Pillar of Cloud

By Jackson Burgess

Garvin Cooper had graduated from law school and wanted to leave his home and family and make a life for himself in the lawless west in 1858. He came to Kansas with high hopes, hopes that were dashed in the face of the conflict between the free states people and the pro-slavery people. Too much lawlessness, apparently.
During his travels, he had joined with another young professional out to make a name for himself as an engineer specializing in bridges. Bob McVey was a talented man but maybe a little too excitable.
They both decided Kansas wasn't for them and determined to head further west. They had become acquainted with a guide who was planning to blaze a new trail west to the Rockies. Cooper and McVey joined up with the guide, Ned Drum, and the small group of people he was to lead across the prairie.
So they set out, Drum, Cooper, McVey, a Quaker man and wife and few other men. The Quakers had a wagon but the rest rode horses. They experience the typical pioneer trials, days when it just rains and rains, rough river and stream crossings, failing water supply, and the hot, dry, dusty days of summer. But they soldier on, united.
Things start to go bad when they are nearly caught by a prairie fire. Some wanted to start a backfire, but Drum overruled and insisted that it would be smarter to race to a nearby river. They managed to get to the river, but it was a very close thing and people began to question Drum's leadership. And then they started encountering the natives and the story changed from adventure to just trying to survive as the clash of personalities puts all their lives at risk.

I did enjoy this tale of a small group of people setting out on a grand adventure that became much more perilous than they had imagined. The ending was sad and I wished for a happier one, but debts had to be paid and that was how the author decided to do it. Still it was a good story, exciting and interesting and seemed pretty accurate in its depiction of those times.

A Bride Goes West

By Nannie T. Alderson and Helena Huntington Smith

The true story of a young woman's life on the Montana range in the 1880s and 1890s.
Nannie was a young Southern woman from West Virginia when she and her new husband set out to become cattle ranchers in Montana. Their first year together was fun and exciting as Nannie became familiar with the ranching life. She wasn't really trained to be a self-sufficient country woman, having been raised in a household where being a lady was more important that knowing how to cook and clean. In fact, the only thing she actually knew how to cook were rolls and it also never occurred to her or her husband that her city clothes were entirely unsuited to the hard life she would now be living. But like many a young bride, she learned and she coped and she adapted.
At first, things seemed to be going really well. Those first few years the rains were timely and the grazing was good. To begin with they were living in a dirt floor shack but her husband and his men soon built them a snug little log house. But then one of the hired hands got into a dispute and in revenge, the little house was burned along with all its contents, including some heirlooms Nannie had brought with her from back East.
After that, they moved and a new place was built. But things just went downhill from there. The weather turned dry and the winters were brutally cold. Between the drought, the cattle lost to cold and blizzards and the decline in the market price and the money spent to build the new place, their dream of cattle ranching was never realized. They had to sell out and move into town where Nannie's husband was killed in a freak accident, kicked to death by two feuding stallions. She was left to raise their four kids by herself, which she did to the best of her ability and helped by a small life insurance policy her husband had.

This was an interesting story about life on a cattle ranch in the pioneer days and about a young woman's education in the school of hard knocks. The bulk of the story is about the time before Nannie's husband died with her life after his death being allotted just one chapter. Like most pioneer narratives, it is a story of hardship, hard work, family, love, danger and survival. It's a good story.

The Awakening Land

By Conrad Richter

The Awakening Land is the name given to a trilogy of novels written by Richter, The Trees, The Fields, and The Town. The Town won the Pulitzer Prize for 1951.
The novels follow Sayward Luckett and her family as settlers in the then wilderness of the Ohio valley, an area of deep, immense forest. In the first novel, The Trees, the Lucketts build themselves a cabin in a forest so dense and tall that the forest floor rarely gets any direct sunlight. They survive mainly on the game that abounds in the area. The forest is filled with giant trees, trees that have never been logged or known the effects of forest fires. These huge trees become the enemy of the people trying to settle there, trying to clear them away to make room for fields and pastures.
Worth, the patriarch of the family, isn't really a farmer. He's a hunter, a woodsman and loves to be out on the prowl, exploring new territory. After his wife dies and after his young daughter Sulie is lost forever in the forest, he becomes tired of the responsibility of taking care of his children and he just walks off into the forest, leaving his kids to be raised by his daughter, Sayward.
She does the best she can, but her brothers and sisters often don't acknowledge her authority and the family suffers for it. Her brother Wyitt follows in his father's footsteps into the wilderness. Her sister Genny marries a lowlife and her other sister Achsa runs off with him.
Through it all, Sayward stays strong. She hopes for the best for her siblings but accepts the fact that they have to live their own lives and make their own mistakes.
In The Fields, Sayward is married and has a family of her own. She and her husband, Portius Wheeler, live in the Luckett family's original cabin. With their own two hands, they cut the big trees and cleared fields to grow crops and raise livestock. Portius is an educated man and a lawyer and their children are taught to read and write. However, most of the money earned is produced through Sayward's farm and from her land. Life is still very hard and requires massive amounts of sheer labor just to survive.
The last book, The Town switches focus from Sayward to her youngest child, an ailing boy named Chancey. A town has grown up on Sayward's land and as the largest landowner in the area, Sayward has become wealthy. Portius even insisted on building them a large, new house although Sayward wanted to stay in the little Luckett cabin that she had lived in for so many years.
Chancey suffered from a rheumatic fever as a tot and had a weak heart as a result. In their fear for his health, his parents restricted his activity severely and he spent most of his days just quietly sitting and dreaming. When a doctor recommends to Sayward that Chancey start to take some exercise, Chancey finds his quiet world turned upside down, much to his displeasure. He has become so accustomed to think of himself as an invalid that his mother's insistence that he get off his stool convinces him that she doesn't care about him. He decides that Sayward and Portius are not his real parents and he invents a long lost family for himself, a family who will love and pamper and cater to him.

