The Way West

 

By A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

The story of a wagon train headed from Missouri to Oregon back in the 1840s.

Lije Evans was a farmer in Missouri with a loving wife and a teenage son. The three of them work hard and have a good life. But Lije is having second thoughts. He feels like he is just breaking even, not improving. So when folks start talking about immigrating to Oregon, which was currently part of the United Kingdom, Lije came to think maybe he should try his luck there. The word was that the land there was rich and productive and a man could get ahead if he was willing to put in the work. 

Lije talks his wife Becky into selling the farm and going west, even though Becky is happy in their little home on their Missouri farm. So off they went, sold the farm, loaded up their wagons, bought their provisions and headed to Independence, Missouri to form up a wagon train and brave the trials of the trails. They face the typical wagon train problems, accidents, deaths, natives, arguments, bison, heat, bugs, dust, river crossings, steep trails, lack of water, the usual. Actually, not too many people die in this story. One man dies of sickness, a woman has a miscarriage, a child dies of snakebite, a native gets shot by a settler. That's about it unless I am forgetting someone. 

This was a fairly good read. Not very exciting, and to someone who grew up in the 1950s, familiar territory. Lije is the main character with him moving up from traveling in the train to becoming the wagon train leader. Secondary characters are his son, his dog Rock and lastly his wife Becky. Rock gets more text than Becky does. Her main function is to tell Lije what a good guy he is. In fact, women in this story are mostly only there to cook and clean and take care of the kids and keep their menfolk happy. Their trials and tribulations are only touched on lightly. Not surprising for a book written in the 1940s.

Also not surprising for a book written in the 1940s is Guthrie's depictions of the natives encountered which he dismisses as lazy, dirty, heathen, ignorant, thieving savages. Near the end of the book, as the settlers are traveling by boat downriver, they pass a native cemetery. One of the settlers remarks about so many good indians, a reference to the old saying, the only good indian is a dead indian. 

If you have never read a story of the wagon trains headed west in America, this will probably be a very interesting story. But as a child of the 1950s, this story didn't tell me anything I wasn't already familiar with. I think the author touches too lightly on the suffering endured by the settlers and romanticizes it all a bit too much.  It did win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950. It is also one novel in a series that Guthrie wrote about settlers headed to Oregon, which I didn't know until I looked up the Wikipedia page about the book: Wikipedia.