A.B. Guthrie, Jr - The Big Sky

The Big Sky is part of a loose trilogy of books that A.B.Guthrie wrote about the opening up of the American West by European colonists and descendents. It follows the adventures of Boone Caudill, who runs away from his violent and abusive father at the age of 17 and makes his way to the frontier where he becomes a trapper. Attracted by the romaticism and the adventure, Caudill goes through a baptism of fire as he quickly loses prized possessions to a thief and is let down by the law, at the same time as meeting the man, Jim Deakins, who would become his best friend.

The book is episodic, we next hear of Boone on a trip upstream to get furs and return a Native American girl, Teal Eye, to her tribe. A few brief sentences fill in the gaps between these chapters, allowing Guthrie to skip time and space, and avoid tedious stories of travelling. It makes the novel a little discombulating, but things hold together. Boone arrives on the frontier at a moment of change. The bison and beaver are becoming hard to find, the Native Americans are restless with the encroaching hunters and pressure is on from more permanent colonists who want to farm, not to hunt in the landscape.

Boone's teacher in this is the much more experienced Dick Summers, who leaves to take up farming in the East. Summers is a key character in one of the other books in the trilogy, widely travelled, experienced and hopelessly in love with the wild landscape. Is a poignant moment as he takes a last look around before heading back East to farm. Boone follows this pattern, becoming a loner, unable to cope with other people and visiting civilisation once a year to trade, drink and buy sex. His despair at the changing landscape is only matched by what his friends see as his desperate search for Teal Eye, last having seen her as a girl and wanting to make her his wife.

Here is one of the parts of the book that really jarred with me (the other is the repeated use of the N word). Boone is in love with Teal Eye, and the book sets this up from the moment he sets eyes on her. She's repeatedly described as a beautiful eleven or twelve year old earlier in Boone's life. By the time he finds her later, she is a woman. But Boone's obsession is thus deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable for the reader. Women in The Big Sky are very much cardboard cutouts, to be used by men for sex, or making home. This is exemplified by his relationship with Teal Eye, who as his wife (Boone lives with the Native American tribe) barely has anything to do other than cook and sleep with him. Later Boone abandons her, and rapes another (European) woman when he briefly returns home. In fact, by buying his marriage to Teal Eye - we're in no doubt that women are a commodity to Boone.

I have no doubt that Guthrie was trying to portray a particular moment in time, and a set of attitudes towards women and Native Americans. But the result is actually to remove the humanity of both Native Americans and most of the women (white and indigenous). A better writer could have told the same story, and made it much more rounded. I just got the impression Guthrie didn't care - he was more interested in the landscape.

There are some interesting set pieces. The chapters when Boone and Jim, and some travelling companions who want to open up a faster way to the West over the mountains to make more money, are trapped through the winter are well done. They give a sense of the horror and danger at the frontier.

But Boone for all the description of frontier life, hunting and the racous nature of the White outposts in Native American land, this rests on brutal violence and mass death. The Big Sky gives us a sense of some of this, but it wasn't the great classic I was expecting.