And for a more contemporary view of Cypress Hills country, check out Dianne Warren’s Cool Water — you’ll find some things have not changed that much.

(And thanks for bringing the post back to the top of the comment list for Stegner’s birthday!)

What may come as a surprise is that Stegner’s boyhood was spent on a remote homestead in southern Saskatchewan, Canada, from 1914 to 1920. In this book we see he knew natives and Metis intimately. He grew up with them and went to school with them. But he also knew Greeks, Chinese, a family of Syrians, Catholics, Jews, Anglicans, cowboys, the RCMP: newcomers with dreams of adventure, riches and land ownership.

Moreover, Stegner absorbed an acute understanding of prairie geography and weather. His reflections on its influence and power are so insightfully rendered that they can at times leave you breathless.

From 1. The Question Mark in the Circle:

“Desolate? Forbidding? There never was a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drouth or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all of your senses. You don’t get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don’t escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.”

From the Introduction, written by his son, Page Stegner:

“Nowhere in Stegner’s writings are these habits of conduct more dramatically expressed than in the novella, “Genesis,”, the fictional centrepiece of Wolf Willow and perhaps the finest piece of short story fiction he ever wrote…In it a young Englishman named Rusty Cullen comes to Canada looking for adventure…[he] undergoes a rite of passage that is as relentless and exacting as any ever faced by a fictional hero…one might observe that Sir Ernest Shackleton trapped in the polar ice of Antarctica’s Weddel Sea had a better time of it…”

Kevin: thanks for your blog

Stegner based his novel on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote (published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West), so I would suspect the absence of those issues in this book is a reflection of the attitude of the times and does say something about the characters. Having said that, one would have thought Stegner could have underlined that with some reference to native peoples. The absence did not affect my response to the novel, but I can see your concern.

It’s beautifully written, and I’m really savoring it. I’m about 400 pages in, I’d guess?

That being said, there’s a really weird thing that’s been bugging me about the book. A few months ago, I read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and I’m struggling with the fact that this novel set in the American West completely dodges any real mention of the removal of native populations, etc. Could it really be that in all that time in the West, Susan would be completely oblivious to those issues? To be not at all influenced or even aware be those events? I don’t know. It’s really bothering me. I guess it’s the ultimate in white privilege to leave that on the road—and if that’s what it is, is it indicative of something about the characters? Is it telling us something about Susan or Lyman? Or is it Stenger himself who didn’t know or care? It’s always on my mind as I’m reading, and it’s similar to why I can’t (or won’t) read novels about the glorious Confederate South. Something’s missing, and I’m feeling the whole at the middle of it.

Is that crazy?

I am going to duck your question about Susan Ward and wait for a woman to respond. I too wanted to give her a slap every now and then, but she comes from a different world and reflects that world. This Western mining stuff is a bit strange, after all.

I do hope you try Big Rock Candy Mountain — I have it noted for another read later this year or early next. Memory says it is not quite as good as Angle of Repose, but we shall see.