volume and when I noticed it while browsing a few months I snapped it up, then decided to read it for a Literary Birthday challenge in one of my groups. Stegner was born on February 18, 1909. Literary Birthday authors are read during their birthday month so this was a perfect time to slip this book to the top of the bedside pile.
The subtitle actually tells you most of what you need to know here: "A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier". Stegner not only talks about his personal history, he tells us about the history of an area of the country that was still a frontier long after most other frontiers had become 'civilized'.
Stegner's family spent six years homesteading in southern Saskatchewan Canada, just north of the international border. The town he calls Whitemud is actually Eastend, and the book opens with the way the town and country seemed to him as a child. But he is actually looking back as an adult: he has returned to see how life has treated 'his' town, and to try and recapture the sensations he lived through there as a boy. I have never gone back to the town where I lived at that age (Stegner moved to 'Whitemud' at age six) and I cannot imagine the shock of seeing the changes that would have developed over the many years since I left. Stegner was most surprised about the trees. He said there had been no trees in the town back then, they had always up and died whenever anyone tried to plant them.
So he wanders around the town pondering, getting a new feel for the place, but refusing to go out to the homestead acres. They would have been swept clean of any sign that his family had been there at all, and that he could not face. Stegner never feels at home in the town during his wanderings until he tracks down an aroma that triggers all his boyhood memories to return in a rush: the scent of the wolf willow plant.
This is a personal story, but more than that it is the history of the region. We see the first Europeans arrive, we witness conflicts between the Native People and the white man. We see the law appear in the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. We follow the surveyors along the 49th parallel. We see the cowboys arrive, and suffer through the terrible blizzards that made men wonder what they thought they were doing there. We see the homesteaders show up. It is all fascinating, and told in such a way that I never felt as though I was reading a school text book, which could have been the case with a less talented author.
The subtitle mentions a story, and the story comes in the section called Genesis. This is where Stegner imagines a young Englishman who has arrived in the country and hired on at a cattle ranch. He is thrilled at the romance of it all, and can hardly sit still while he and his new co-workers set out on their roundup. But what none of them realize is that this winter of 1906-1907 will be known forever as the worst storm season in a lifetime. (That is true.) This section is given as an offering of what it must have been lie to be a cowboy during that awful year which brought ruin to so many ranches in the area and cleared the way for the homesteaders to try their luck. A little bit of historical fiction within the history. And if you can read this Genesis without wrapping your blanket around you while you shiver, you are tougher than I am!
I also liked the vision of the Mounties setting off on their cross country trip to their new territory: each troop with their own distinct color of horse. I was amazed at the tortured journey of the surveyors plotting out the international boundary. Who knew there was more to it than holding up a tape and having some other person make signals at you?
Well, I suppose I could go on and on but I will spare you. This book was just incredible. Anyone interested in Canada should read it. Just keep that blanket close!
November 7, 2021
So it took me awhile to read this one, partly because many sections of it has dense historical information and it's been awhile since I've read anything like that. To be honest I had run across this book by random chance one day and had picked it up - maybe you can guess this - because of the horses on the cover. I had literally no idea what this book was even about. No idea if it was fiction or nonfiction. There were horses on the cover so I had hoped they would be in the book as well (but that is no guarantee).
So this book is very much like a unicorn. It's an oddball as its both nonfiction AND fiction. I had never run across anything like that before. And I have a feeling the fictional story in here is based on facts although I don't know how much of it is true. The blizzard of 1906-1907 is true and I am sure many of the details are too...but I am unsure if the characters named had been real people or if perhaps only a few had been real.
So before I say anything else this book is about the history of an area in Saskatchewan called the Cypress Hills. And to be more precise the town called Whitemud (today it is apparently called Eastend and it seems to be a tourist destination for camping & natural beauty). The author grew up there in Whitemud. His family spent the summers there trying to farm and they spent the winters in Montana. As the last section of the book tells us, the land was just not suited well to farming due to the weather conditions. All of these issues are explained in great details from his memories.
It was fascinating to read his memories about life in the town back then. Oh, I found some of the facts boring - you know the stuff like "Mr so-and-so was leader of the town until XX year"...that sort of facts I just don't find engaging at all. But what I did love was his own personal stories of how things were back then. Some of the examples are: the river flooding with huge ice sheets until it broke a bridge over the river, his mother sewing him into his plaid clothing for two weeks at a time until it was time for the twice a month bath (but how did they go to the outhouse then if they were sewn into clothes??), how young kids had guns and it was common to go hunt rodents, the war between the farmers and the hungry rodents...
That stuff was fascinating!
And the horses!! Yes there are indeed horses in here! Lots of them. Ponies and strong Clydesdales! And until I read this I never dreamed that so many battles and lives had been lost because of horses! That bit was near the front of the book. People loved to steal horses and then often the former owners of the stolen horses would blame it on whoever was convenient; usually some native American tribe. It didn't seem to matter if they did it or not, which in my opinion is wrong. Pioneer days were very lawless in many ways and people could go do whatever they wanted. Kill who they wanted. But until I read this I had no idea so many innocent people had died because of stolen horses.
My favorite part of this book is without doubt the novella "Genesis" and it's short sequel "Carrion Spring". I believe they could be seen as one story although the main character changes. Carrion Spring shows us the aftermath of Genesis. Together the two are about 50,000 words by my estimation. I would say it's well worth reading this book just for Genesis. Such a superb story!
Genesis really brings history alive and the main character is a young man from England who decides he wants to be a cowboy and so he ends up working as a greenhorn in the Cypress Hills area. This is an excellent survival story! It's set during the horrible winter of 1906-1907. So think roaring winds, subzero temperature, blowing blizzards and all that entails. The things the cowboys must endure while trying to do their jobs are described in very vivid details. They have both ponies and Clydesdales with them and they have to try and get the calves in. This story just fascinated me and I cannot believe the conditions they had to live under. Like sleeping outside in a cloth tent with a blizzard blowing right outside! It's a miracle they didn't freeze! This story also is quick moving with much danger and excitement too. Plus lots of horses! And to make things more interesting the main character, Rusty, feels he doesn't fit in with the others. He likes to post while the others do a relaxed seated trot. So he tries to fit in as best he can but he also has a lit of self doubt. So Rusty grows through the story in a character arc.
