The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  I don’t want to ask you for access to privileged documents and won’t—unless, without them, you think I would make serious mistakes about the fire. I doubt very much if, after me, there will be anyone who has had the right combination of training or will take the endless time to try to write another searching account of the Mann Gulch fire.

  I expect you to see that I do not miss anything important. My guess is that this is the last time around. [. . .]

  Thank you again for your thoughtfulness in writing me. I am an admirer of your prose style, as well as of your husband’s.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Norman Maclean

  [P.S.] Yes, I have Life Magazine of Aug. 22, 1949—in fact, I have Wag Dodge’s own copy.4 I also have Wag’s scrap-book of newspaper clippings.

  Sept. 21, 1979

  Dear Mrs. Jansson:

  I am packing up to leave Seeley Lake for the summer (? I don’t know whether “summer” is the right word, since it’s in the high 20s nearly every morning), so there are things I want to say I’ll have to leave until I get to Chicago. But I couldn’t leave without thanking you for your letter of Sept. 5 and of the enclosed reminiscences of your life as a ranger’s wife. In many ways, your husband was also a tragic victim of the Mann Gulch Fire—after it and in part because of it his life began to fade out. I was especially moved by your description of his returning home after he led the rescue team into Mann Gulch—carrying the smell of death with him. Contrary to your fears, I appreciated your personal, behind-the-scenes descriptions of him. As for his professional reports on the Mann Gulch Fire, I think I have all of them, but I am counting on you to check on me to be sure I have.

  It is not clear from your letters whether the copy you sent to me of the reminiscences is mine to keep or whether I am to return it. If you wish it returned, do I have your permission to have parts of it Xeroxed?

  I shall be visiting a little along the way, so it will be early in October before I reach Chicago. [. . .]

  Thank you again. I am sure you haven’t heard the last of me.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Norman Maclean

  Dec. 20, 1979

  Dear Mrs. Jansson:

  I am glad that on the whole you liked the talk I gave at the Conference of the Intermountain Fire Research Council, and I am sorry about the very “cry.” I meant it in the sense of “he cried out in his sleep,” not in the sense of “wept.” The truth is that I don’t believe any man connected with the fire ever wept after he was a child.

  I gave my copy of the talk to the Secretary of the Intermountain Fire Research Council nearly two months ago presumably for publication in the Proceedings of their Council, so it undoubtedly is too late to make any changes in it now. I promise, though, that if it is ever republished I will remove this unhappy little ambiguity.

  I don’t want to close this letter at this time of year without wishing you great happiness during the coming season and the coming new year—and all the years to come.

  For me, I hope it is the year that I bring the Mann Gulch Fire under control.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Norman Maclean

  Feb. 8, 1980

  Dear Mrs. Jansson:

  Thank you for your kind words about my stories. I am especially touched by your words since they come from an authority on the world in which they took place.

  I was also touched by the montage of personal remembrances they called up for you of times when you were in Wolf Creek or on the Elkhorn. My wife’s ashes are scattered on a mountain named after her and by her when she was a girl that overlooks the town of Wolf Creek and the Oxbow Ranch all the way to the entry to the Gates of the Mountains. I am getting too old, alas, to climb up each summer to be with her for a time.

  The mountain you ask about at the head of Mann Gulch is Willow Mountain. At its other side is Willow Creek which runs into the Elkhorn just before they run into the Missouri. The last summer when I went into Mann Gulch I went through the old McGregor Ranch, up Willow Creek and over the divide into Mann Gulch. The Montana Fish and Game Commission, which now owns the McGregor Ranch, leant me a horse to take me to the top of the divide, or I don’t think I could have made it. It was well over 100° that day in the Gulch. [. . .]

  The Sleeping Giant5 had nothing to do with the Mann Gulch Fire. The Sleeping Giant is on the other (the west) side of the Missouri.

