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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.

"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."