On the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana the Great Plains meet the
mountains without the buffer of foothills. It is the only place in
the Northern Rockies where grizzly bears in search of food come out
of the mountains and onto the plains, always to the consternation
of local livestock producers. The Front is also a place of
blistering-hailstorm summers, and ferocious winters of blasting
blizzards and Chinooks. The small towns of Choteau, Augusta, Bynum,
Dupuyer and Browning are scattered along the hundred miles of the
Front like a sprinkling of pebbles on hard ground. In between the
towns are sprawling cattle ranches and wheat farms, and north of
Choteau the remote and austere outpost of the Kingsbury Hutterite
Colony. It is the Last Best Place in an increasingly diminished
Last Best Place, and for most of his long life was home to Alfred
Bertram Guthrie, Jr. (1901-1991), author and fierce
conservationist.
Like other homegrown regionalist writers (Wallace Stegner and
Ivan Doig come to mind), A.B. “Bud” Guthrie was acutely conscious
of the steady transition from the pastoral to the developed in the
West. From Indians and mountain men, to ranchers, farmers and the
small town boosters who have historically labored to sell the West
to the highest bidder, Guthrie chronicled them all. If he were
alive today, he would be writing about Hollywood hobby ranchers,
trendy homesteaders and yuppie fly fishermen. Not that he would
like it. He lived ninety years and with a pitiless gaze saw the
West change mostly for the worst, and then died a curmudgeon.
A.B. Guthrie has his aficionados, but is otherwise not read much
nowadays. He is primarily known for The Big Sky (1947),
the classic American novel of the 1830s Rocky Mountain fur trade.
Its three-word title is synonymous with Montana, and has been
recently used as a catch phrase by posses of real estate brokers
bent on selling the state down the river to agricultural decline
and subdivision sprawl. Guthrie followed up The Big Sky
with the Pulitzer Prize winning The Way West (1950), about
the Oregon Trail era. His dozen books of fiction and nonfiction
amount to history of the Rocky Mountain Front: 1830-1960. He tried
his hand at screenwriting, and his greatest success in that realm
came with his adaptation of Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1953),
which earned him a nomination for an Academy Award.
Guthrie’s knowledge of his milieu was formidable. He spent an
idyllic youth wandering the woods and fields around Choteau, and
fishing the rushing and blue-holed Teton River (now summer-drained
for irrigation) in front of the mountains. This turned him into a
lifelong conservationist, with a special regard for Ursus Arctos
Horribilis, the grizzly bear, which he called “the living,
snorting, incarnation of the wildness and grandeur of America”. The
great bear figures prominently in one of his last books, 1988’s
Big Sky, Fair Land: The Environmental Essays of A.B. Guthrie,
Jr.
The author’s public stance concerning the grizzly and its future
put him at odds with the Choteau ranching community, including his
own son A.B. “Bert” Guthrie, Jr. , a sheep rancher. As grizzlies
recovered in the Northern Rockies starting in the early 1980s,
stockmen regularly lost cattle and sheep to bears on the Front.
Guthrie stood up for the grizzly in the face of much criticism from
local Choteau “hotheads.” All this caused many of his neighbors to
stop speaking to him, and continued to strain relations with his
son Bert, who once said — in effect — that the two of them got on
well except when the subject was grizzlies. As for his hometown,
the author’s view is best summed up in his 1965 autobiography,
The Blue Hen’s Chick: Choteau was “a cluster of churches
and bars and gossip”.
From “The Barn,” his cabin on the Front near Ear Mountain,
Guthrie could envision the primeval West. The mountain stars in a
number of his books, especially The Big Sky. In the novel,
the mountain man Boone Caudill gazes longingly upon it, and through
Caudill’s actions, Guthrie gives us his view of what’s happened to
the American West:
“A man always kills the thing he loves.”