  I am returning the check you sent me for copies of my book. It is my pleasure and privilege to give them to you.6

  Tell me, is Roger your son? I will send him an inscribed copy.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Norman Maclean

  March 1, 1980

  Dear Mrs. Jansson:

  I am sending an autographed copy of the River for Roger. I am sending it under separate cover and to you, since offhand I don’t seem to find his address in the mess around here.

  I can’t at this distance assure you that I will be in Chicago in late April. I am visiting my son and his family in April in Washington, D.C.—April in Washington being among other things the season of Magnolias and azaleas, given my taste, more beautiful than Washington in cherry-blossom time. So the time of my visit has to correspond to the time of the azaleas and to the convenience of my son and his wife, both of whom work. [. . .]

  I can understand your anxiety over the fact that I am writing about the Mann Gulch Fire. Seemingly all those living who had close connections with those in the fire are worried about me. I have to accept that as a fact of scholarship, and go ahead and call the shots as I see them, trusting my own integrity as a person and a life-long training as a scholar. The reasons are at least several why those connected with those who were in the Mann Gulch [fire] do not want it talked about in public. Although I have known the former Mrs. Dodge, wife of the foremen on the fire, since she was a small girl whom my brother and I chased around the chicken coop, she would be very happy now if I would go off in the brush and die. She still lets me fish, though, on the Blackfoot River where it runs through her ranch. Professor Diettert’s hands shake when he tries to talk to me. Mrs. Harrison gently but firmly refuses to talk to me. These are perhaps only small matters, but almost nothing large or small has come easy in trying to find out how thirteen young men died in Mann Gulch on Aug. 5, 1949. I sometimes wonder why I go on trying. In one of your letters you quote someone as referring to [your] husband as “a thick-headed Scot,” which sometimes has to explain things when all else fails.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Norman Maclean

  May 9, 1980

  Dear Mrs. Jansson:

  Thanks very much for the slides and the telephone call. My son-in-law is a photographer and so has a projector, so I’ll soon be seeing them on the screen. I’m going to speak late this month at a faculty club here on something or other I am doing on the Mann Gulch fire, and may have occasion to use them. Certainly, some time I surely will, and I am grateful to you for giving them to me.

  I was also glad about the telephone call and especially glad to hear that your trip was a big success. Northern Idaho and northern Montana are good places to get out of toward the end of a winter. It is also a pleasure for the rest of us who see you as you fly by. I enjoyed very much our evening together.

  I’ll be going to Montana a little earlier than usual this spring. Montana State University at Bozeman is awarding me an honorary doctor degree at their spring convocation. That’s nice of them.

  Norman Maclean

  June 12, 1980

  Dear Mrs. Jansson:

  I just got back from Bozeman where I was treated better than I often am in Missoula where it is very doubtful that “the best university in Montana” is located, but it will be some time yet before I get there myself—certainly not in time to catch you on your way to your family reunion in Minnesota. I should leave here in another week or 10 days (if I quit trying to answer my back-mail), but I stop in Helena for a week or so with my brother-in-law and so get to Seeley Lake just in time to op
en my cabin for the 4th of July and fortify my woodpile against the onslaught of the motor cycle set.

  It will be at least the end of the first week of July before I get down to Missoula, and I doubt if I get much farther west than that before I return to Chicago. I must complete a first draft of the Mann Gulch story this summer—or else it will have to be published posthumously. I have worked on it now for four years—I don’t think I could face another year on Mann Gulch. I’m already almost as bad as your husband was about it—I’ll be having nightmares about it unless I get a transfer soon. But I sure would like to see the Priest River Experiment Station very much. We’ll see.

  It was indeed a pleasure to meet you.

  Norman Maclean

  July 2, 1980

  Dear Mrs. Jansson:

  I arrived yesterday at the Lake and found two letters from you waiting for me and a shocking letter from Walter Rumsey’s daughter.7 In case you have not heard of the time Walter was not a survivor. I am enclosing a copy of his daughter’s letter to me together with a copy of the obituary notice that accompanied it. I am also doing the same thing for Bob Sallee8 and Laird Robinson.

