III
“I think somewhere in Wolf Willow I remark on how I wasn’t sure who I was,” Stegner told Richard Etulain during those 1980 conversations. “I wasn’t sure whether I was American or Canadian, so I decided I was a Norwegian; I took my grandfather’s Old Country name and signed it in all my schoolbooks, which was quite preposterous except that it probably indicated a desire for a continuity that wasn’t there.” That lack of continuity is not simply a consequence of growing up without a sense of history; it might be equally attributable to having grown up genealogically deficient.
On the paternal side Stegner had no identifiable family at all other than his father, an eighth-grade dropout who, at the age of fourteen, fled the small farming community near Rock Island, Illinois, where he was from and never looked back. “I never knew the first name of my grandfather, or of my grandmother either,” Stegner has written, and while George Stegner evidently had siblings, he never revealed their names or where they lived or what they did. Wallace’s mother, born Hilda Emelia Paulson, grew up on a farm near the Norwegian enclave of Lake Mills, Iowa—the same farm on which her second son would be born in 1909—but Hilda’s mother was dead by the time she was twelve, and her father, Chris Paulson, and her sister, Mina, were the only relatives Wallace ever knew.
Discontinuity, moreover, was endemic to the lifestyle George Stegner embraced, and in the vagabond conditions to which he subjected his family. By the time Wallace was five years old he had been moved a half dozen times, from his grandfather’s farm near Lake Mills to Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Redmond, Washington, to Seattle (where George abandoned the family and took off to seek his fortune in Canada), to Bellingham, back to Lake Mills, and finally to the construction camp on a railroad grade in Saskatchewan called Eastend. He, his mother, and his brother, Cecil, arrived in the summer of 1914 to rejoin his father, living in a derailed dining car for over a year until George finally built a small, gabled, white frame house.
In 1915, with the help of his two sons, George Stegner homesteaded a quarter section fifty miles south of Eastend along the Montana line and planted it to wheat. It was a serendipitous beginning; the year was a bonanza year that saw Saskatchewan producing half the total wheat crop of Canada, with an average yield of over twenty-five bushels per acre. But then came 1916, and a rude shock. Severe hailstorms and a parasitic fungus disease called rust devastated the crop; yields fell to half of the previous year’s level. Drought burned out the harvests in 1917, 1918, and 1919, and the Stegners’ dreams of getting rich on Red Fife shriv eled in the blistering prairie heat along with the dying wheat spears.
George turned to running bootleg liquor across the border from Montana into dry Canada, an abject occupation he would directionally reverse after the passage of the Volstead Act, so that by 1920 he was running whiskey into the now dry United States from now wet Canada. In the spring of that year he sold the house in Eastend, abandoned the quarter-section homestead, and moved his family to Great Falls, Montana, where his sons encountered their first paved street, their first lawn, and their first flush toilet. A year later they were on the road again, this time to Salt Lake City and, at last, to a residency that for Wallace would continue (no doubt to his astonishment) for the next seventeen years.
“Eastend,” Stegner has written, “was a failure place, ultimately. But it held our atomic family together for six years ... and it imprinted me, indelibly, with the perceptions, images, memories, behavior codes, and attitudes that have controlled my mind and life and writing ever since.”5 Those images and memories are nowhere more intensely in evidence than in hundreds of passages throughout Wolf Willow, and nowhere more poetically expressed than in the evocative recollection of the gray-leafed river bush that gives the book its title:It is wolf willow, and not the town or anyone in it, that brings me home. For a few minutes, with a handful of leaves to my nose, I look across at the clay bank and the hills beyond where the river loops back on itself, enclosing the old sports and picnic ground, and the present and all the years between are shed like a boy’s clothes dumped on the bath-house bench. The perspective is what it used to be, the dimensions are restored, the senses are as clear as if they had not been battered with sensation for forty alien years. And the queer adult compulsion to return to one’s beginnings is assuaged. A contact has been made, a mystery touched. For the moment, reality is made exactly equivalent with memory, and a hunger is satisfied. The sensuous little savage that I once was is still intact inside me.
As for behavioral codes and attiudes? Certainly the principle of the stiff upper lip, to which Stegner fully subscribed, was nowhere more admirably practiced than by the cowboy culture on the Whitemud range and by the ensuing town builders who imitated it. And it is clear that Stegner’s often repeated belief that civic cooperation and a striving for community, not rugged individualism, were what settled the West finds its earliest expression in his Eastend experience. So does his reaction to the barbarism and callousness endemic to frontier life that manifested itself in his devotion as an adult to “civility” and manners (precisely because they were so absent in Eastend’s social interchange), and his allergic reaction to all forms of cruelty, prejudice, and persecution. While he finds himself as guilty of intolerance and savagery as any frontier child, as an adult he heatedly repudiates his adolescent conduct.