There are also other odd little horse facts scattered throughout the book. One is that the eastern horses had fared rather bad on the grasses of the plains? And something about 'curly grass' or 'buffalo grass'? It seems different grass species grow in different areas!
Oh! And the book's name! The author states that a place has a certain smell. Did you ever notice that? A smell might make you think of someone or a location? Well to him the area he grew up had a distinct scent and he later discovered that smell was from a plant called Wolf Willow. But as a child growing up he never knew what was creating the unique smell. That makes me think how my elementary school had this unique scent too but I have no idea what it was.
But one of the most fascinating things I have read in here is this: you grow up in an area but you are taught the history of places far away, places on other continents that you will never see. And you are never taught the local history of where you live. And that is why the author wrote this book. He realized that the area he had grown up in had it's own history, a history he never knew. A history of tribes and pioneers and failed farms and weather all mixed together. What he says in here is true. And it was a revelation! I was taught the history of Greece, Egypt, Rome & Europe but nothing of my own state but I never actually realized that until I read this. And now I wonder why?
The Mounties are also mentioned in here too! I will close with a line from the book about the Mounties and their steeds.
"On July 8 they started, a spectacular cavalcade two miles long led by A Troop on dark bay horses, followed by B Troop on dark browns, C Troop on chestnuts, D Troop on grays and buckskins, E Troop on blacks and F Troop on bright bays. They went, in spite of Sir John Macdonald's desire to have a force with as little "gold lace, fuss and feathers, as possible," with the pump and circumstance at which the British have few equals: a stream of scarlet tunics, white helmets, white dragoon gauntlets, gleaming metal, polished leather, 275 picked officers and men on picked horses, the most brilliant procession that ever crossed these yellowing plains. Behind them lumbered the freight wagons, 73 of them, behind those 114 squealing Red River carts with metis drivers, and two 9-pounder field guns, and two brass mortars and field kitchens and portable forges and mowing machines for making hay en route and nearly one hundred cattle destined for slaughter before they reached the buffalo herds."
So this book is very much like a unicorn. It's an oddball as its both nonfiction AND fiction. I had never run across anything like that before. And I have a feeling the fictional story in here is based on facts although I don't know how much of it is true. The blizzard of 1906-1907 is true and I am sure many of the details are too...but I am unsure if the characters named had been real people or if perhaps only a few had been real.
So before I say anything else this book is about the history of an area in Saskatchewan called the Cypress Hills. And to be more precise the town called Whitemud (today it is apparently called Eastend and it seems to be a tourist destination for camping & natural beauty). The author grew up there in Whitemud. His family spent the summers there trying to farm and they spent the winters in Montana. As the last section of the book tells us, the land was just not suited well to farming due to the weather conditions. All of these issues are explained in great details from his memories.
It was fascinating to read his memories about life in the town back then. Oh, I found some of the facts boring - you know the stuff like "Mr so-and-so was leader of the town until XX year"...that sort of facts I just don't find engaging at all. But what I did love was his own personal stories of how things were back then. Some of the examples are: the river flooding with huge ice sheets until it broke a bridge over the river, his mother sewing him into his plaid clothing for two weeks at a time until it was time for the twice a month bath (but how did they go to the outhouse then if they were sewn into clothes??), how young kids had guns and it was common to go hunt rodents, the war between the farmers and the hungry rodents...
That stuff was fascinating!
And the horses!! Yes there are indeed horses in here! Lots of them. Ponies and strong Clydesdales! And until I read this I never dreamed that so many battles and lives had been lost because of horses! That bit was near the front of the book. People loved to steal horses and then often the former owners of the stolen horses would blame it on whoever was convenient; usually some native American tribe. It didn't seem to matter if they did it or not, which in my opinion is wrong. Pioneer days were very lawless in many ways and people could go do whatever they wanted. Kill who they wanted. But until I read this I had no idea so many innocent people had died because of stolen horses.
My favorite part of this book is without doubt the novella "Genesis" and it's short sequel "Carrion Spring". I believe they could be seen as one story although the main character changes. Carrion Spring shows us the aftermath of Genesis. Together the two are about 50,000 words by my estimation. I would say it's well worth reading this book just for Genesis. Such a superb story!
Genesis really brings history alive and the main character is a young man from England who decides he wants to be a cowboy and so he ends up working as a greenhorn in the Cypress Hills area. This is an excellent survival story! It's set during the horrible winter of 1906-1907. So think roaring winds, subzero temperature, blowing blizzards and all that entails. The things the cowboys must endure while trying to do their jobs are described in very vivid details. They have both ponies and Clydesdales with them and they have to try and get the calves in. This story just fascinated me and I cannot believe the conditions they had to live under. Like sleeping outside in a cloth tent with a blizzard blowing right outside! It's a miracle they didn't freeze! This story also is quick moving with much danger and excitement too. Plus lots of horses! And to make things more interesting the main character, Rusty, feels he doesn't fit in with the others. He likes to post while the others do a relaxed seated trot. So he tries to fit in as best he can but he also has a lit of self doubt. So Rusty grows through the story in a character arc.
There are also other odd little horse facts scattered throughout the book. One is that the eastern horses had fared rather bad on the grasses of the plains? And something about 'curly grass' or 'buffalo grass'? It seems different grass species grow in different areas!
Oh! And the book's name! The author states that a place has a certain smell. Did you ever notice that? A smell might make you think of someone or a location? Well to him the area he grew up had a distinct scent and he later discovered that smell was from a plant called Wolf Willow. But as a child growing up he never knew what was creating the unique smell. That makes me think how my elementary school had this unique scent too but I have no idea what it was.
But one of the most fascinating things I have read in here is this: you grow up in an area but you are taught the history of places far away, places on other continents that you will never see. And you are never taught the local history of where you live. And that is why the author wrote this book. He realized that the area he had grown up in had it's own history, a history he never knew. A history of tribes and pioneers and failed farms and weather all mixed together. What he says in here is true. And it was a revelation! I was taught the history of Greece, Egypt, Rome & Europe but nothing of my own state but I never actually realized that until I read this. And now I wonder why?
