These Thousand Hills by A. B. Guthrie

First published: 1956

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: The 1880’s

Locale: Oregon and Montana

Principal Characters:

• Lat Evans, the protagonist, the son of a poor Oregon farmer-rancher
• Callie Kash, a prostitute, the niece of a madam
• Joyce Sheridan, a schoolteacher from Indiana, the niece of a storekeeper
• Tom Ping, a young cowboy
• Mike Carmichael, an older cowboy

The Novel

These Thousand Hills traces the rise of Lat Evans from penniless cowboy to well-to-do rancher, civic leader, and political candidate. In order to attain the success that he craves, in order to reach a financial and social level which his pioneer father merely dreamed about, Evans must struggle with nature, with society, and with his own impulses.

Courage, skill, and luck are essential if a poor boy and raw hand such as Evans is to succeed. Because he can break horses, he earns top wages on the drive to Fort Benton, Montana, and there wins the wild horse Sugar in a bronco-riding exploit. A hard winter of wolfing and capture by Indians also test his stamina, but luck plays a part in the medical feat which wins his release from captivity and even in the race on Sugar, which gives him a stake.

As Evans moves up the ladder, he becomes more concerned with guarding his reputation than he is with guarding his life. Although he continues to be generous to his dirt-poor parents and to his old companions, he becomes more and more concerned about his associations, more and more vulnerable in his new social role. The conflict of loyalties intensifies, and in the last section of the book, his ambitions are threatened by the desperate acts of his friend Tom Ping, the appearance of his scoundrelly grandfather Hank McBee, and the suspicion of murder which falls upon Callie, the prostitute who has helped to make him a success.

It is at this point that Evans must recognize the price which he and those who love him must pay for his success. The choice which he must make is heartbreaking; he expects to lose his status, his family, his ranch, and his political future. He realizes, however, that being worthy in his own eyes is more important than any other consideration, and he chooses to be loyal and honest. At that point, Guthrie permits him to be reprieved through the loving choices of his friends and of the two women in his life. The lesson has been learned, but the ultimate price has not been demanded of Evans. Although he can never forget those times when he turned his back on his family and his friends, above all on Callie, there will be no price except memory. His luck has held.

The Characters

In Lat Evans, Guthrie has a protagonist who is far less noble than the mountain men of his earlier novels or Lat’s own grandfather, Lije, the protagonist of The Way West (1949). Lat does not seek freedom, adventure, or challenge. He wants status in the community, financial success, a wife who is a lady, and a family which will make him proud. Even his seeming rebellion—he leaves his poor, moralistic family, and swears, drinks, whores, and gambles—is belied by the fact that from the first he saves his money for the ranch he desires. Guthrie seems to realize that he risks losing the reader’s sympathy for Lat. Therefore he must stress the fact that Lat sends money to his parents, though he does not write to them or visit them, and that, as his old friend Mike Carmichael points out, he buys drinks and aids the poor. His marriage to the Indiana schoolteacher Joyce Sheridan, however, seems as much dictated by his mind as by his heart, and the fact that the marriage works is a result of Joyce’s fitting the pattern of respectability, as well as of her charm and goodness.

Lat’s cowboy friends are carefully differentiated. Mike Carmichael, the middle-aged little man whom Lat meets when he hires on to a cattle drive, understands the conflicts in Lat, perhaps because he came from a good family, as he confides late in the novel. Tom Ping, who ran away from home when he was ten, cannot understand Lat’s desertion of him when Ping marries a prostitute, nor can he forgive Lat’s protection when Ping is caught with a gang of rustlers. In his poverty, he snarls at Lat, reminding the town that Lat’s prosperity came from one horse and one race, forgetting Lat’s frugality and seriousness through the years. Lat does provide for several of his cowboy friends, concealing their sexual ventures from his straitlaced wife and keeping them from the bottle, which she detests. As they grow older, men such as Carmichael are willing to exchange their freedom for the security which they have on the Evans ranch, and therefore Carmichael in particular can understand Lat’s choice of respectability.

Callie Kash and Joyce Sheridan more closely approach stock characters than do Guthrie’s cowboys. Callie, the good-hearted prostitute, was betrayed by a lover and sent by her father to the aunt who runs a “boarding house.” When she falls in love with Lat, she remains faithful to him by detaching herself mentally from her carnal activities. She loans him money, nurses him, and bakes for him, only to be thrown over after Lat meets Joyce and decides to move into a world which likes picket fences and uses the word “vice” with frequency. Callie is most alive in the scene when she inveighs against men—all men, brutal or idealistic. Joyce Sheridan, the proper schoolmistress, comes alive when she speaks or thinks of the fear which the big sky produces in her; a nester by nature, she is terrified by the grandeur of Montana, which her God seems too small to govern. Despite the tenderness Joyce has shown to the injured Carmichael, her forgiveness of Lat’s involvement with Callie seems rather easy, given her narrow-mindedness.

Critical Context

These Thousand Hills was the third in a series of Western chronicles by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., following The Way West, which had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Critically, it has been less well regarded than The Way West or Guthrie’s first major novel, The Big Sky (1947), but sympathetic readers have argued that the lack of force or lack of unity which they observe is the result of the subject, an increasingly more complicated society, rather than of any technical defect. As Guthrie’s chronicle moves into the twentieth century with the books that follow These Thousand Hills, the lack of color and of epic scope are even more evident.

Although the trappings of the Western novel are familiar to everyone—the saloon, the prostitutes, the Indians, the rustlers—Guthrie’s details are better researched than many another writer’s. He can re-create a river scene in spring or tell the reader how to save on strychnine in wolf-poisoning. What finally elevates him above many other writers of the Western historical novel, however, is his emphasis on the complex and difficult decisions which are forced upon his characters in a wilderness which is becoming civilized. In These Thousand Hills, the decisions are still being made in a society which has not lost its memory of the time when men dared the impossible, when the best of them stretched toward the big sky. Yet in this book midpoint in Guthrie’s Western series, the dream of freedom is already in retreat.

Bibliography

Chatterton, Wayne. “A. B. Guthrie, Jr.” In A Literary History of the American West. Western Literature Association. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987. Chatterton gives an overview of Guthrie’s career.

Erisman, Fred. “Coming of Age in Montana: The Legacy of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 43 (Summer, 1993): 69-74. Erisman evaluates Guthrie’s legacy and contributions to the literature of the West.

Ford, Thomas W. A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Ford provides a critical and interpretive study of Guthrie, with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.

Guthrie, A. B. The Blue Hen’s Chick: An Autobiography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Guthrie’s autobiography illuminates the themes of his novels and the autobiographical direction his later fiction would take.

Kich, Martin. Western American Novelists. Vol. 1. New York: Garland, 1995. Part of a multi-volume annotated bibliography of prominent western writers of the 1930’s and 1940’s, including Guthrie. Primary and secondary resources, including first reviews of Guthrie’s novels, are included.

Petersen, David. “A. B. Guthrie: A Remembrance.” In Updating the Literary West. Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University Press, 1997. An overview of Guthrie’s life and career.