But not all behavioral codes learned as a boy in Eastend were so thoroughly revised in maturity. “I am as impatient with the weakness of others as my father ever was,” he writes in “Specifications for a Hero.” He is exasperated, he says, by incompetence, embarrassed by pity, disgusted by self-pity, made uneasy by displays of emotion, contemptuous of affectation. “I even at times find myself reacting against conversation, that highest test of the civilized man, because where I came from it was unfashionable to be ‘mouthy.’ ” While he acknowledges that these sentiments are perhaps ignoble (they are the trappings of an “inhumane and limited code, the value system of a life more limited and cruder than in fact ours was”), it is perfectly clear that he finds much to admire among their principal proponents.
Nowhere in Stegner’s writings are these habits of conduct more dramatically expressed than in the novella, “Genesis,” the fictional centerpiece of Wolf Willow and perhaps the finest piece of short fiction that he ever wrote. In it a young Englishman named Rusty Cullen comes to Canada looking for adventure and learns that all the cattle outfits using the open range east of the Cypress Hills are shorthanded. Within a matter of hours he finds himself hired by the T-Down ranch; within days he is headed out on the late fall roundup, his head full of illusions about both himself and his situation. “They carried no lances or pennons, the sun found no armor from which to strike light,” the narrator remarks, but the English boy knew that “no more romantic procession had ever set forth.”
Mr. Cullen is about to learn something about the nature of romance. The drive is soon caught up in the worst blizzard of the 1906 “winter of the blue snow,” and the Englishman undergoes a rite of passage that is as relentless and exacting as any ever faced by a fictional hero. Undermining its drama with a plot summary is beyond the purview of this introduction, but one might simply observe that Sir Ernest Shackleton trapped in the polar ice of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea had a better time of it than the T-Down cowboys caught out on the flats above the Swiftcurrent—Rusty Cullen included. And it gives nothing away to say that in the end our hero sits among his colleagues “a different boy, outside and inside, from the one who had set out with them two weeks before. He thought he knew enough not to want to distinguish himself by heroic deeds.... he did not think that he would ever want to do anything alone again, not in this country.”
“Genesis” is a perfect illustration of everything Wolf Willow is about—the triumph of cooperation over rugged individualism, and the understanding that what might pass for heroics in a less demanding environment is merely chores in this one. It is about endurance, sacrifice, camaraderie, and above all the virtue of the stiff upp
er lip. It is, in short, a paradigm of the book’s central motif—Wallace Stegner searching the Cypress Hills country to reestablish the circumstances of his childhood environment, and in so doing to define himself as a human being. “I may not know who I am,” he writes, “but I know where I am from” (italics added). No one familiar with Stegner’s work is going to be fooled for a minute by this rhetorical modesty, but perhaps we might rephrase the statement to read something like this: “I may not know exactly why I am who I already know I am, but once I revisit where I’m from, I’ll know better.” Now we have Wolf Willow in a nutshell. And it’s still a librarian’s nightmare.
NOTES
1 Wendell Berry, “Wallace Stegner and the Great Community,” South Dakota Review (winter 1985), 16.
2 David Dillon, “Time’s Prisoners: An Interview with Wallace Stegner,” Southwest Review (summer 1976), 252.
3 Richard Etulain, Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983), 73.
4 Jackson Benson, Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), 282.
5 Wallace Stegner, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, vol. 9 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1998).
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
WORKS BY WALLACE STEGNER
The Big Rock Candy Mountain. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.
The Sound of Mountain Water. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1969.
The American West as Living Space. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987.
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. New York: Random House, 1992.
Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: Wallace Stegner’s American West. Edited by Page Stegner. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999.
BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.
Colberg, Nancy. Wallace Stegner: A Descriptive Bibliography. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1990.
Etulain, Richard W., ed. Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983.
Hepworth, James R., ed. Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.
Robinson, Forrest G., and Margaret G. Robinson. Wallace Stegner. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.
Stegner, Page, and Mary Stegner, eds. The Geography of Hope: A Tribute to Wallace Stegner. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996.
I
THE QUESTION MARK IN THE CIRCLE
... whoever even once in his life has caught a perch or seen thrushes migrate in the autumn, when on clear, cool days they sweep in flocks over the village, will never really be a townsman and to the day of his death will have a longing for the open.
ANTON CHEKHOV, “Gooseberries”
1
The Question Mark in the Circle
An ordinary road map of the United States, one that for courtesy’s sake includes the first hundred miles on the Canadian side of the Line, will show two roads, graded but not paved, reaching up into western Saskatchewan to link U.S. 2 with Canada 1, the Trans-Canada Highway. One of these little roads leads from Havre, on the Milk River, to Maple Creek; the other from Malta, also on the Milk, to Swift Current. The first, perhaps a hundred and twenty miles long, has no towns on it big enough to show on a map of this scale. The second, fifty miles longer, has two, neither of which would be worth comment except that one of them, Val Marie, is the site of one of the few remaining prairie-dog towns anywhere. The rest of that country is notable primarily for its weather, which is violent and prolonged; its emptiness, which is almost frighteningly total; and its wind, which blows all the time in a way to stiffen your hair and rattle the eyes in your head.
