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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.