These three books are a wonderful look back at an era that is hard to envision now. What suffering they endured and what back-breaking labor! These books are almost as good as a trip back in time. They really immerse the reader in the culture and life of the people of that time and place and their language where cougars are called "painters" and wolves are "night dogs." It is hard, though, to read of the destruction of that grand old forest that used to cover so much of the eastern United States and of the destruction of the wildlife that dwelt in those shaded, ferny depths.
When I first started to read The Trees I immediately recognized the name Sayward Luckett. I remembered her from the miniseries starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Sayward and Hal Holbrook as Portius which aired in 1978. It must have made quite an impression on me that I could still remember the name and I can picture Elizabeth's face even now. I remember at the end of the show, when Sayward was an old woman, the people going and getting little trees from the forest to plant in their town at Sayward's instigation. For by then she had stopped hating the trees and had begun to appreciate how much trees add to the landscape. Ain't it the truth, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."

The Way West

By Alfred B. Guthrie, Jr.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 1950.

This is the story of a wagon train headed west on the Oregon Trail in 1846, starting off in Independence, Missouri and headed for the Columbia River and Fort Vancouver in the Oregon Territory. This is story of hardy pioneers, determined to reach their goal, despite hardship, accidents, sickness and death. People do die on the trail, one to fever, one to snakebite and one to premature birth. But the pioneers keep on trucking, looking for the gold at the end of the rainbow. At one point, the wagon train splits apart, as one group decides to head for California as they have heard the trail is easier than the one to Oregon. The pilot of the train, Dick Summers, is an old mountain man, trail wise and eager to get away from civilization and farming and back to his roots. His great wisdom and sound advice are the key to the success of the effort as he guides the pioneers through treacherous river crossings, across burning deserts, and on steep, nearly impassible mountain tracks. It's a pretty good story, engrossing and easy to read.
This novel was made into a movie in 1967 starring Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark and Sally Field.
A word about the way the native peoples are portrayed in this book. Guthrie doesn't have a much sympathy for the people who will end up being pushed off the land by his doughty settlers. He most often describes them as dirty, smelly, naked, thieving, lousy and shiftless, with their hands out for whatever they can beg or steal from the settlers passing through their country. At one point, one of the characters is describing an Indian cemetery, saying, "You'll never set your eye on more good Injuns than right there," meaning all the dead Indians. I wouldn't call it an even handed or fair portrait but certainly typical of the times in which it was written.

Review by The Pulitzer Project.

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

By Jane Smiley

The title of this book is more exciting than the actual book. The premise is terrific: independent young woman heads west to find her place in life. The reality is the book is about the ten years before the Civil War and parts of it are pretty boring, unless you find the subject of the abolitionists entertaining.
The book starts out with Lidie at loose ends after her father has died. She describes herself as a tall, plain woman with no domestic accomplishments. She hates cooking, cleaning, sewing and she has no prospects of marriage. Her sisters don't know what will become of her. Fortunately, an abolitionist passes through town on his way out to the Kansas Territory and he is struck by Lidie's seeming air of independence and they end up married and off to prove up their claim in the territory.
Many abolitionists are settling in Kansas in an attempt to keep the territory away from the influence of the slave states. They are the Free State faction. They face lots of opposition, mostly from the neighboring state of Missouri. Pro-slavery forces from Missouri try to intimidate and drive off the Free Staters. A lot of the book is about the conflicts between the two groups. Parts of it are more like reading a history book than a novel.

So after all her trials and tribulations out west, Lidie ends up right back where she started and manages to accomplish nothing at all for all her endeavors. Which was a pretty disappointing ending.

Review by Heller McAlpin in the LA Times:   http://articles.latimes.com/1998/apr/05/books/bk-36038.