The Mounties are also mentioned in here too! I will close with a line from the book about the Mounties and their steeds.
"On July 8 they started, a spectacular cavalcade two miles long led by A Troop on dark bay horses, followed by B Troop on dark browns, C Troop on chestnuts, D Troop on grays and buckskins, E Troop on blacks and F Troop on bright bays. They went, in spite of Sir John Macdonald's desire to have a force with as little "gold lace, fuss and feathers, as possible," with the pump and circumstance at which the British have few equals: a stream of scarlet tunics, white helmets, white dragoon gauntlets, gleaming metal, polished leather, 275 picked officers and men on picked horses, the most brilliant procession that ever crossed these yellowing plains. Behind them lumbered the freight wagons, 73 of them, behind those 114 squealing Red River carts with metis drivers, and two 9-pounder field guns, and two brass mortars and field kitchens and portable forges and mowing machines for making hay en route and nearly one hundred cattle destined for slaughter before they reached the buffalo herds."
November 12, 2022
I really enjoyed this. It was one of those surprising little gems that I collected in a Value Village at some point, most likely because it was a penguin classic cover.
I was delighted to find that this book took place not too far from where my own father’s family settled after immigrating from England. In fact, I found that I was able to better understand my father and uncles by having read this, as I could see the environment they grew in and how that shaped them as men, for better or worse.
Like the author, I find in my later years an appreciation and thirst for history. Having been born in Saskatchewan, having had family living there all their lives and having a good deal of family history tied to this place, I especially appreciated how well the author wrote about his experiences there. He was able to evoke a time and place that will be indelibly set in my mind and I now feel even more inspired to visit Ravenscrag, where my family settled and Eastend, then I had before.
The writing style put me in mind of Steinbeck, whom I love, love, love. There was a casual informality but with gorgeous prose which I’m just a sucker for. The pacing was a little meandering at times and I may not have enjoyed it as much if I didn’t feel as though I had a personal interest in the history of the place but the fictional story of the newly arrived Englishman who wanted to be a cowboy and instead ended up in a devastatingly bad Saskatchewan winter was excellent. I’ll definitely be checking out more by this author.
I was delighted to find that this book took place not too far from where my own father’s family settled after immigrating from England. In fact, I found that I was able to better understand my father and uncles by having read this, as I could see the environment they grew in and how that shaped them as men, for better or worse.
Like the author, I find in my later years an appreciation and thirst for history. Having been born in Saskatchewan, having had family living there all their lives and having a good deal of family history tied to this place, I especially appreciated how well the author wrote about his experiences there. He was able to evoke a time and place that will be indelibly set in my mind and I now feel even more inspired to visit Ravenscrag, where my family settled and Eastend, then I had before.
The writing style put me in mind of Steinbeck, whom I love, love, love. There was a casual informality but with gorgeous prose which I’m just a sucker for. The pacing was a little meandering at times and I may not have enjoyed it as much if I didn’t feel as though I had a personal interest in the history of the place but the fictional story of the newly arrived Englishman who wanted to be a cowboy and instead ended up in a devastatingly bad Saskatchewan winter was excellent. I’ll definitely be checking out more by this author.
March 17, 2012
As a westerner madly in love with mountains, deserts and history of my homeland, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I haven't delved much into Wallace Stegner. I've read a tiny bit of his non-fiction, and none of his novels, but everybody who's anybody west of the 100th meridian knows all about this guy and recommends him...
And now I think I get it. Stegner nails the "sense of place" thing with this one, a combination of history and memoir, with an unforgettable novella dropped in smack dab in the middle of the book. All with the goal of painting a picture of the patch of Saskatchewan shortgrass prairie (right on the Montana border) he grew up on circa 1910 or so. He's writing decades later, after living, exploring and writing about the west, so when he goes back to visit and research he's looking through some interesting goggles. He and his family got to partake in the epic story that was the frontier: Trying to turn raw material into something that pays, and pays big, or at least better than whatever it was you left behind. Could be gold, furs, oil, or timber, but in this case it's the fertile topsoil of the plains and the rush to make it big with dryland wheat farms.
Stegner knows his family's experience was just one chapter of the history of that place, so he ties it into all the events that led up to his family's arrival. The usual suspects, albeit in very short order: beaver trapped out, bison killed off, Indians pacified, cattle put on to graze on open range, cattle killed off by horrendous winters, the arrival of the railroad, the land fenced and settled by the likes of the Stegner family...with some Canadian twists of course, such as French speaking tribes of "half-breeds" trying to remain independent, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and more.
Like almost everyone else, the Stegners failed miserably as wheat farmers. Not due to their incompetence or laziness, but rather for their inability to admit that THE DREAM of freedom and prosperity just over the next (western) horizon was often a mirage, and a wicked one at that. Some land just won't bend to the will of Manifest Destiny, not for long anyway, and many learned that lesson the hard way, including young Wallace Stegner.
The best part was the novella, a tale of cowboys trying to round up the strays and yearlings before the snows fly. I'll leave it at that. It may sound cliche-aren't all things cowboy cliche by now?-but know that a writer like Stegner isn't going to fall back on anything trite or silly. This part of the book packed a powerful punch, and put the rest of the tale, all that came before and after, into perspective, as the experiences of this bunch symbolizes the experiences (often, but not always, failures) of everyone else who tried to make a go of it in that region and others like it.
In the end, Stegner muses on the culture that was created in places like "Whitemud". What ideals and hopes did they bring? What happened when they got there? Did the open space and freedom lead to better things? Did they allow the best of human hopes and visions to take wing? Or did they hammer away at those dreams until nothing was left but provincial small mindedness and the ongoing, often bitter, struggle to get by?
If you're into the American west you simply must read this book. If you don't care one way or the other about the west but want to read an amazing memoir, read this book. And EVERYBODY should read it for the novella...would make a great movie.
And now I think I get it. Stegner nails the "sense of place" thing with this one, a combination of history and memoir, with an unforgettable novella dropped in smack dab in the middle of the book. All with the goal of painting a picture of the patch of Saskatchewan shortgrass prairie (right on the Montana border) he grew up on circa 1910 or so. He's writing decades later, after living, exploring and writing about the west, so when he goes back to visit and research he's looking through some interesting goggles. He and his family got to partake in the epic story that was the frontier: Trying to turn raw material into something that pays, and pays big, or at least better than whatever it was you left behind. Could be gold, furs, oil, or timber, but in this case it's the fertile topsoil of the plains and the rush to make it big with dryland wheat farms.
