The Way West by A. B. Guthrie

First published: 1949

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: 1845

Locale: Independence, Missouri, and the overland trail to Oregon

Principal Characters:

• Lije Evans, a Missouri farmer and later a wagon-train leader
• Rebecca Evans, his wife
• Brownie Evans, their son, a boy on the edge of manhood
• Dick Summers, a former mountain man, pilot of the wagon train
• Mercy McBee, the pretty daughter of the poor white Henry McBee
• Irvine Tadlock, the organizer and first leader of the wagon train

The Novel

The Way West is an account of a wagon-train journey from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon in 1845. On a superficial level, it is a realistic story of a group of pioneers who complete their arduous venture without major disaster. Although one family turns back, a man and a boy die, and a dissident group swings south to California, the pioneers reach their Oregon destination, ready to begin a new life.

A second plot line in the novel traces the development of a social structure, suggesting that the wagon-train organization finally shaped will be the basis for a new kind of society that is to be formed in the new settlements. In Independence, Missouri, Irvine Tadlock organizes the wagon train and makes sure that he is elected leader of it. His insistence on authority, discipline, and order, however, comes to be resented by the pioneers, both because he lacks real knowledge of the frontier and because the wilderness demands a flexibility and an independence of thought that Tadlock does not have. The turning point of this plot line comes midway in the novel, when Tadlock is deposed and Lije Evans is made the new leader. Although Evans is not sure of his own abilities, he proves himself to be the kind of leader needed in the new country.

The third level of action in The Way West is psychological. As the wagon train moves through the spring and summer months, facing external dangers and internal dissension, Guthrie penetrates the minds of several characters, revealing the doubts and dreams which set them on the trail to Oregon and tracing their responses to the challenges of the journey and to the wilderness through which they pass. Appropriately, at the end of the novel, Guthrie focuses on the characters who have responded best to the experience of the trail: Dick Summers, who has reaffirmed his love of life in the wilderness; Lije Evans, who has proven himself as a leader of men in the new land; Rebecca, who has cheerfully endured the hardships of the journey and compassionately accepted her new daughter-in-law; Brownie Evans, now a man, not a boy; and Mercy McBee Evans, now a woman and a loving wife, not a romantic girl.

The Characters

In every settled society, there are men slow to words and action, men whose real capacities are not evident to themselves or to those around them. Yet when that society is threatened by disaster or challenged by change, such men, gifted with common sense, a feeling for fair play, and the willingness to take counsel with others before making the necessary decisions, may become the new leaders of the society. Such a man is Lije Evans. Beginning his journey to Oregon with no very high opinion of himself, he finds himself speaking for the right and the sensible, defending the camp dogs against the malicious, and insisting that the train delay when a man sickens with camp fever. After his election as the new wagon-train leader, he has to prove himself to himself; he arrives in Oregon as a leader of society and a builder of the nation.

The first leader of the wagon train, Irvine Tadlock, is the kind of loud-mouthed, selfish, ambitious man, followed by hirelings, who is familiar to readers of Western novels. The antithesis of Tadlock is the former mountain man Dick Summers, wise, experienced, and brave but not foolish. Having just lost his wife when the novel begins, Summers willingly signs on as pilot for the wagon train, and he is conscientious and effective. His world, however, is that of the wilderness, and he is more at home in his memories of Indian squaws and solitary campfires than in the world of the settlers.

Brownie Evans and Mercy McBee, the young lovers of the novel, could have been stock characters. Mercy, however, is a complex person. The unhappy daughter of vicious and filthy parents, she is ready for escape, and therefore she is easily seduced by a man with manners. Her courage when she finds herself pregnant and rejected, her practical honesty in admitting her situation to Brownie, who loves her, and her willingness to go on with her life make her a sympathetic and interesting character. In his response to her, Brownie, the young man who has been learning about the wilderness from Dick Summers, becomes a person of depth and compassion. (It is disappointing to meet him as a narrow-minded, bad-tempered adult in These Thousand Hills, published in 1956.)

Mercy’s seducer, Curtis Mack, is rather sketchily drawn as a sexually frustrated man whose anger further alienates his wife, impels him to random murder, and produces spasms of guilt that are intensified by his affair with Mercy. His wife, Amanda Mack, is one of the women in the train who cannot accept their situation. Despite her very real love for Curtis, she dislikes sex and fears pregnancy so much that she turns from him and from life itself. Although Judith Fairman does not reject her husband, she finds it difficult to accept the death of her son from a snakebite, the son whose delicate health had impelled the family to undertake the move West to higher, less malarial country. Like Amanda Mack, Judith Fairman distances herself from life. These women are contrasted to Rebecca Evans, the wife who leaves her flower beds and her loved cabin in Missouri because she has sensed Lije’s need for a challenge, who nightly makes a home beside the wagon, who counsels and encourages Lije and the other pioneers, and who reveals her capacity for cheerful, realistic adjustment to life at every halt along the trail.

Critical Context

The Way West was A. B. Guthrie’s second major novel, following The Big Sky (1947), which had firmly established him as a writer of realistic Western novels having a thematic and psychological depth rarely found in the genre. Although many critics preferred The Big Sky because it re-creates the era of the mountain men rather than the familiar period of the wagon trains, it was The Way West that won for Guthrie the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. The later novels in his Western series have been less praised than the first two works, perhaps because as the American West gradually lost its epic scope, the novels themselves necessarily have become smaller in vision.

In his treatment of the conflict between civilization and the wilderness, Guthrie can be compared to Joseph Conrad, with whom he shares an ambivalence toward the primitive, recognizing its appeal but admitting its dangers, both physical and moral. Among American writers, Guthrie is often compared to James Fenimore Cooper, who shared Guthrie’s fascination with the wilderness, his love of untamed nature, and his tragic awareness that those who love the wilderness are the same people who join in taming and destroying it.

The incidents in Guthrie’s novels can be found in dozens of other Western novels. Many other Western novels, however, are merely adventure stories in which the good defeat the bad. Guthrie, who wrote the screenplay for the classic film Shane (1953), in his novels creates complex characters who make choices which are not easy and who, like Shane, must pay a price for every moral triumph. For that reason, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., is one of the most important Western novelists.

Bibliography

Chatterton, Wayne. “A. B. Guthrie, Jr.” In A Literary History of the American West. Western Literature Association. Fort Worth, Tex.: 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 and 1940s, including A. B. 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. Western Literature Association. Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University Press, 1997. An overview of Guthrie’s life and career.