The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  From Fort Union, going backward up Clark’s return route of 1806, they went up the Yellowstone, past the mouths of the muddy, swinging rivers—the Powder, the Tongue, the Bighorn—also reduced in the present and busy pouring Wyoming and Montana toward the Gulf of Mexico. At Billings they turned northward to Great Falls and Fort Benton, and then on through Helena, Three Forks, Dillon, and over the Lemhi Pass to Salmon, Idaho, where DeVoto took a look at the Salmon River and scribbled a postcard to Carvel Collins, a friend back in Cambridge, instructing him not to try it in his foldboat. North again into Montana, down the Bitterroot Valley to Missoula, over the Lobo Pass that had so punished Lewis and Clark, and on to Lewiston, the Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu, and at last to the Columbia, whose lower reaches they got to in time for a Portland Fourth of July.3

  Every stage of that journey to the Pacific was familiar from books; nearly every stage was as new to DeVoto’s eyes as it had been to the eyes of Lewis and Clark. It was the part of his summer journeying that interested him most and that would be most immediately useful, not only for the writing of the Lewis and Clark book but for the improvement, in galley proofs, of Across the Wide Missouri. But there were whole empires of the West still to be seen, and what would have been pure pleasure was made, as usual, compulsive by the obligations he had assumed in order to pay the expenses of historical research. Some of his articles could be generated out of the daily adventures of the road, but the Fortune article demanded fresh impressions of six or eight national parks, only two of which he had ever visited.

  From Portland, on July 6, they drove south to Crater Lake, and on to San Francisco, and on again to Yosemite. Because he had no choice, DeVoto drove like a tourist trying to set mileage records for a short vacation, but he worked very hard en route with his boxed library of books and maps, fitting each new valley, mountain range, desert sink, and town into his mental relief map of the continental geography and his outline of the history of exploration and settlement. All this was new to him. Having left Kirkland on the Columbia, and Gordon in his forest job, they were less encumbered, and in spite of their haste could relax and enjoy what came toward them up the road. They took turns driving, changing every fifty or one hundred miles, so that each could get a chance to look. The desert in particular, that gray-green sagebrush waste rising in long alluvial skirts to the worn ranges, all that emptiness domed with the big sky full of strato-cumulus clouds that quenched and darkened the light one moment, and the next let the intolerable brightness flood across great hammocked valleys and the twisted, tormented, worn, and furrowed mountains—the desert all but shocked them with its beauty, and when they drove across it at night to Salt Lake City, and watched dawn come on, and then sunrise, DeVoto had one of his articles instantly in hand. “Night Crossing,” he called it when he published it in Woman’s Day.4 It was from the heart, a hymn, a poem. And the freshness with which the desert came to him is an index of how little familiar he had been, up to that time, with his chosen country, even the Great Basin desert which had been his boyhood’s front yard. As usual, it was coming back that opened his eyes to it, half in recognition, half in sharpened perception.

  Dispelling his private ignorances and confirming his book knowledge were among the purposes of this trip, and he dispelled and confirmed at a gallop. Pausing in Utah only long enough to buy a new set of tires and to say hello to a few friends, including Chet Olsen in the regional Forest Service office in Ogden, they went northward again to Grand Teton and Yellowstone, gave those a brief inspection, talked with National Park Service people, and went on out the east entrance to deposit young Mark at a ranch camp near Cody, in the Sunlight Basin.

  Now south to Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado, for another fast look and some talk with Park Service people; and after a couple of days they made a U turn and went straight back the way they had come. South Pass, the gateway both for the mountain fur trade and for the wagon trains that followed it, was something DeVoto had to see.

  Off the main road now, and not often visited, South Pass is one of the most deceptive and impressive places in the West. Stop there and watch the cloud shadows go over, and see the white rumps of antelope move among the sage, and study the deep, braiding ruts that the wagons made as they fanned out and came down the long, even slope from Pacific Spring, on the western slope at last—stop there off the road (Wyoming 28), with your motor shut off, and listen to the wind, which breathes history through dry grass and stiff sage, and smell dust and distance, and look eastward over the gentle rise to where you know the Sweetwater and Devil’s Gate and Independence Rock and the last crossing of the Platte recede on backward toward the United States, and then turn and look west, down the long, easy slope toward the Green, and you can believe you understand something about the spirit of the Völkerwanderung that moved America westward. It was DeVoto’s major theme, and he wanted South Pass to speak to him. But they turned east from Farson in a dreary rain. The gray slope rising eastward was dim; the unpaved road was slick and soapy. The magic that he had hoped for, and that he might have found on a better day, was not there: he could not visualize the toiling wagons coming over that rise and heading downhill toward Oregon, California, the Zion in the valleys of the mountains. He couldn’t imagine Old Gabe and Black Harris squatting by a campfire on this sagebrush slope and discussing with Brigham Young and his counselors the possibilities of settlement in the Great Basin.