Stegner knows his family's experience was just one chapter of the history of that place, so he ties it into all the events that led up to his family's arrival. The usual suspects, albeit in very short order: beaver trapped out, bison killed off, Indians pacified, cattle put on to graze on open range, cattle killed off by horrendous winters, the arrival of the railroad, the land fenced and settled by the likes of the Stegner family...with some Canadian twists of course, such as French speaking tribes of "half-breeds" trying to remain independent, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and more.
Like almost everyone else, the Stegners failed miserably as wheat farmers. Not due to their incompetence or laziness, but rather for their inability to admit that THE DREAM of freedom and prosperity just over the next (western) horizon was often a mirage, and a wicked one at that. Some land just won't bend to the will of Manifest Destiny, not for long anyway, and many learned that lesson the hard way, including young Wallace Stegner.
The best part was the novella, a tale of cowboys trying to round up the strays and yearlings before the snows fly. I'll leave it at that. It may sound cliche-aren't all things cowboy cliche by now?-but know that a writer like Stegner isn't going to fall back on anything trite or silly. This part of the book packed a powerful punch, and put the rest of the tale, all that came before and after, into perspective, as the experiences of this bunch symbolizes the experiences (often, but not always, failures) of everyone else who tried to make a go of it in that region and others like it.
In the end, Stegner muses on the culture that was created in places like "Whitemud". What ideals and hopes did they bring? What happened when they got there? Did the open space and freedom lead to better things? Did they allow the best of human hopes and visions to take wing? Or did they hammer away at those dreams until nothing was left but provincial small mindedness and the ongoing, often bitter, struggle to get by?
If you're into the American west you simply must read this book. If you don't care one way or the other about the west but want to read an amazing memoir, read this book. And EVERYBODY should read it for the novella...would make a great movie.
April 21, 2012
This wonderful collection of essays and fiction about the last Western frontier is both romance and anti-romance. Writing in the 1950s, Stegner captures the breath-taking beauty of the unbroken plains of southwest Saskatchewan and the excitement of its settlment at the turn of the century. Part memoir, the book recounts the years of his boyhood in a small town along the Whitemud River in 1914-1919, the summers spent on the family's homestead 50 miles away along the Canadian-U.S border. His book is also an account of the loss of that Eden and the failed promise of agricultural development in this semi-arid region with thin top soil.
Stegner is a gifted, intelligent writer, able to turn the people and events of history into compelling reading. The opening section of the book describes the experience of being on the plains and specifically in the area where Stegner was a boy. And it lays out the geography of that land -- a distant range of hills, the river, the coulees, the town -- which the book will return to again and again.
The following section evokes the period of frontier Canada's early exploration, the emergence of the metis culture, the destruction of the buffalo herds, the introduction of rangeland cattle, and then wave upon wave of settlement pushing the last of the plains Indians westward and northward. A chapter is devoted to the surveying of the boundary along the Canada-U.S. border; another chapter describes the founding of the Mounted Police and its purely Canadian style of bringing law and order to the wild west.
The middle section of the book is a novella and a short story about the winter of 1906-1907. In the longer piece, eight men rounding up cattle are caught on the open plains in an early blizzard. Stegner builds the drama and the peril of their situation artfully and convincingly. The final section of the book returns to Stegner's memories of the town and the homestead, ending with his family's departure for Montana.
Stegner lived at a time and in a place where a person born in the 20th century could still experience something of the sweep of history that transformed the American plains. I've read many books about the West, and because of his depth of thought, his gifts as a writer, and his unflinching eye, Stegner's work ranks for me among the best. I heartily recommend this book.
Stegner is a gifted, intelligent writer, able to turn the people and events of history into compelling reading. The opening section of the book describes the experience of being on the plains and specifically in the area where Stegner was a boy. And it lays out the geography of that land -- a distant range of hills, the river, the coulees, the town -- which the book will return to again and again.
The following section evokes the period of frontier Canada's early exploration, the emergence of the metis culture, the destruction of the buffalo herds, the introduction of rangeland cattle, and then wave upon wave of settlement pushing the last of the plains Indians westward and northward. A chapter is devoted to the surveying of the boundary along the Canada-U.S. border; another chapter describes the founding of the Mounted Police and its purely Canadian style of bringing law and order to the wild west.
The middle section of the book is a novella and a short story about the winter of 1906-1907. In the longer piece, eight men rounding up cattle are caught on the open plains in an early blizzard. Stegner builds the drama and the peril of their situation artfully and convincingly. The final section of the book returns to Stegner's memories of the town and the homestead, ending with his family's departure for Montana.
Stegner lived at a time and in a place where a person born in the 20th century could still experience something of the sweep of history that transformed the American plains. I've read many books about the West, and because of his depth of thought, his gifts as a writer, and his unflinching eye, Stegner's work ranks for me among the best. I heartily recommend this book.
February 15, 2016
Read this because it takes place in southern Canada, Sasketchewan, similar to Raymond Alberta where my mothers family started. Learned about the Metis, mixed French and Indian people who were not a tribe or a group, so lived near white settlements but were not really a part of the settlement.
May 29, 2014
Wolf Willow is a personal memoir by Wallace Stegner, whose fiction and non-fiction writings capture a deep sense of the western places he called home during the early part of his life. The book takes its title from a willow particular to the Cypress Hills, the area of southern Saskatchewan where Stegner spent part of his early years. Unlike many memoirists and fiction writers from small, rural towns, Stegner writes not as one who was cynical and embitterered by the experience. Rather, he recognizes the conditions of the place, physical and otherwise, that shaped both the strengths and the limitations of its people.
The first part of the book chronicles the period before the town he lived in, Whitemud, was settled. He gives us deeply evocative descriptions of the topography of the place, the peoples native to the area, and the defining event of drawing the national boundary between the US and Canada along the 49th parallel (called the Medicine line). We learn of the different tribes, the metis, who were half-breed traders, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who pacified the area in a very different way than the American Cavalry and the transition from buffalo to cattle herds.
