I read the first book in this series, The Big Sky, many years ago in an old Time-Life series of out of print books. It was very good (also a movie with Kirk Douglas, I think), and I wanted to read this sort-of sequel, especially since it is on many lists of the best westerns. However, it is not available as an e-book, so I did not read it out of principle. I recently realized that I wasn't sure what the principle was, so I bought a used paperback copy. It's quite good. I recommend that you read it with a copy of the Oregon Trail Map that the national park service has. You can download it as a .pdf file. Now I have a paperback copy that nobody wants, so if you are interested, I will give it to you. ( )

First edition good

Good western historical fiction. I liked The Big Sky a little better. ( )

This book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon along the Oregon Trail to the wilderness that was Oregon. Lije Evans, his wife Rebecca, and his son Brownie are one of a group of families who sign on with a wagon train to make the journey, and they represent, in my eyes, the perfect depiction of the kind of strong individuals who carved out this new land into civilization. During the journey, Lije discovers himself as a leader and we discover that a good man can be a strong man; that a quiet man can make all the noise that is needed.

There is one more member of the Evans family that I have not mentioned, but for whom I developed a great attachment, the dog, Rock. At the outset of the story, there is a move to kill all the dogs, many thinking they would be a nuisance on such a long trip. Evans figured he would have some business with the man who came to shoot Rock. That was the moment I knew I was going to love Lije, no going back.

My favorite character, by far, however, was Dick Summers. A seasoned mountain man who has been farming in Missouri, he signs on to pilot the group as far as the Dalles. I recognized right away that without men like Dick, none of the others would have ever survived to do the settling. In fact, they would hardly have known how to get where they were going. What I loved the most about him, however, was his open mind; never thinking the world should be like him or give him any particular homage.

He didn’t blame the Oregoners as he had known old mountain men to do. Everybody had his life to make, and every time its way, one different from another. The fur hunter didn’t have title to the mountain no matter if he did say finders keepers. By that system the country belonged to the Indians, or maybe someone before them or someone before them. No use to stand against the stream of change and time.

I felt I got to know Dick Summers in a way that I could strangely relate to. Of course, his lost youth was danger and mountains and the capability to survive, but wasn’t he longing for what most of us older people long for?

At the nub of it did he just want his youth back? Beaver, streams, squaws, danger--were they just names for his young time?

When I went back to review the passages I had marked while reading, almost all of them were Dick. His was the voice that spoke to me.

Guthrie shows us the physical hardships of the journey, which would surely be enough to defeat most of us, but which we could all fairly well imagine; but he also shows us the emotional toll that such a choice entails. Makes you wonder how anyone ever had the courage to set out, particularly with children in tow. The thought of the women, visibly pregnant, prodding the oxen while walking the trail, wore me to a bone. Guthrie’s men are both strong and weak, as are the women, and he seems to know both sexes well...what makes them the same and what makes them different, and how much both were needed to make such an undertaking work at all.

She wondered if he felt the same as she did. Did any two people ever feel the same? Did ever one soul know another, though they talked at night, though sometimes in hunger and in isolation they sought to make their bodies one, the all-mother in her loneliness trying to take back home the lost child-man?

I could picture these people, a mix of quite different backgrounds and incomes, growing closer and more understanding or more leery and wiser as the migration became a way of life. I could feel how tired and weary they felt at the end of even a good day. I could see the young faces becoming withered and crusted by exposure to wind and sun, and the older faces becoming hardened and set. At the same time, I could feel the yearning they all shared to start a new life, find a new adventure, see something they had never seen before. If they were still heading trains West, and if I were thirty years younger, I could see myself being convinced by Guthrie that the travails would be worth it; that Oregon could be home, and that a sturdy wagon and a good man might be all you would need.
( )

"What a person wondered was, were other people like him underneath or, more likely, solider and properer and not moved by crazy notions? He wouldn't want to tell about how it was with him, not even about the way his chest filled sometimes when he came to a rise and looked over the country or how his heart turned just at the smell of camp smoke…" (pp95-96)

Despite being a Pulitzer Prize winner, back when that really meant something, and a successor to one of my favourite recent reads, The Big Sky, there were times when I wasn't sure if I loved The Way West, or saw it as a great book. I enjoyed it throughout, but there were moments when something on the path A. B. Guthrie had laid out would wobble underfoot and make me unsure of my place. But then, there's a scene where the mountain man Dick Summers (the only character to return from The Big Sky) recognises that he made the right choice in coming out West again and taking in the glorious country. One of the other characters asks him why he's smiling, and Dick replies, "Was I smilin'? Just feelin' good, I reckon" (pg. 225). It's a warm moment and I realised that, for all its minor wobbles, I too had been smiling throughout.

Those wobbles were legitimate; stones come loose from the path. The Big Sky was a slow book and The Way West is too, but more happened in The Big Sky. It seems strange to say that, as it often seemed like not much happened and the book was all landscape and thought. But though The Way West has more characters – it follows the members of a wagon train on the famous Oregon Trail – they don't sit as deeply in the memory as characters from the first book, even minor ones, sat. They do just fine, and better than most novels, but a "captain ought to know his company down to the last pup" (pg. 132), and by the end too many of the characters remain strangers. Of those who are more prominent, Higgins becomes forgotten despite having some point-of-view chapters earlier on in the book. Brownie, the teenage boy, is one that seems set up to grow into a man, but his waxing confidence ("he was more like Dick Summers all the time" (pg. 97)) is less show than tell, and by the end he remains in a bit-part role and seems to have reverted into boyishness. Furthermore, though there are storms, river crossings, hardships, conflicts within the group and encounters with Indians, we never feel as though the wagon train is in great peril. There's very little circling of the wagons.

All that said, Guthrie's path is still a sturdy one even after some of those stones have come loose. The prose style is a good example of this; there are moments when I thought some of the sentences were strangled or overcooked, and others where I had to re-read a paragraph to get the sense of it, but then every time I thought this, Guthrie would go on to produce some astonishing piece of writing or touching dialogue between characters or some well-staged scene, and I would forgive the moment where things had drifted slightly. It's as though Guthrie is a prize-fighter who has feinted with his left hand, the better to knock you down with his right.

As in The Big Sky, the great redeemer in The Way West is the American landscape, and the thoughts it evokes in the characters and in the reader. I wrote in my review of The Big Sky that the book demanded you take it slow, and The Way West is the same in that it rewards those who are willing to treat with it on its own terms. The prose, like the West's prairie air, has "a taste to it" (pg. 126), and oftentimes you can tell Guthrie is writing a character towards an outcrop or a stream, solely to provide them a moment of solitude so they can paint the land they see with their eyes and Guthrie can deliver his potent inner monologue on how it makes them feel. In a lesser book, this would seem manipulative or writerly, but in The Way West you can easily imagine these characters wanting to steal away for a moment and look out on the mountains or the plains or the stars or the mighty rivers. Like them, the reader gets the wanderlust where he just wants to say 'goddamn', or moments where he "felt he couldn't speak for the crowding in his chest" (pg. 318). Guthrie's ability to do this is unmatched and it's the most compelling reason to invest in one of his books.

I began to value this all the more highly as it is rare, particularly nowadays, to find a book which does its own thing rather than pandering to a target audience. In fact, I don't know of many books which grant themselves this extent of license, and like the unbroken Western landscape our characters traverse, we're sometimes overwhelmed by its extent but grateful for the sense of freedom such space provides. Like one character realises at the very end, for all the tough moments, the "hardships, sorrows, partings… the heart [was] still ready to beat high" (pg. 340). Wagh! ( )