This is no safety valve for the population explosion, no prize in a latter-day land rush. It has had its land rush, and recovered. If you owned it, you might be able to sell certain parts of it at a few dollars an acre; many parts you couldn’t give away. Not many cars raise dust along its lonely roads—it is country people do not much want to cross, much less visit. But that block of country between the Milk River and the main line of the Canadian Pacific, and between approximately the Saskatchewan-Alberta line and Wood Mountain, is what this book is about. It is the place where I spent my childhood. It is also the place where the Plains, as an ecology, as a native Indian culture, and as a process of white settlement, came to their climax and their end. Viewed personally and historically, that almost featureless prairie glows with more color than it reveals to the appalled and misdirected tourist. As memory, as experience, those Plains are unforgettable; as history, they have the lurid explosiveness of a prairie fire, quickly dangerous, swiftly over.
I have sometimes been tempted to believe that I grew up on a gun-toting frontier. This temptation I trace to a stagecoach ride in the spring of 1914, and to a cowpuncher named Buck Murphy.
The stagecoach ran from Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, to the town I shall call Whitemud, sixty miles southwest in the valley of the Whitemud or Frenchman River. The grade from Moose Jaw already reached to Whitemud, and steel was being laid, but no trains were yet running when the stage brought in my mother, my brother, and myself, plus a red-faced cowpuncher with a painful deference to ladies and a great affection for little children. I rode the sixty miles on Buck Murphy’s lap, half anesthetized by his whiskey breath, and during the ride I confounded both my mother and Murphy by fishing from under his coat a six-shooter half as big as I was.
A little later Murphy was shot and killed by a Mountie in the streets of Shaunavon, up the line. As I heard later, the Mountie was scared and trigger-happy, and would have been in real trouble for an un-Mountie-like killing if Murphy had not been carrying a gun. But instead of visualizing it as it probably was—Murphy coming down the street in a buckboard, the Mountie on the comer, bad blood between them, a suspicious move, a shot, a scared team, a crowd collecting—I have been led by a lifetime of horse opera to imagine that death in standard walk-down detail. For years, growing up in more civilized places, I got a comfortable sense of status out of recalling that in my youth I had been a friend of badmen and an eyewitness to gunfights in wide streets between false-fronted saloons. Not even the streets and saloons, now that I test them, were authentic, for I don’t think I was ever in Shaunavon in my boyhood, and I could not have reconstructed an image from Whitemud’s streets because at the time of Murphy’s death Whitemud didn’t have any. It hardly even had houses: we ourselves were living in a derailed dining car.
Actually Murphy was an amiable, drunken, sentimental, perhaps dishonest, and generally harmless Montana cowboy like dozens of others. He may have been in Canada for reasons that would have interested Montana sheriffs, but more likely not; and if he had been, so were plenty of others who never thought of themselves as badmen. The Cypress Hills had always made a comfortable retiring place just a good day’s ride north of the Line. Murphy would have carried a six-shooter mainly for reasons of brag; he would have worn it inside his coat because Canadian law forbade the carrying of sidearms. When Montana cattle outfits worked across the Line they learned to leave their guns in their bedrolls. In the American West men came before law, but in Saskatchewan the law was there before settlers, before even cattlemen, and not merely law but law enforcement. It was not characteristic that Buck Murphy should die in a gunfight, but if he had to die by violence it was entirely characteristic that he should be shot by a policeman.
The first settlement in the Cypress Hills country was a village of métis winterers, the second was a short-lived Hudson’s Bay Company post on Chimney Coulee, the third was the Mounted Police headquarters at Fort Walsh, the fourth was a Mountie outpost erected on the site of the burned Hudson’s Bay Company buildings to keep an eye on Sitting Bull and other Indians who congregated in that country in alarming numbers after the big
troubles of the 1870’s. The Mountie post on Chimney Coulee, later moved down onto the river, was the predecessor of the town of Whitemud. The overgrown foundation stones of its cabins remind a historian why there were no Boot Hills along the Frenchman. The place was too well policed.
So as I have learned more I have had to give up the illusion of a romantic gun-toting past, and it is hardly glamour that brings me back, a middle-aged pilgrim, to the village I last saw in 1920. Neither do I come back with the expectation of returning to a childhood wonderland—or I don’t think I do. By most estimates, including most of the estimates of memory, Saskatchewan can be a pretty depressing country.
The Frenchman, a river more American than Canadian since it flows into the Milk and thence into the Missouri, has changed its name since my time to conform with American maps. We always called it the Whitemud, from the stratum of pure white kaolin exposed along its valley. Whitemud or Frenchman, the river is important in my memory, for it conditioned and contained the town. But memory, though vivid, is imprecise, without sure dimensions, and it is as much to test memory against adult observation as for any other reason that I return. What I remember are low bars overgrown with wild roses, cutbank bends, secret paths through the willows, fords across the shallows, swallows in the clay banks, days of indolence and adventure where space was as flexible as the mind’s cunning and where time did not exist. That was at the heart of it, the sunken and sanctuary river valley. Out around, stretching in all directions from the benches to become coextensive with the disk of the world, went the uninterrupted prairie.