The middle section of the book does something novel for a memoir. Stegner inserts a fictional account of the terrible winter of 1906, that more or less marked the end of cattle ranching. The account is absolutely riveting, the majority of which is narrated by a greenhorn cowboy who joins up to herd the cattle through the winter. As the terrible cold and blizzards set in we see the gradual transition from trying to save the herd to physical survival of the men.
The final part of the book chronicles the settling of Whitemud after this terrible winter, and the attempts at turning the area into an agricultural Eden. In the end, Stegner's family fails to do so, as did many others as they slammed up against the hard reality of insufficient rainfall west of the 100th meridian where their land was located.
In the epilogue, we are reminded that the book began with a return visit to Whitemud by Stegner. We see a remarkable portrait of town father Corky Jones, and the strengths and struggles and limits of this rural community. And we see Stegner's appreciation for how this community shaped him, even though he and his family couldn't remain.
This book is one more reason I consider Stegner as one of this country's great writers of "place", along with Wendell Berry. Most of us just live in places. What both Stegner and Berry do is help us understand places and how they help shape the lives of the people in those places, perhaps challenging us to begin to notice our own places and how they shape us.
The first part of the book chronicles the period before the town he lived in, Whitemud, was settled. He gives us deeply evocative descriptions of the topography of the place, the peoples native to the area, and the defining event of drawing the national boundary between the US and Canada along the 49th parallel (called the Medicine line). We learn of the different tribes, the metis, who were half-breed traders, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who pacified the area in a very different way than the American Cavalry and the transition from buffalo to cattle herds.
The middle section of the book does something novel for a memoir. Stegner inserts a fictional account of the terrible winter of 1906, that more or less marked the end of cattle ranching. The account is absolutely riveting, the majority of which is narrated by a greenhorn cowboy who joins up to herd the cattle through the winter. As the terrible cold and blizzards set in we see the gradual transition from trying to save the herd to physical survival of the men.
The final part of the book chronicles the settling of Whitemud after this terrible winter, and the attempts at turning the area into an agricultural Eden. In the end, Stegner's family fails to do so, as did many others as they slammed up against the hard reality of insufficient rainfall west of the 100th meridian where their land was located.
In the epilogue, we are reminded that the book began with a return visit to Whitemud by Stegner. We see a remarkable portrait of town father Corky Jones, and the strengths and struggles and limits of this rural community. And we see Stegner's appreciation for how this community shaped him, even though he and his family couldn't remain.
This book is one more reason I consider Stegner as one of this country's great writers of "place", along with Wendell Berry. Most of us just live in places. What both Stegner and Berry do is help us understand places and how they help shape the lives of the people in those places, perhaps challenging us to begin to notice our own places and how they shape us.
April 12, 2010
I wish I could remember the name of every author and every book I've ever read. I can't. My memory is reliable for about a year's worth of reading. After that only the most remarkable books (good and bad) stick. To aid my memory I have a list of everything I've read going back to 1987. Despite my list keeping I'm still surprised sometimes when I "rediscover" an author. I've mentioned this happening with Neil Gaiman and now it's happened with Wallace Stegner.
Wallace Stegner was a Canadian author who wrote fiction and non-fiction. Back in 2005 I thoroughly enjoyed Angle of Repose. Now for the Canada Reads 3 challenge, I've read one of his non-fiction books, Wolf Willow.
Wolf Willow is formally a memoir but it's a memoir in the same way that Tales from Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett is. It's part memoir, part history and part fiction.
Perhaps I don't know enough about the history of the border area between Saskatchewan, Montana and North Dakota but the book didn't hold my attention as Angle of Repose did.
There were a few moments though that I will remember beyond the point where I forget the title, the author and when I read it. The first of those is Stegner's description of the culture shock between winter and summer. During the winter he traveled north into town to go to school. There he was clearly in Canada. Then during the summer he'd be on the farm plowing the fields that butted up against the 49th parallel. He could through rocks into the United States. He watched life go by on America prairies. As a kid growing on a border town I related to Stegner's sentiments.
My second favorite scene was a description of a particular Mountie who was a local legend for his ability to get his man no matter the circumstances. With the rural location and the (I'm guessing exaggerated) description of his feats, I couldn't help but think of Benton Fraiser from Due South.
Wallace Stegner was a Canadian author who wrote fiction and non-fiction. Back in 2005 I thoroughly enjoyed Angle of Repose. Now for the Canada Reads 3 challenge, I've read one of his non-fiction books, Wolf Willow.
Wolf Willow is formally a memoir but it's a memoir in the same way that Tales from Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett is. It's part memoir, part history and part fiction.
Perhaps I don't know enough about the history of the border area between Saskatchewan, Montana and North Dakota but the book didn't hold my attention as Angle of Repose did.
There were a few moments though that I will remember beyond the point where I forget the title, the author and when I read it. The first of those is Stegner's description of the culture shock between winter and summer. During the winter he traveled north into town to go to school. There he was clearly in Canada. Then during the summer he'd be on the farm plowing the fields that butted up against the 49th parallel. He could through rocks into the United States. He watched life go by on America prairies. As a kid growing on a border town I related to Stegner's sentiments.
My second favorite scene was a description of a particular Mountie who was a local legend for his ability to get his man no matter the circumstances. With the rural location and the (I'm guessing exaggerated) description of his feats, I couldn't help but think of Benton Fraiser from Due South.
November 6, 2016
“Desolate? Forbidding? There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drouth or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don’t get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don’t escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.�
In which the brilliant Wallace Stegner wanders through his Wild West childhood and the generalized, folkloric history of Saskatchewan. It meandered a bit at times, perhaps more than I would have liked, but his considerable power as a raconteur carries you throughout.
“I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from. I can say to myself that a good part of my private and social character, the kinds of scenery and weather and people and humor I respond to, the prejudices I wear like dishonorable scars, the affections that sometimes waken me from middle-aged sleep with a rush of undiminished love, the virtues I respect and the weaknesses I condemn, the code I try to live by, the special ways I fail at it and the kinds of shame I feel when I do, the models and heroes I follow, the colors and shapes that evoke my deepest pleasure, the way I adjudicate between personal desire and personal responsibility, have been in good part scored into me by that little womb-village and the lovely, lonely, exposed prairie of the homestead.�
In which the brilliant Wallace Stegner wanders through his Wild West childhood and the generalized, folkloric history of Saskatchewan. It meandered a bit at times, perhaps more than I would have liked, but his considerable power as a raconteur carries you throughout.
