Table of Contents
WOLF WILLOW
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
I - THE QUESTION MARK IN THE CIRCLE
Chapter 1 - The Question Mark in the Circle
Chapter 2 - History Is a Pontoon Bridge
Chapter 3 - The Dump Ground
II - PREPARATION FOR A CIVILIZATION
Chapter 1 - First Look
Chapter 2 - The Divide
Chapter 3 - Horse and Gun
Chapter 4 - Half World: the Métis
Chapter 5 - Company of Adventurers
Chapter 6 - The Last of the Exterminators
Chapter 7 - The Medicine Line
Chapter 8 - Law in a Red Coat
Chapter 9 - Capital of an Unremembered Past
III - THE WHITEMUD RIVER RANGE
Chapter 1 - Specifications for a Hero
Chapter 2 - Genesis
Chapter 3 - Carrion Spring
IV - TOWN AND COUNTRY
Chapter 1 - The Town Builders
Chapter 2 - Whitemud, Saskatchewan
Chapter 3 - The Garden of the World
Chapter 4 - The Making of Paths
EPILOGUE: FALSE-FRONT A THENS
Acknowledgements
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WOLF WILLOW
WALLACE STEGNER (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; A Shooting Star, 1961; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.
PAGE STEGNER was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1937. He attended Stanford University, where he received his B.A. in History in 1959 and his Ph.D. in American Literature in 1964. From 1965 to 1995 he was Professor of American Literature and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, retiring in 1995 to devote full time to writing.
He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1979-80), a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1980-81), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981-82).
He is the author of three novels, two works of literary criticism, three collections of essays on the American West, and a natural history of the Grand Canyon, and a history of the American frontier from 1800 to 1899.
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First published in the United States of America
by The Viking Press, Inc., 1962
Published in Compass Book edition 1966
Published in Penguin Books 1990
This edition with an introduction by Page Stegner
published in Penguin Books 2000
9 10
Copyright © Wallace Stegner, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1962
Introduction copyright © Page Stegner, 2000
All rights reserved
“Quiet Earth, Big Sky” and “History Comes to the Great Plains,” which appear
here in somewhat altered form as “The Question Mark in the Circle” and “The
Medicine Line,” first appeared in American Heritage. “History Is a Pontoon Bridge”
first appeared in Horizon. “The Mounties at Fort Walsh,” which makes up part of
the chapter entitled “Capital of an Unremembered Past,” and “The Town Dump”
first appeared in Atlantic Monthly. “Genesis” first appeared in Contact. “Carrion
Spring” first appeared in Esquire. “The Making of Paths,” here expanded into
the chapter of the same name, first appeared in The New Yorker.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-
Wolf Willow : a history, a story, and a memory of the last Plains frontier / Wallace
Stegner ; with an introduction by Page Stegner.
p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-101-15366-6
1. Frontier and pioneer life—Cypress Hills Region (Alta. and Sask.) 2. Cypress
Hills Region (Alta. and Sask.)—Social life and customs. 3. Cypress Hills Region
(Alta. and Sask.)—Fiction. 4. Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909—Childhood and youth.
I. Title. II. Series.
F1079.C9 S74 2000
971.24’3—dc21 00-062401
http://us.penguingroup.com
This is in memory of my mother
INTRODUCTION
Just how does one characterize a book like Wolf Willow? Do we look for it on the shelves of Western Americana? Or on the fiction table? Or over in the autobiography section? Viking Press, its publisher, addressed the conundrum with a subtitle that satisfied nobody, including its author, because the formulation—A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier—suggests a kind of tidy tripartite package that the work itself doesn’t entirely support, and with its focus on genre says little about the intellectual concerns informing the narrative. A number of its reviewers didn’t quite know what to make of a bouillabaisse of reminiscence, history, and drama either. “It’s a librarian’s nightmare,” Stegner himself once said. “How do you catalogue it?”
It’s easy enough to inventory its central concerns. First, if not foremost, Wolf Willow is a selective history of the Cypress Hills region near the Saskatchewan-Montana border, a rather neatly proscribed area of some thirty thousand square miles “between the Milk River and the main line of the Canadian Pacific, and between approximately the Saskatchewan-Alberta line and Wood Mountain.” It is the history of a small town called Eastend (renamed Whitemud in the narrative), where Wallace Stegner spent the most formative years of his childhood. And it is also, by synecdoche, the chronicle of a process of white settlement on the northern plains, a process that reaches its climax and end in this particular short-grass subdivision of southwestern Canada.