  So they turned away, heading north and west toward Thermopolis, Three Forks, Helena, finally Glacier National Park, clear up against the Canadian border. From Glacier he wrote to Bob Bailey and Garrett Mattingly, calling this western tour the best thing he had ever done in his life.5 He wished he had been born in Montana instead of in “the scurvy little Mormon-Catholic dump that created all my neuroses.” That sidelong disparagement of Ogden was reflex, a joke, a piece of role playing, not the expression of a renewed hatred of his home town. As a matter of fact, coming back to him on this euphoric tour of all the country he had dreamed of and made himself an expert on, his home town looked a good deal better than it ever had before; and though he had fallen in love with Montana, he had all but forgiven Utah by the time he came across the salt desert into a Utah sunrise.

  From Glacier the DeVotos dropped down again to Yellowstone, picked up Mark from his ranch near Cody, and made a great bend to the west, clear out into the Sawtooth Range in Idaho, where in a Forest Supervisor’s cabin at the end of thirty-nine miles of frightful mountain road they rested ten days while DeVoto straightened out his notes, caught up with his correspondence, and wrote a couple of Easy Chairs. On September 12 they were back in Cambridge, greatly enlarged.

  Out of that hectic, zigzagging loop of 13,580 miles, DeVoto emerged with a firm sense of the outlines and relationships of western geography, a heightened feeling of how the wilderness had worked on the American consciousness, and an increased confidence about the geopolitical implications of the expedition whose story he had set out to tell. The travel book that he had half planned to write about the trip never got written, nor did the anthology of western writing that he had promised Alfred McIntyre ever get assembled. The Life articles somehow fell through the crack and were never published, though according to Avis’ recollection he was paid for three and had his expenses compensated besides. Nevertheless, spread over the next twelve months, there were substantial written consequences of the trip: five Easy Chairs, two full-length Harper’s articles, three articles in Woman’s Day, and the text that accompanied a dozen pages of Ansel Adams’s National Park pictures in Fortune.6 The bulk of those pieces were the work of the journalist who had taken over from John August as provider. A few were serious and provocative studies produced as the weapons of controversy—a controversy that did not flicker out as the Literary Fallacy dispute did, but went on, hardly interrupted, for the rest of DeVoto’s life. The summer of 1946 turned him into a conservationist, one of the most effective in our history. When he finally came West in person, he came like Lancelot.


  The ephemeral writings repeat the conclusions and exhibit the habit of rather glib generalization that had been apparent in “Main Street Twenty Years After” and other reports on his 1940 tour. DeVoto the journalist was most interesting when he was reporting personal experiences or the visible social phenomena of western towns, most tedious when he was counting up how many synthetic tires, spark plugs, and quarts of oil his Buick had consumed. (He conceived these facts to be part of his duty to the traveling public, and an impulse related to the one that made him interested in the clothes and traps and skills and “possibles” of the mountain men made him mount his platform and instruct a public more knowing than he gave it credit for being on How to Travel in the West.) He was least persuasive when he generalized about regional attitudes and about such abstractions as the western character.

  His commentary on the new motel civilization of the western roadside was sharpened by the fact that he had been away all through the time when it was developing, and he could see it as what it was: a swift, sensible adaptation to American habits and the conditions of the automotive age. His advice to car manufacturers about the sunshades, double glass, air conditioning, and heavy-duty springs and shock absorbers needed on cars built for western driving was sound—a generation or more later another consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, would make similar suggestions a whole lot more urgently—though DeVoto’s list of necessities romanticized the difficulty of western roads. Some of his complaints, especially about the chambers of commerce that used historical sites as tourist come-ons but did nothing to preserve or maintain them, were well taken. The Whitman Mission, Fort Clatsop, and other key points on his tour had turned out to be neglected, litter-strewn shacks and rural slums, and his protests had a good deal to do with their later rehabilitation.

  Other complaints—bad service on the ferries, the absence of Wisconsin cheese in Wisconsin restaurants—were predictable and fairly trivial. His general demand that roadside entrepreneurs exploiting the renewed floods of travelers start offering decent service and fair prices undoubtedly earned him the gratitude of disgruntled tourists. But some of his confident generalizations about western character and attitudes are worthy of a congressman’s book about Red China.

  Back in 1936, reprinting some of his articles on education in Forays and Rebuttals, DeVoto had admitted that he got his reputation as an authority on education simply by assuming it. Up to 1946, some part of his reputation as an authority on the West was similarly open to suspicion. His generalizations were sometimes challengeable, and even some of his “facts” were the flash impressions of a book-learned reporter willing to show off his expertise.

  One comprehensive western tour could not cure him of old habits. Thus he found western speech less marked by local variations than the speech of any other American region (true), but thought the au sound gave it away. Maybe. Most Westerners say dawg and some say Gawd. But they say many other things, too. Cache Valley, Utah, an authentic western community within fifty miles of DeVoto’s home town, could have taught him a local dialect clearly distinguishable from most western speech; and his friend Edith Mirrielees, born in Big Timber, Montana, within sight of the Crazy Mountains and the Absarokas, enunciated as pure a dahg and Gahd as if she had taught all her life in the schools of Massachusetts.

