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The Big Sky (1947)

de A. B Guthrie Jr

Altres autors: Mira la secció altres autors.

Sèrie: Guthrie's Western Sequence (1)

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1,1262517,657 (4.08)166
The first in an epic western saga that spans over a hundred years in the course of six novels. Boone Caudill travels west to the Rockies, leaving his abusive father to find a life of freedom in the wild. He wins the love of a beautiful Blackfoot princess, a woman willing to love him despite his wild ways. Their lives become forever entwined through adventure, travel, and eventually betrayal. He finds that freedom comes at a price, higher than he ever could have imagined.… (més)
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» Mira també 166 mencions

Es mostren 1-5 de 25 (següent | mostra-les totes)
This is a wonderful book full of winds, savagery, unsullied nature, friendship, hard men, and loss. When I was young there were men who sat beneath a tree at the bottom of our garden, watching the world go by. WW2 had left them to fend for themselves. Some of them were hard men: men who said little, who had something about the set of jaw and lips that signaled pain, loss, and the toll of life. Set in the mid-1800s, Guthrie's hard men are mountain men; who are quiet, keenly observant, more at ease in open space than indoors, men who have known hardship, and men who remain calm in crisis.

The narrative arc follows Boone who is bold, too quick to anger, and instinctive; not just in his search for a better life, but in his single-minded quest for the girl/woman, Teal Eye. But living instinctively has its difficulties. Guthrie writes with a sparse precision and his use of backwoods dialogue is masterful, not only in its economy of expression but in its richness:
A dog that was all hair and bark ran from behind the house and yipped at Blue. Blue winked one eye and let a low growl out of his Phlegmy throat, and the small dog backed up, still yipping. Then he lifted his leg against a bush and scratched the ground afterwards and trotted away with his head held high as if he had made a good out of it. p 370.
The Big Sky has rhythms where we rest between passages of extreme tension, such as the theft of a horse at night, with closely observed evocations of landscape and the natural world inhabiting it. If the allegorical trajectory of the novel is the steady progression of Boone becoming part of that world as theystruggle up-stream. it is also the steady destruction of it and the over-riding sense of inevitable loss as Boone staggers towards internal and external confrontation at the very end. Summers shows us another side as he faulters in old-age. In many respects this is such a well observed book that I can also read it as the struggle today between the vanishing values of the analogue world as they are subsumed by the digital.
Summers couldn't see anything among the willows, not so much as a branch bent out of shape or the grass trampled where a man might have gone through, but he knew the Sioux were there. He brought his head back, still slowly, and turned about, to see an Indian screened in the brush only an arm's length away. Two black stripes ran down the Indian's cheeks. They pulled downward as the Indian caught his movement. There was one still instant, - a flash of seeing, in which nothing moved or sounded - and then the Indian jerked up his battle axe. (p. 119)
( )
  simonpockley | Feb 25, 2024 |
Good historical novel about mountain men in the West. ( )
  kslade | Dec 8, 2022 |
A fictional account of Americans winning their way across a hostile prairie to find a prosperoue settlement in the Oregon Country. The characters contain the usual roes first established by Fenimore Cooper in "The Prairie" but the writing with an experiment in presenting dialogue, goes well enough. While expected, the charactewrs are well drawn and motivated. We are solely concerned with the affairs inside the wagon train, and the natives are treated in a very dismissive fashion. The book made a lot of money for Mr. Guthrie, who also became an early environmental invstigator. ut, i was not very impressed. ( )
  DinadansFriend | Sep 6, 2022 |
[b:The Big Sky|202035|The Big Sky (The Big Sky, #1)|A.B. Guthrie Jr.|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441429378l/202035._SY75_.jpg|1461085] is the first in A.B. Guthrie’s series of novels about the settling of the American West. It is the story of three men, Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, each of whom braves the unknown and difficult life in the cold mountains west of civilization, for his own unique reasons. It is a portrait of what a mountain man was and what it took to be such an adventurer.

There is nothing sugar-coated in this book. It is often raw and coarse and startling.

They were a heap better than squaw meat, which men had been known to butcher and eat, probably after bedding with the squaws first.

This is a hard, cruel and unforgiving life, and the men who live it are sometimes little more than animals. Boone Caudill, fleeing an already hard and abusive life with his father, becomes a kind of savage survivalist. Dick Summers, in many ways the most skilled and intuitive of the three men, is only half a mountain man. He has altered his life, but not his soul. He likes to get to town and doesn’t mind the idea of farming, and he is the only one who still manages to fit into the world of white men.

One of the main characters of The Big Sky is the West itself. Guthrie paints it the way Ansel Adams photographed it, large and beautiful and powerful.

From the top Boone could see forever and ever, nearly any way he looked. It was open country, bald and open, without an end. It spread away flat now and then rolling, going on clear to the sky. A man wouldn’t think the whole world was so much. It made the heart come up. It made a man little and still big, like a king looking out.

This is God’s country, but even the men who love it and choose it, question what kind of God rules in such a wilderness. Jim Deakins contemplates his relationship with God and what God expects from him fairly frequently, and I particularly enjoyed his thoughts, because I think having such close connections to nature, but also experiencing its cruelties up close, would raise doubts and wonder.

These men are like the wildness of the country they inhabit, they are being worn away, being lost, becoming the last of their kind. The country is on the cusp of westward expansion, the buffalo are being slaughtered into extinction, Greeley is about to urge young men to go west, and the young men are going to take young women with them and build and plow.

It was strange about time; it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop--a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst.

A historical picture of life in 1830s Montana, The Big Sky is also about change--the change in the country and the change in the people who populate it. There is no room for the Indians in the society that is coming, and there is no room for the mountain men either. Both are dying breeds. Both are living on borrowed time.

I must note that the portrayal of the Indians in this book seems remarkably accurate to me. They are seen as both victim and aggressor, but neither the noble savage nor the devil’s spawn. The attitude of the white men toward them is primarily one of exploitation or dread, and only a few, like Boone and Summers, come to really know anything about them individually. There is a graphic chapter that deals with the devastating effects of smallpox on the Indian population, that is one I will find it hard to ever forget.

Wallace Stegner wrote the foreward to the volume I was reading. If you would truly like to recognize the importance and meaning of this novel, you need do nothing more than read it.

Boone Caudill is “both mountain man and myth, both individual and archetype, which means that the record of his violent life is both credible and exhilarating.” Don’t think anyone could have said it better than that.
( )
  mattorsara | Aug 11, 2022 |
Kentucky runaway becomes mountain man, marries Blackfoot woman, kills best friend out of jealousy, cannot fit society.
  ritaer | Jul 24, 2021 |
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Nom de l'autorCàrrecTipus d'autorObra?Estat
Guthrie Jr, A. Bautor primaritotes les edicionsconfirmat
Clark, Walter Van TilburgIntroduccióautor secundarialgunes edicionsconfirmat
Foley, KevinNarradorautor secundarialgunes edicionsconfirmat
Haemer, AlanDissenyador de la cobertaautor secundarialgunes edicionsconfirmat
Stenger, WallacePròlegautor secundarialgunes edicionsconfirmat
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To my father
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Serena Caudill heard a step outside and then the squeak of the cabin door and knew that John was coming in.
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The first in an epic western saga that spans over a hundred years in the course of six novels. Boone Caudill travels west to the Rockies, leaving his abusive father to find a life of freedom in the wild. He wins the love of a beautiful Blackfoot princess, a woman willing to love him despite his wild ways. Their lives become forever entwined through adventure, travel, and eventually betrayal. He finds that freedom comes at a price, higher than he ever could have imagined.

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