A Review of Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain

One of the great writers of the West wrote the novel THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN which I read many years ago. He was Wallace Stegner and the book is said to be semi-autobiographical. The "Bo" mentioned below was patterned after his father. A long article by A. O. Scott in today's New York Times (6-02-2020) named "Wallace Stegner and the Conflicted Soul of the West" bears some similarities to the virus we're experiencing. Here is a portion of that long article -

"One of the stories is that whiskey is an effective medicine, but the town is dry, so Bo, heedless of expert advice and by nature resistant to any attempt to tell him what to do, hatches a plan to cross the border into Montana and bring back a few cases. He undertakes a thrilling, harrowing journey, driving in a blizzard on dubious roads through locked-down villages and desolate farmsteads. It’s an exciting ride — a tour de force of precise, suspenseful prose — and also an appalling study in selfishness and irresponsibility. Chasing after a big score, Bo spreads the virus across a wide swath of territory before coming home and falling sick, along with Elsa and Bruce. Bo, a rambunctious avatar of the unconfined, can-do spirit of the West, is a mortal danger to everyone around him.

The picture of empty streets and stricken households — of neighbors reluctant to open their doors, of public buildings hastily converted into morgues and wards — makes for eerie reading now. So does the portrait of Bo Mason, a man who thinks he can outwit biology and who places money over family safety or civic obligation. “That quarantine’s nothing but a word,” he says, and he goes about his business with blustery confidence in his own immunity — to bad weather and financial miscalculation as well as infection. "

Sod Houses

We watched Tom Isern’s Plains Folk presentation last evening on Facebook. He sang an old folk song “Little Old Sod Shanty on the Plains,” and spoke of window wells so deep they could be sat in. My mother-in-law told stories of her youth living in a sodhouse and how she’d sit in the deep window well and watch for her parents to come back after milking the cows.

Isern and his wife Suzzanne are both NDSU professors who lend attention to the history of pioneer life on the Great Plains. Their show has appeared several times to date and can still be found archived on the Great Plains Facebook site. Given the comments they’ve received, it’s obvious it’s starting to catch on around the country.

Broken and Gelded

One line from Conrad Richter’s Sea of Grass remains in my memory: “That lusty pioneer blood is tamed now, broken and gelded like the wild horse and the frontier settlement.” 

I was reminded of it while researching a Western character who just happened to be a woman in Shields, North Dakota where she and husband Ott Black lived at one time. On the day the first Milwaukee train arrived in town, it was obvious the country wasn’t yet tamed, broken, and gelded. The train had to stop so the gates could be opened and closed where the railroad went through Charley McLaughlin’s pasture.

This town and area were bicultural. The Standing Rock reservation was close by, as was my wife’s childhood farm home. She tells about being in Shields with the family one Saturday night while they went shopping and she grabbed onto an Indian lady’s red coat thinking it was her mother’s. She doesn’t remember how long she tagged along with her but got scared when she found out.

Gone With the Wind

I carved several plaque/shelf pieces like this, and now I don’t even know where some of them ended up, including this one. Gone with the wind…

Mother's Day, 2020

An NDSU history professor, Tom Isern, and his wife, Suzzanne Kelley, the director of NDSU Press, have started producing a weekly Facebook program from their  home called Plains Folk. He’s folk-oriented and sings the praises of the old North Dakota settlers. Last Friday evening one tune contained the line about someone who trapped gophers for the bounty on their tails: “I’m gonna get a new outfit with my gopher tails this fall.”

After hearing it, my wife said don’t you remember the story your mother told about her brother, Marion (Sonny). Written on the back of this picture was her remembrance of how he’d trapped gophers until he got enough money - about $8 or $10 -  to buy the suit he is wearing in this picture. My mother is the oldest girl in the family and is seen sitting on the left.

Now, this Mother’s Day, 2020, I can’t help but think how young she was on this picture and how quickly her life passed. She was 94 years of age when she died and has already been gone six years. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

A Reversal

People who’ve lived their lives in concrete jungles do things like what we read in this headline from the New York Times: “The Trump Administration Is Reversing Nearly 100 Environmental Rules.” This doesn’t square with global warming, clean air, or protection of the wild things. - This old proverb comes to mind - “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Time to Take a Break

“…and now I didn’t seem to be finding other people who had done any of that.” So said Ivan Doig in the introduction to his popular memoir This House of Sky. He was referring to having done such things on the ranch where he was raised in Montana as working with lambs, picking rocks, bucking hay, digging wells by hand, and other manual labor jobs that few experience anymore.

I understand what he meant. Dad performed most of the jobs a veterinarian would be called to perform today. I held the lambs while his knife made wethers of the rams and  barrows of the boars. Shade tree mechanics, I helped overhaul engines and weld broken machines. We had a clipper mill, a hammer mill, scoop shovels, manure forks, hay forks, bale hooks, wire stretcher, and knew how to use each one.

The world is much different now, and I won’t pretend to criticize it, that’s just the way it is now and was then. To survive we performed many tasks manually, but today’s world features digital gizmos on which we punch buttons to operate. 

My wife and I got restless and felt we’d sheltered in place long enough and when the weather finally turned springlike a few days ago, we drove to the countryside. Our destination was the large Sheyenne National Grasslands south of Leonard, east of Sheldon, and north of McLeod to give a sense of location and about 110 square miles of public land to give a sense of size. We always called it the government pasture or sometimes the sandhills, and many times as a young boy I’d go with my mother and grandmother picking berries in season. I wasn’t any good for that but remember climbing the sand dunes and sliding back down for fun.

A small cemetery some call The Pioneer Cemetery sits back about a quarter mile from the road and where my great-grandmother and her stillborn daughter rest since 1892 beneath a weathered sandstone marker. A few miles down the road in a cemetery called the Owego Church cemetery her husband lies. A total of four cemeteries in the area hold several relatives on my mother’s side. The two mentioned, the one on Highway 46 by the West Prairie Church, and the Helendale Church cemetery south of Leonard. Things such as this make a person feel attached to an area.

The pioneers who lived and died here had to work with their hands and squeeze out a living by their wits. Things such as cars and airplanes hadn’t even entered their vocabularies yet, and there we were leaving the car on the road and walking in just for a little exercise. And talk about walking, we ended up at the Pigeon Point Preserve maintained by Nature Conservancy where bull whackers stopped overnight as they walked beside their ox powered wagons between Fort Abercrombie to Fort Ransom.

I need to set aside this weekly column because I have another project that I want to complete. My brain doesn’t handle doing too many things at once. If this paper wants my articles again, we’ll see how things look in the fall. Check out my blog - lynnbueling.blogspot.com - for up-to-date entries that I place in it occasionally. I can be reached at lynn.bueling@gmail.com (note the dot in this email address) if you come across something of interest that we could shape into a story for future telling. Adios!