The Big Sky
  A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

The “Mountain Man” is a temptingly heroic figure. Historically he lived in freedom and danger and under a requirement of absolute self-reliance that altogether shrink the cowboy’s much written-about wage-earner’s life. About half of the mountain men (beaver trappers, in prose) met violent ends in the wilderness; some were writers and even sort-of philosophers. Their day was short, roughly 1822 to 1845 or so, though a few held on for more years of solo adventure. With the beaver trapped out, they became guides for safari hunters and wagon trains; a few became prospectors; or they went back east and took up a farm. Their course is somehow very American, spanning the nineteenth century. and there is no missing the resonance in Guthrie’s name for his protagonist: Boone. The temptation in the mountain man story is to glory in the bright romance of life in the wilderness, to the exclusion of the shadows and contradictions that are in real life and that are gone into in great fiction. So careful a novelist as Vardis Fisher, as recently as his Mountain Man ( New York, 1965), made his tide character a non-credible romance hero. A. B. Guthrie Jr. ( 1901- 1991), a Montanan who’d had years of Kentucky newspaper work and a Neiman Fellowship to Harvard under his belt, refused the easy road. He had a theme, he wrote later. Each man kills the thing he loves. Here we see his character Boone Caudill at a crucial, character-revealing time of decision.

Publication Information: Book Title: The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature. Contributors: Thomas J. Lyon - editor. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: 163.