The Way West
by A. B. Guthrie Jr.
Summary
A wagon train forms at Independence, Missouri, in 1846, bound for Oregon, and the novel walks it every mile of the way: the Platte, the fords, the buffalo country, the mountains, the rationed water and the graves.
The company is led at first by Tadlock, a politician with a future in mind, who runs the train the way ambitious men run things, by speeches and rules and the steady accumulation of resentment. The guide is Dick Summers, an ageing mountain man who has already outlived the free country he loved, hired to shepherd farmers across a wilderness he knew when it belonged to nobody. And in the middle is Lije Evans, a big, mild, self doubting Missouri farmer who does not want authority and keeps being the man people turn to when something true has to be decided. The transfer of the train from Tadlock to Evans, accomplished through accidents, deaths and one hard vote, is the actual plot, and it is as good a study of practical leadership as American fiction owns.
Around them Guthrie fills the wagons with the whole range of reasons people went: land hunger, debt, restlessness, marriages good and bad, a teenage girl whose trouble becomes the train's, and the daily grind of dust, oxen and river crossings rendered with a working reporter's precision.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, steady and absorbing.
Best for readers who want the Oregon Trail as the emigrants experienced it, a novel about a community inventing itself, with the romance kept honest.
Historical Context & Significance
The Way West won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950. It is the second book of A. B. Guthrie's Montana sequence, following The Big Sky, whose mountain man Dick Summers returns here as the guide, and the two novels together, with These Thousand Hills after them, track the West from the beaver trade to the cattle towns.
Guthrie was a Kentucky newspaperman for two decades before The Big Sky freed him, and the Pulitzer finished the job. Hollywood then borrowed him: George Stevens hired him to adapt Jack Schaefer's Shane, and the 1953 film brought Guthrie an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay. The 1967 film of this novel, with Kirk Douglas as Tadlock, Robert Mitchum as Summers and Richard Widmark, is remembered mostly for its cast.
Guthrie spent the rest of his long life in Montana writing the later books of the sequence and defending the country itself, an early and loud conservation voice. He died in 1991, and the trilogy remains the spine of serious fiction about the overland migration.