Fair Land, Fair Land
First edition cover
|
|
| Author | A. B. Guthrie, Jr. |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Western |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin Company |
|
Publication date
|
1982 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| 813/.52 19 | |
| LC Class | PS3513.U855 F3 1982 |
Fair Land, Fair Land is a 1982 Western novel in a sequence of six by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. dealing with the Oregon Trail and the development of Montana from 1830, the time of the mountain men, to "the cattle empire of the 1880s to the near present.". In order of publication Fair Land, Fair Land is the sixth and last of this western sequence. The publication sequence started with The Big Sky, then proceeded to The Way West,These Thousand Hills,Arfive (1971), The Last Valley (1975), and Fair Land, Fair Land.
The first three books of the six in the chronological sequence (but not in the sequence of publishing)—The Big Sky, The Way West, and Fair Land, Fair Land—are in themselves a complete trilogy, starting in 1830 with Boone Caudill leaving Kentucky to become a mountain man and ending with the death of Caudill and later the death of Dick Summers in the 1870s. For Wallace Stegner The Big Sky is "the best" of the six novels in Guthrie's sequence. As popular and highly regarded had been The Big Sky, The Way West went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950.
Although Fair Land, Fair Land is the third in the chronology, Guthrie wrote it as the last of the series of six. In his "Author's note" at the beginning of the novel, he wrote that he had "sworn more than once to write no more about the early-day West and just as often have broken the vow." He said that with Fair Land, Fair Land he was breaking the vow again to fill the time gap, "roughly from 1845 to 1870," between The Way West and These Thousand Hills.
In its view of the white settlement of the American west, Fair Land, Fair Land is the bleakest book in the series. The most positively portrayed whites are mountain men and those who choose to live with the Native Americans and adopt their ways, such as Dick Summers and Hezekiah Higgins. Other whites range from settlers who don't realize they are despoiling an Eden, to destructively careless wealth seekers, and to deliberately evil murderers.
Fair Land, Fair Land begins where The Way West ends, with Dick Summers riding away from the group of "wagon-train people" he has guided from Independence to Oregon, but Summers leaves without saying goodbye and while the settlers are still sleeping. As a mountain man traveling light, all Summers carries is his Hawken rifle, "his old Green River knife, some ammunition and a small sack of possibles."
...
Wikipedia