  DeVoto thought western humor self-depreciatory, as if reflecting “an inner chagrin.” Yet his own humor, developed in the West from western models, was of a very different kind from that, and so was the humor of the Virginian and Lin McLean, and so was that of the celebrated Mormon preacher J. Golden Kimball, and so was that of the ex-river pilot whom DeVoto had once defended against the “chagrin” theory of Van Wyck Brooks.

  Somewhat blithely, he declared that all Westerners ate steak and fried potatoes for breakfast, probably because he himself, in certain circumstances and mainly in Montana, did so. He found Westerners “passionate eaters,” and all overweight, though from his letters it seems that he himself was the one who went wild on western beef after the wartime shortages of Cambridge and the horsemeat steaks of the Harvard Faculty Club.7 He told his Easy Chair readers that Westerners rode horses naturally, which was unreliable information on the face of it: he forgot that the West is an oasis (which is to say a primarily urban) civilization, in much of which horses are about as common as they are in Scarsdale; and he forgot the deficiencies in the riding line of that well-known Westerner Bernard DeVoto. He said Westerners accepted too many of the myths and fantasies deriving from the cattle kingdom—a generally valid judgment in which he should have included himself, for many of his ineradicable attitudes were the result of his adoption of the outdoor-Westerner role. He thought the West’s single contribution to architecture was the mountain cabin of shellacked logs, a contention which seemed to forget the Swedes of Delaware, who had naturalized the log cabin long before the West was ever dreamed of; and which seemed also to make shellac a function of architecture.

  And so on. He was not an infallibly reliable witness. Writers whom he had scolded for generalizing about the frontier, for making a unity out of a loose collection of variables, would have been justified in suggesting that he listen to his own warnings. The West was no more a unit than the frontier ever was, and only his own enthusiasm could make it so. As young Arthur Schlesinger once told him, he sometimes, by a single outrageous statement, gave an opponent the handle by which to pull down an otherwise sound argument. Exaggerations and horseback judgments that DeVoto’s friends understood and discounted as mere exuberance and phrasemaking sometimes got frozen into print and made him look as if he knew less than he did.

  Nevertheless, at the end of the summer of 1946 he knew far more about the West, past and present, from books and in person, than his roadside journalism suggested. Some of what he knew emerged with the clarity of revelation and withstood not only his own second thoughts but repeated angry challenges from without. When he thought he detected in many areas of western life an internal stress that sprang from economic and cultural colonialism, he put his finger on something elusive but real. And when he moved into the subject of western land and resource use, historical and contemporary, he was talking about something he knew and understood and could prove. In that area he was entirely disinterested and impartial, and he had read Powell and Walter Webb and had grown up along his grandfather Dye’s irrigation ditches under the Wasatch watershed.

  Throughout the states where the Public Domain was a large factor, which meant wherever aridity had balked the land-disposal laws of the United States, which meant the whole West with the exception of Texas and parts of the Pacific Coast, he heard in 1946 a tune he had heard all his life: the ambivalent clamor for more federal subsidies and federal aid discordantly fused with complaints about absentee federal landlordism. In his understanding of the importance of aridity in the West, DeVoto followed Powell, to whom he had devoted part of a chapter in The Literay Fallacy, and Walter Webb, whose The Great Plains was a basic book about the lands west of the ninety-eighth meridian. He understood the West’s vulnerability, the dangers of overgrazing and the logging of watersheds in a dry land. He knew exactly what it meant when he saw the Powder, the Tongue, and the Bighorn pouring their silt into the clear Yellowstone. He knew—and on his 1946 trip he had it constantly forced on his attention—the pressures that miners, loggers, dam builders, and stockmen put upon the federal bureaus entrusted with the management of the Public Domain. From his Cambridge sideline he had watched Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada geld the Grazing Service and turn it into the impotent Bureau of Land Management, perennially underbudgeted and too weak to manage anything. His close friends in the National Forest Service had kept him informed about the hostility of stock interests to range regulation.

  Now in Boise, toward the end of his western tour, he was intercepted by his friend Chet Olsen from the regional Forest Service office in Ogden. Olson brought word of discussions held between committees of the American Livestock Association and the National Woolgrowers’ Association in Sal
t Lake City, and he had copies of the resolutions they had passed. He put them into DeVoto’s hands, because he hoped that an airing in the Easy Chair might forestall the designs the stockmen had against the grazing division of the National Forest Service.8

  Olsen did better than he knew. He did more than ignite an Easy Chair. He ignited a whole string of Easy Chairs, articles, speeches, and political maneuvers. He lit a pilot light that burned steadily through the rest of DeVoto’s life and exploded into hot action at every new injection of fuel. He handed DeVoto the cause and the controversy that took precedence over all the other causes and controversies of his contentious career, the one that most enlisted his heart, conscience, and knowledge.

  DeVoto went West in 1946 a historian and tourist. He came back an embattled conservationist, one whose activities would eventually entitle him to be ranked with George Perkins Marsh, Powell, Karl Schurz, Pinchot, and Roosevelt. Appropriately, his strength was the strength of words. His platform was more often than not the Easy Chair, which through the eleven years of his incumbency had developed a loyal and influential group of readers.