“I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from. I can say to myself that a good part of my private and social character, the kinds of scenery and weather and people and humor I respond to, the prejudices I wear like dishonorable scars, the affections that sometimes waken me from middle-aged sleep with a rush of undiminished love, the virtues I respect and the weaknesses I condemn, the code I try to live by, the special ways I fail at it and the kinds of shame I feel when I do, the models and heroes I follow, the colors and shapes that evoke my deepest pleasure, the way I adjudicate between personal desire and personal responsibility, have been in good part scored into me by that little womb-village and the lovely, lonely, exposed prairie of the homestead.�
June 3, 2016
I don't know why it took me so long to get through this. I liked it...I think it was because the chapters were too long for it to be an effective bedside table book. I kept falling asleep, no fault of the book.
I chose this because I like Stegner's writing and this is kind of in the world of my studies - it's about his childhood right on the border between Saskatchewan and Montana. He writes about existing in two worlds, in a way. In the winter they lived and went to school in town, celebrated Canadian holidays, read books by British or Canadian writers, got the Canadian side of history (as regards, say, the War of 1812) and from 1914 on were at war. In the summer they farmed a parcel right on the border and were actually closer to American towns, and so they bought American goods and celebrated the 4th of July and weren't at war (until 1917).
I like the style of this book too - it starts as memoir and history, and then goes into a few chapters of fiction that deal with life in the region during the decades before the town was built and Stegner got there. Driving cattle and whatnot. Then it is back to memoir. The whole time Stegner is musing on what it means to have grown up in this place, during the last gasp of great plains homesteading. And what it means to have failed, since his family homestead never amounted to anything and eventually they left.
There is some really thoughtful stuff here. "For her sake I regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it...How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know?...How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of Progress?"
I chose this because I like Stegner's writing and this is kind of in the world of my studies - it's about his childhood right on the border between Saskatchewan and Montana. He writes about existing in two worlds, in a way. In the winter they lived and went to school in town, celebrated Canadian holidays, read books by British or Canadian writers, got the Canadian side of history (as regards, say, the War of 1812) and from 1914 on were at war. In the summer they farmed a parcel right on the border and were actually closer to American towns, and so they bought American goods and celebrated the 4th of July and weren't at war (until 1917).
I like the style of this book too - it starts as memoir and history, and then goes into a few chapters of fiction that deal with life in the region during the decades before the town was built and Stegner got there. Driving cattle and whatnot. Then it is back to memoir. The whole time Stegner is musing on what it means to have grown up in this place, during the last gasp of great plains homesteading. And what it means to have failed, since his family homestead never amounted to anything and eventually they left.
There is some really thoughtful stuff here. "For her sake I regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it...How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know?...How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of Progress?"
November 29, 2020
This is a book dear to my heart. It is the history of the area near where I was born and raised, told by someone who lived there as a child when it was just being settled. It is so cleverly written, in a narrative that makes history come to life. He tells the good, the bad and the ugly of prairie life in the early 1900s. The writer returns to the small prairie town 40 years later and this is what he says, “Things look the same, surprisingly the same, and yet obscurely different.� Things haven’t changed that much in these places. The smells, tastes, heat, cold, and sounds of the prairies are all there between the covers and brought back vivid memories. The descriptions of blizzards, cyclones and drought are so real. My favourite line and there were so many, is this one. “I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.� Reading this amazing book, masterfully written, reminded me of where I’m from.
November 30, 2019
The point of view from which Stegner was able to conjure up for us the transition forward from "Frontier" in the American West is so astonishing to me, and so rare, and so every day being lost, it nearly catches my breath. No One is still in possession of these kinds of reflections, in their context. I am born, lived, still living, in a community that is the product of this history. But every person old enough to have lived these years of memory spent the rest of their lives trying to hang on to some kind of life here. They did not spend much time reflecting, comparing, adding weight or translating significance for their recollections and snatches of eye-witnessing a transition in community history. They tell of things they remember, often devoid of emotion or judgement, shrug and maybe laugh a little and move on to another story.
But here, from Stegner's memory and literary life, it is all woven together in a fully realized whole expression of meaning. So much actual history, and context and perspective and care used to carefully represent his memories without the artificial coloring of myth or romanticizing. Rather, here is much fodder for dismantling myth and seeing our trajectory in the West with the good, the bad and the ugly.
Purely historical highlights: reflections on Plains Indians policy, the whiskey traders, survey of the 49th Parallel, the Northwest Canadian Mounted Police, the cattle barons, homesteading, and the irreversible affects of all of the aforementioned.
What a gift this book is! What a painful and exhausting labor it must have been. My copy was ordered from a used book shop: the inside cover is stamped with a city Library imprint, then a large Discard over the top. Too many years of no one being interested . . . and as our society marches forward in what seems a fatalistic and irrevocable direction, I wonder what is being lost by too few careful histories and memories like this one.
But here, from Stegner's memory and literary life, it is all woven together in a fully realized whole expression of meaning. So much actual history, and context and perspective and care used to carefully represent his memories without the artificial coloring of myth or romanticizing. Rather, here is much fodder for dismantling myth and seeing our trajectory in the West with the good, the bad and the ugly.
"It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. At noon the total sun pours on your single head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe or impotent man. Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow's fall."
Purely historical highlights: reflections on Plains Indians policy, the whiskey traders, survey of the 49th Parallel, the Northwest Canadian Mounted Police, the cattle barons, homesteading, and the irreversible affects of all of the aforementioned.
What a gift this book is! What a painful and exhausting labor it must have been. My copy was ordered from a used book shop: the inside cover is stamped with a city Library imprint, then a large Discard over the top. Too many years of no one being interested . . . and as our society marches forward in what seems a fatalistic and irrevocable direction, I wonder what is being lost by too few careful histories and memories like this one.
"What this town and its surrounding prairie grew from, and what they grew into, is the record of my tribe. If I am native to anything, I am native to this."
