I just finished Guthrie’s
Fair Land, Fair Land. He published this book over 30 years after
Big Sky and
The Way West, inserting it into the middle of his Western sequence. Perhaps he felt he’d left Dick Summers, the mountain man/Oregon trail guide, hanging after reaching the Oregon territory and turning his eyes back to the Great Plains. I was happy at the prospect of knowing what happened to Summers, even though I guessed it wouldn’t end well. Of course it didn’t. He was labeled a “turn-coat” with his squaw wife and half-breed children and that was the end of him. But worse was his experiencing the inch-by-inch loss of the land he loved to an idea of “progress.”