But Wolf Willow is utterly atypical of conventional history. What we have here is history filtered through the evocative and judgmental mind (and memory) of the region’s most illustrious native son; Stegner’s response to his subject is a kind of stratified formation of anthropology, sociology, geography, geology, and ecology applied to a literal place—and to literal place as a state of mind.
Its subtitle notwithstanding, Wolf Willow is divided into four parts, no
t three, and it includes an epilogue that attempts to measure the historical promise of Whitemud (née Eastend) against its modern-day subsidence into apathy—a pilgrimage, Stegner sadly notes, from American Dream to Revolt against the Village. “From one point of view Whitemud is an object lesson in the naivete of the American hope of a new society. It emphasizes the predictability and repetitiousness of the frontier curve from hope to habit, from optimism to a country rut....”
The first, second, and fourth parts weave a lemniscate pattern of history and autobiography—only the concentration of the subjective /objective intermingling changes from chapter to chapter. The third part, the center of the book, consists of the short story “Carrion Spring,” a brief autobiographical preface called “Specifications for a Hero,” and the novella “Genesis,” which, as Larry McMurtry has said, “is as good a short novel as anybody has done about the West or any part of it.” Both narratives focus on the winter of 1906-7, when ranching in southwestern Saskatchewan was virtually wiped out by a pattern of inclemency that was merciless even by Canadian standards. The “winter of the blue snow” was the mother of all calamities on the Whitemud range—a series of blizzards and storms that began in November and continued with such severity that by December animals were dying in catastrophic numbers in every coulee and draw. By spring their carcasses dotted the landscape, and the open-range cattle industry in southwestern Saskatchewan was effectively finished. “A great event, it had the force in the history of the Cypress Hills country that a defeat in war has upon a nation” (137).
The number of ranches that went under in the aftermath of this disaster opened the door for homesteaders (like George Stegner and his family) and permanently altered a way of life in the Cypress Hills region. Big spreads like the Turkey Track, T-Bar Down, Circle Diamond, and N-M went out of business, making it easier for the federal government to change leasing policies and encourage dryland farming. Red Fife wheat cultivation replaced cattle grazing. A new kind of frontier squeezed out the old, and instead of uninhabited rangeland, shack towns such as Eastend became the central feature of a rapidly advancing settlement.
Stegner’s critical eye is exceedingly sharp throughout Wolf Wil low, in spite of the informality of the voice, but his criticism is tempered by an unmistakable affection for the Cypress Hills. Taking note of all the flyblown, backwater, unlettered vulgarities of Eastend, he nevertheless insists that questions about a region as human habitat “ought to be answered without the scorn of a city intellectual or the angry defensiveness of a native son.” The brief impossible dream may have faded, but there is nobility in the “stickers” and in the militantly cooperative society they have formed. One needs to honor the intention for human institutions rather than scorn the result.
The narrative tone in Wolf Willow is learned but relaxed, moving easily from personal recollection to historical fact and back again in a seamless weave. For example, remembering the waiting room in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where he and his brother and mother were detained in the Canadian plains version of Ellis Island, Stegner reflects on the portraits of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police hanging on the wall. “The resolute, disciplined faces and the red coats glimmering in the shabby room filled me with awe.” He recalls that he was struck dumb with wonder, and sat through the entire wait without uttering a word. “I can see those portraits yet; they were burned into me as if I had been photographic film.”
Remembrance carries him along—to the train ride west, and the dusty stage ride into the construction camp that is Eastend, where “among overturned Fresno scrappers, lumber piles, and yellow mud puddles” the very first thing he sees is a real live Mountie: “and he was altogether so gorgeous that I don’t even remember meeting my father, who must have been there to welcome us and whom I had not seen for six months.” These memories, in turn, engender thoughts of how “The Law” must have looked to the Sioux and Blackfoot when the scarlet-coated mounted police first rode westward from Fort Dufferin in the summer of 1874, and reflection soon segues into ten pages of roughly chronological history of the RNWMP, from its inception to its civilizing presence throughout Canada. This movement—memory and contemplation shading into factual reconstruction—is the principle structural device that Stegner uses throughout the nonfiction portions of the book.