June 4, 2017
Wallace Stegner is the Pulitzer-prize winning author of Angle of Repose, a novel I've been meaning to read for years. Wolf Willow is a hard book to categorize given that it is part memoir of Stegner's boyhood growing up on the remote frontier of the Cypress Hills and the town of Whitemud in southern Saskatchewan, part history of the region, and part fiction with a brilliant novella, Genesis taking up the middle portion of the book describing the harsh winter of 1906-1907 and the cowboys' tormented struggle to try to round up the cattle and calves stranded in the snow-covered plains of the region. Stegner relates his boyhood in the region and then struggles because at the time he really did not know any of the history of the area. He then goes on to describe the history from his adult perspective when this was written in the 1950s. He includes the history of the Native Americans including the plains Indians who fled to southern Canada after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. He also relates the history of the early trappers and traders from the Hudson Bay Company and the , a group of peoples in Canada who trace their descent to First Nations peoples and European settlers. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were also an early part of the history. Then Stegner uses his eloquent prose in the novella mentioned above, one of the high points of the book. At the end, he returns to the town to see how it has evolved and concludes that most of the inhabitants who bettered themselves in life ended up leaving for places with more opportunity including himself. Overall, an interesting portrait of life and hardship on the plains of Western Canada.
February 7, 2019
This book is an oreo of memoir and local history sandwiching a novella. It’s wonderful at evoking place and space, and I love Stegner’s musings on a landscape imprinting itself on a child between 8 and 12, and forever shaping that child’s worldview.
Published in the mid-50s, this book is remembrance of Stegner’s time growing up on the border of Saskatchewan and Montana, and his later dive into the colonial history of the area. I also grew up where prairie meets hills, and I think he’s right. I didn’t live anywhere else until I did my undergraduate in Halifax. Even though I love the city, I really missed the wide open spaces and high, blue skies of the prairie.
Though a lot of this book really rang true to me, and a lot of his analyses (like the way that small towns force bookish people to either bend or leave) still ring true, some of his discussion of Indigenous peoples is definitely of a different time. Though he’s generally admiring of the people that lived in the area, and wishes that he had learned some of their history instead of the history of the British Empire in school, there’s a lot of noble savage rhetoric.
This is a wonderful exploration of a time and place in Canada that is often overlooked, and the combination of memoir, history and fiction is a novel way to evoke time and place. I’d definitely recommend picking this up.
Published in the mid-50s, this book is remembrance of Stegner’s time growing up on the border of Saskatchewan and Montana, and his later dive into the colonial history of the area. I also grew up where prairie meets hills, and I think he’s right. I didn’t live anywhere else until I did my undergraduate in Halifax. Even though I love the city, I really missed the wide open spaces and high, blue skies of the prairie.
Though a lot of this book really rang true to me, and a lot of his analyses (like the way that small towns force bookish people to either bend or leave) still ring true, some of his discussion of Indigenous peoples is definitely of a different time. Though he’s generally admiring of the people that lived in the area, and wishes that he had learned some of their history instead of the history of the British Empire in school, there’s a lot of noble savage rhetoric.
This is a wonderful exploration of a time and place in Canada that is often overlooked, and the combination of memoir, history and fiction is a novel way to evoke time and place. I’d definitely recommend picking this up.
April 6, 2015
I almost quit reading this so many times! It took me 7 months to get through it, though it's only 300 pages. I was quite bored with much of it. I think the only reason I persevered was because it was Wallace Stegner, and I love his other stuff. The man can really write. This book is part historical fiction, part memoir, and part history...a rather eclectic and unpleasant mix for me. I like to keep fact and fiction distinctly separate, because I hate having to guess which is which. It has an odd format reminiscent of a short story collection. What is most memorable about this book, other than it's taking ages to trudge through it, is the vividness of the writing. A vast majority of the book takes place in the extreme cold or blistering heat. Stegner's writing makes you feel the temperatures. He also makes you feel the poverty and the vastness of the land. The Epilogue was my absolute favorite. It's been a while since I was so glad to finish a book. Parts of it, I enjoyed 5*, some of it I enjoyed 3-4*, but much of it, I didn't enjoy at all. Still, enjoyment was not really the point of the book. I settled on 3* because of the quality of the writing. I wouldn't recommend this book, but I do feel proud to be finished with it at long last! I feel a sense of liberation. It's been hanging over my head for sooooo long.
Read
July 7, 2016When I describe this book to my friends I talk about the beauty of the language, the lyricism of the story, and liken it to watching a three-hour movie filled with beautiful scenery that makes you ache, but still, it's a movie of scenery.
That's not to say I didn't love Wolf Willow. I found it to be gorgeous and once I figured out what the format was and learned to appreciate the description, metaphors, and the insights into the lives of those who live on the Great Plains, I really started to get into it. In particular, the section titled "Genesis" had me spellbound as I followed the journey of Rusty - the Englishman who joins up with a cattle driving crew and experiences the full magnitude of the Great Plains in all their harsh, beautiful, deadly glory.
This was my first Wallace Stegner book. I've heard of him, but never took the time to pick up anything written by him. I found it to appeal to me on a deep, core level in some ways. I lived in Nebraska for most of my childhood/teenage years and coming back to this state to live now has brought a peace to my soul that is a long time coming.
That's not to say I didn't love Wolf Willow. I found it to be gorgeous and once I figured out what the format was and learned to appreciate the description, metaphors, and the insights into the lives of those who live on the Great Plains, I really started to get into it. In particular, the section titled "Genesis" had me spellbound as I followed the journey of Rusty - the Englishman who joins up with a cattle driving crew and experiences the full magnitude of the Great Plains in all their harsh, beautiful, deadly glory.
This was my first Wallace Stegner book. I've heard of him, but never took the time to pick up anything written by him. I found it to appeal to me on a deep, core level in some ways. I lived in Nebraska for most of my childhood/teenage years and coming back to this state to live now has brought a peace to my soul that is a long time coming.