  I did not know Walter well, but I admired him greatly. He had a kind of Kansas steadfastness and stateliness about him, and of course as a survivor of the fire that spared almost no man or tree he was as much a ghost as a man or as a Kansan. The day I spent in Mann Gulch with him, Bob Sallee and Laird Robinson was one of the best days of my life.

  Walt was a great admirer of your husband and spoke of him several times. As I remember, he knew him not only through the Forest Service but through church and work with the young people. Like yourselves, he was a devout but not a parading Methodist.

  My instinct is to leave completely unchanged what I wrote about him, except to acknowledge his death in a footnote or in the preface.

  I am woefully behind in everything (including my book) or I would thank you at greater length for your letters and your sketch of Duncan Moir9 and for a copy of your husband’s letter to the Regional Forester stating (to keep the record straight) his differences from the Forest Service’s logistics of the fire. Hard as I must work this summer, I will find time to thank you more fully for them.

  Among other troubles, I can’t get Oregon’s volcano off my cabin.10 I oiled it late last summer, and the volcanic dust is ingrained in it. I can’t get it off.

  Very sincerely,

  Norman Maclean

  Nov. 19, 1980

  Dear Lois:

  Your grand-daughter doesn’t have it quite right for me. For me, it’s “How are you and don’t tell me. I’m not so fine.”

  I no more got back to Chicago from the summer, than I had to return to Montana (Billings) to be the banquet speaker at the annual conference of the Montana Historical Society. It was a rush trip and I caught a cold and a month later still have it and am spiritually bedraggled. The autumn is almost gone and I am almost non-productive.

  I am also stopped by the fact that I have come to a place in the story of the Mann Gulch Fire where the time of the final succession of events is important—and that leads to an ever bigger question—the question of whether “the Forest Service” didn’t alter the actual time of the events to agree with their logistic scheme of events. And this leads to an even larger question—just what credibility can be placed in any of the statements of “the Forest Service” and the witnesses about the fire?

  I can’t tell you, Lois, how these questions haunt me and alter my basic feelings about the story and for the time being cripple my progress with it. Hell, I’m not a political muck-raker—in so far as I am a writer, I am a writer of stories, generally western stories and generally tragic ones. I am generally a tragic writer because generally my view of things is tragic. What do I want of a story about a house-detective of the Forest Service who sneaks around getting witnesses to alter their testimony? That might be a pretty good story for my son, who is one of the better Washington news reporters, but it’s no story for me.

  But I can’t walk off now and leave it. As you are a Methodist, so I was brought up a Presbyterian, which is about the same thing. I don’t quit a job because near the end it gets messy. Lois, maybe you can help to get me going again.

  I have lots of problems in facing the possibility that “the Forest Service” tried to alter evidence to make all stories fit their stories. For one thing, I have been trained all my life to start by trying to make sense out of things, as you being a schoolteacher too must have been trained, but I can’t make any sense of why they should run the danger of trying to tamper with witnesses and artifacts. Can you?

  (1). I can’t see where the story as it occurred needed to be tampered with anywhere. I think it is a rather noble and terrifying story of the elite of men coming to disaster by doing what they were trained to do which always before had led to success. I agree totally with your husband in his letter to Wag Dodge (Sept. 1, ’49)—sure anybody in the world who knew the results of the fire ahead of time would have done everything differently, he wouldn’t even have let his men or himself be dropped into Mann Gulch on Aug. 5, 1949, but knowing what was known about fire-fighting and what was known about the fire in Mann Gulch on Aug. 5, 1949, he, the Ranger of Canyon Ferry, would have done what Wag Dodge did and probably would not have been smart enough to think of “lighting an escape fire.” What was wrong with the truth, Lois? Anyone who understood anything about the bitter turns of the universe and of forest fires would have had no trouble in understanding the true story of Mann Gulch. There was no story they could have put out, including the one they did, that would diminish the tragedy for everyone. Why forsake the truth because at times it is almost unbearably harsh?

