Fair Land, Fair Land

Rating:
Summary: Devastating conclusion to a great but very dark epic
Review: A. B. Guthrie may be the most underrated 20th-century American writer and the first Big Sky trilogy is in there with _Moby Dick_ as an epic of disaster.

_Fair Land, Fair Land_, begins with Dick Summers deciding he doesn't like the Oregon to which he led a group in _The Way West._ Heading back to what is now Montana, he is joined by Hezekiah Higgins for reasons that are less than clear. Both marry Native American (Blackfeet and Flathead, respectively) women and live more in Native American than in Anglo Wild West society, though they cater to a boom town of gold-miners for a while.


Through the first two-thirds of _Fair Land, Fair Land_ dark cloud gather and darken and pile up around the memory of Boone Caudill, the tragic brooding hero and monster of _The Big Sky._ And after the long-fated confrontation with him, other thunderheads form.


Most of the book is elegaic fora wilderness being rapidly destroyed (the span of time of the novel is from 1845 to 1870) with an ending that is positively apocalyptic.


Although the Blackfeet woman Teal Eye is the vortex of this novel (and of the last half of _The Big Sky_), the frequent accounts of hunting and the amount of killing make this, I guess, a "guy book," albeit one that easily could be argued to be about lethal aspects of masculinist conceptions of the physical and social worlds.