July 17, 2022
Wallace Stegner is one of my favorite authors and has written many excellent books.... but this is not one of them. The book was obviously a labor of love for Stegner as it concerns his boyhood in Saskatchewan, just over the U.S. border. He lived there in the early 20th century and describes it as one of the last locations on the North American prairie to be settled. I can see why he considered this an interesting topic but unfortunately he elected to present it in an experimental manner. Some chapters are straight history, others are historical fiction and still others are personal memoir. Unfortunately all are dominated by Stegner's tendency to get bogged down in descriptive detail as to physical landscape. Particularly in the historical fiction chapters which unfortunately dominate the book. Things come alive in the memoir sections where Stegner's focus is on people. His strong suit.
Disappointing.
Disappointing.
September 21, 2023
A classic of the first order... thoroughly researched, beautifully written and full of wisdom. After more than forty years, Stegner returns to the small town in Saskatchewan where he spent a part of his formative years. A lot has changed but one thing is the same - Wolf Willow. He also visits what used to be the family homestead and acreage located down near the U.S. border and brings out his memories of his father's farming efforts there. Finally, he reflects at some length on the overall "settler" experience on the prairies and its impact on the evolution of rural communities.
I found the "Genesis" part of the book (about a late in the season cattle drive) as intense and absorbing as a storm at sea described by Joseph Conrad. Will have to add this one to my list of favorite reads.
I found the "Genesis" part of the book (about a late in the season cattle drive) as intense and absorbing as a storm at sea described by Joseph Conrad. Will have to add this one to my list of favorite reads.
May 31, 2015
A quiet and remarkable tome comprising an unusual range of styles in fiction, essays, and historical musings. I was not able to read every word as some of the subject matter went beyond the bounds of my interest in prairie life. However, the first few chapters as well as some of the fiction and the epilogue contained some of the most meaningful prose I've ever read. Given the sensitivity and incisiveness of his writing, I am puzzled that Wallace Stegner is not more commonly mentioned in conversation or in his colleagues' works.
February 18, 2022
In this semi-autobiographical reflection on the Great Plains, Wallace Stegner gives us "a history, a story and a memory" that even seventy years after its publication is still vibrant and insightful.
The first part of the book details Stegner's early life in and around the Cypress Hills area of rural Saskatchewan. His family moved off their farmstead and into town when he was still a boy. The name of the town is actually Eastend, but Stegner refers to as "Whitemud" in the book. This could simply be the nickname town residents used when he was young, but I prefer to believe that the deception is a tacit admission by the author that he may not be a particularly reliable narrator in retelling the events from his childhood, and that in this memoir more than one tall tale may have been blended in along with the facts. As he recounts his experiences and remembers the events, neighbors and places of his childhood, Stegner talks about how his education tried to "make an European out of me" and tells how he regrets that he grew up wihout any real grounding in the history of the places and people that formed his day-to-day world. Even so, he states that "If I am native to anything, I am native to this� and he proceeds to lay out the history of the region for us. You can't understand me, he seems to be saying, unless you understand where I grew up. And you can't understand where I grew up unless you understand the Great Plains.
Stegner’s account begins far in the geologic past, and then tracks animal and human habitation in the Cypress Hills area all the way through to the late 19th Century. In the process he is fascinated by numerous oversize personalities but still gives due time to politics and environment. For the most part Stegner is a romantic in terms of the west, and notes that it is "impossible not to believe in progress in a frontier town." Even so, he is not blind to the darker points of European expansion in the region, and states bluntly that "No one who has studied western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide."
The third part of Wolf Willow is a fictional account of a young Englishman who travels to the plains for adventure, and finds himself involved in a doomed cattle drive during the terrible winter of 1906-07. It is well written and enjoyable, but it is a bit odd that he has dropped a novella into the middle of his history/biography.
Perhaps the most interesting, and sobering, part of the book is its coda, "False-Front Athens." In it Stegner � from his viewpoint in the 1950s - takes a hard look at the way that small towns on the plains had evolved (or failed to evolve) during the first half the 20th century. He looked at how small towns seemed to hemorrhage young talent, laments that the cultural institutions of Whitemud were perhaps less developed in 1950 than they had been in 1910, and concludes that such towns are a “as good a place to be a boy and as unsatisfying a place to be a man as one could well imagine.�
The first part of the book details Stegner's early life in and around the Cypress Hills area of rural Saskatchewan. His family moved off their farmstead and into town when he was still a boy. The name of the town is actually Eastend, but Stegner refers to as "Whitemud" in the book. This could simply be the nickname town residents used when he was young, but I prefer to believe that the deception is a tacit admission by the author that he may not be a particularly reliable narrator in retelling the events from his childhood, and that in this memoir more than one tall tale may have been blended in along with the facts. As he recounts his experiences and remembers the events, neighbors and places of his childhood, Stegner talks about how his education tried to "make an European out of me" and tells how he regrets that he grew up wihout any real grounding in the history of the places and people that formed his day-to-day world. Even so, he states that "If I am native to anything, I am native to this� and he proceeds to lay out the history of the region for us. You can't understand me, he seems to be saying, unless you understand where I grew up. And you can't understand where I grew up unless you understand the Great Plains.
Stegner’s account begins far in the geologic past, and then tracks animal and human habitation in the Cypress Hills area all the way through to the late 19th Century. In the process he is fascinated by numerous oversize personalities but still gives due time to politics and environment. For the most part Stegner is a romantic in terms of the west, and notes that it is "impossible not to believe in progress in a frontier town." Even so, he is not blind to the darker points of European expansion in the region, and states bluntly that "No one who has studied western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide."
The third part of Wolf Willow is a fictional account of a young Englishman who travels to the plains for adventure, and finds himself involved in a doomed cattle drive during the terrible winter of 1906-07. It is well written and enjoyable, but it is a bit odd that he has dropped a novella into the middle of his history/biography.
Perhaps the most interesting, and sobering, part of the book is its coda, "False-Front Athens." In it Stegner � from his viewpoint in the 1950s - takes a hard look at the way that small towns on the plains had evolved (or failed to evolve) during the first half the 20th century. He looked at how small towns seemed to hemorrhage young talent, laments that the cultural institutions of Whitemud were perhaps less developed in 1950 than they had been in 1910, and concludes that such towns are a “as good a place to be a boy and as unsatisfying a place to be a man as one could well imagine.�
Displaying 1 - 30 of 159 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.