  (2). More specifically, what sense did it make to try to get your husband to change his logistics by 20 minutes so that it would agree with Dodge’s story as to when the tragedy (“the accident,” as the Forest Service refers to it) occurred? Lois, when Dodge said “the accident” occurred, he was at the upper end of the Gulch only 100 yards from where some of his crew were dying, and your husband was down in the Missouri River riding in a boat. Why shouldn’t there be some variation in the timing of the events? Even Dodge could not know exactly—he saw none of the events. His face was in his wet handkerchief and both his face and his handkerchief were buried in the ashes. He didn’t know the time until the main fire passed him by and he looked at his watch and it said 6:10, so he said, and who knows whether his watch and your husband’s agreed. Anyway, it would seem almost inevitable (unless they conspired afterward) that there would be some difference in the timing of the same events when they were several miles apart and couldn’t see for the smoke anyway. An agreement among them as to the exact timing of events in the circumstances would be more suspicious to me than some differences as what seems to me to be the facts.

  Lois, why from the Forest Service point of view—from theirs, not yours or mine—was it so important that your husband and Dodge agree almost exactly about the deaths of 13 men none of which anybody who lived saw?

  I’ve come to a place in my story where it doesn’t make sense anymore, and (with a cold) I am having a hard time thinking of what to write.

  Can you think of any true words that might help me?

  Very sincerely yours,

  Norman Maclean

  [P.S.] Lois, right now I would like to use a sentence from your husband in a letter to “Bob and Wilma,” whoever they are, as the frontispiece of my story:

  “I think there is a tremendous story in the Mann Gulch episode and I feel that someday it won’t hurt us to tell it.”

  Dec. 10, 1981

  Dear Lois:

  Thank you very much for the jelly, which I have just finished, which would seem like a good time to thank you for it, except that it is a sadder time than I thought it would be. I like jelly very much, and was unhappy to see it go.

  I have finished a first draft of the story, and have put the manuscript aside for several weeks hopefully to gather strength to sta
rt the imposing job of revision. I revise a lot (even my life), but this looks like the biggest revising job I ever took on. I’ll never again try to tell a story that all the time tries to tell the truth. Often the truth isn’t worth what it costs.

  But thanks again for your contributions (some of which were truly helpful), and best wishes for the coming season and the coming new year.

  Norman Maclean

  Acknowledgments

  Many years ago, as I wrote and published several articles about Norman Maclean, I made the acquaintance of University of Chicago Press editor Alan Thomas, as well as John N. Maclean and Jean Maclean Snyder. All three supported my work. With John and a party of others, I walked into Mann Gulch on August 5, 1994, the forty-fifth anniversary of the Mann Gulch fire. In March 2000 I finally met Alan and Jean face-to-face, as both kindly took me to lunch and listened to my gushings about Norman and hopes for a book. John and Jean had graciously allowed me access to the Norman Maclean Archive (Department of Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago), where I spent five happy days poring through notes, letters, photographs, and the extant chapters (both longhand and typescript) from the Custer manuscript.

  I want to thank Alan, John, and Jean for inviting me to serve as editor of the book you are holding. It is a better book than the one I planned most of a decade ago. I appreciate deeply their vote of confidence, and preparing the Reader has proven one of the highlights of my scholarly life. It has also allowed me to step close once again to one of my favorite writers. I also thank Marie Borroff and Nick Lyons for answering my e-mail queries and editing me when I needed it. And I especially thank Robert Utley, preeminent historian of the West, who answered many questions for me more than a decade ago, and who more recently has tolerated my occasional phone query and generally supported this book. My thanks go also to William Bevis for his comments on the selection and introduction, and to Jim Hepworth, who was the publisher of an earlier book on Norman Maclean and was supportive of this project. Bill has been a friend and mentor, and expert on Montana letters, for many years; Jim spent an evening at our home several years ago, after a day of fishing, and we talked in depth about Norman and this new book. Finally, I am grateful to Alan Thomas’s colleagues at the University of Chicago Press for their work in bringing this book to publication, including Randolph Petilos, Erin DeWitt, Jill Shimabukuro, Joan Davies, Rich Hendel, and Levi Stahl.