II
Wolf Willow is an intensely personal history, and when understood as the writer’s meticulous attempt to realize himself in terms of his own regional sources, it becomes infinitely more complicated than any mere account of the Cypress Hills as living space. Stegner’s former student and close friend Wendell Berry once wrote, “It is hard to imagine Hemingway researching and writing a history of Michigan or Africa; to him, as to many writers now, history was immediate experience. To Mr. Stegner, it is also memory. He has the care and the scrupulousness of one who understands remembering as a duty, and who therefore understands historical insight and honesty as duties.”1 In short, Stegner is involved in his subject not merely as a student of history; he is in large measure his own primary source, and his memory becomes an archive from which he is able to reconstruct directly much of the frontier paradigm with which he is concerned. While Wolf Willow is to a considerable extent autobiography, it is autobiography used as an adjunct of history.
“I don’t know when it was I began to get interested in the Canadian West and to get the feeling that I had grown up without any history and that I wanted some,” Stegner told Richard Etulain during a series of recorded conversations in 1980. He described the sensation as a kind of absence he couldn’t quite define, something akin to suffering a vitamin deficiency. “I don’t suppose that I missed history until I was at least middle-aged, and then I realized that I didn’t have a single place to which I could refer myself. I had no crowd, I had no gang, I had no sociological matrix or context except as I could find it or form it by going back along my life, which I did in Wolf Willow and some of the novels.” 2 Again, it was Wendell Berry who observed that if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are, and it is clear that this historical memoir is, above all, a conscious attempt to define a who out of the excavation of a childhood where.
Wolf Willow did not start out to be a reiminiscence of unshel tered childhood, or for that matter the story of a final frontier. “I had some kind of half-assed notion that I wanted to do a study in village democracy, focusing on three very different places. One was Saskatchewan, where I had spent my boyhood. Another was Vermont, which had been a village democracy for two hundred years at least. There’s one from scratch and one two hundred years old, and so I went back to Denmark to find one that was ten thousand years old.”3 Indeed, during the spring of 1954 Stegner spent four months in Denmark, courtesy of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The year before, he had returned to the town in which he had lived from ages five to eleven, Eastend (or Whitemud), and spent a week or two poking around old haunts that he had not seen for forty years. Researching small-town democracy in Vermont required no special effort, since the village he intended to write about had been his summer home since 1937.
The only aspect of this proposal that might be regarded as “half-assed” was the writer’s commitment to it. Having “quit” the writing of fiction in 1950, after the publication of The Preacher and the Slave (“It made a splash like a feather dropping into the Grand Canyon,” he sourly observed), and having finished the John Wesley Powell biography (Beyond the Hundredth Meridian), he was a man in search of a literary project. But it wasn’t long before he began to question just how seriously he was engaged by this comparative study. His spiritual covenant (apart from writing fiction) was with the West; neither a small town in New England nor a Danish island community in the south Baltic was finally what he wanted to write about. “What it came down to was concentrated on the Saskatchewan ... because that was obviously the one that interested me most.”
Returning from Denmark in the fall of 1955, Stegner had a year’s appointment as a fellow at the Center fo
r Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, and it was during this period that he wrote many of the various parts that were to become Wolf Willow, including the three pieces of fiction originally intended for it (only two were finally included). At least eight of the chapters were published, all or in part, as magazine pieces, and in fact it may have been rather late in the book’s fabrication before he began to figure out how such a potpourri was going to fit together. In the spring of 1962 he wrote Marshall Best at Viking that he was uneasy about the preliminary manuscript he had submitted because the parts did not seem to meld well enough. “One of my difficulties, I think, was that I had not much rewritten the several magazine articles that went into the book, with the result that each new article had a sense of beginning over.”4
Heeding the advice of his good friend Malcolm Cowley, he rewrote the beginnings of several chapters, tying them themati cally and stylistically to the book’s opening—the autobiographical account of his return to Eastend. And he added a chapter called “Specifications for a Hero” that is in essence an autobiographical preface to the novella, “Genesis,” and that provides, at its conclusion, a skillful transition between the nonfictional and fictional sections of the book. “If we want to know what it was like on the Whitemud River range during that winter when the hopes of the cattle empire died, we had better see it through the eyes of some tenderfoot, perhaps someone fresh from the old country, a boy without the wonder rubbed off him and with something to prove about himself.” In inventing this individual, Stegner acknowledges he combined aspects of several individuals he had known in the Cypress Hills, cowboys from the Lazy-S ranch, and says, “Let it be admitted that I have also put into him something of myself.” Finally it seemed that he had been able to stitch all the pieces into a patchwork quilt whose pattern not only would hold together, but would reveal something true about the place and the time.
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