The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology ed. by William Kittredge, Annick Smith

Abstract

282 Western American Literature The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. Edited by William Kittredge and Annick Smith. (Helena: The Montana Historical Society Press, 1988. 1182 pages, $39.95.) This almost overwhelmingly voluminous but magnificent anthology ranges wide across the territory of Montana literature, from early Native American creation myths and the journals of explorers and pioneers, to gold rush tales and memoirs of the early twentieth-century agricultural frontier, to poems and stories and essays of contemporary writers who are only beginning to establish their reputations. The title, The Last Best Place, conveys the response of early inhabitants and visitors to the land now known as Montana. As Arapooish, a Crow chief, exclaims, “The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country.” And as Meriwether Lewis writes in his journal, attempting to describe the falls of the Missouri River: “I wished for the pencil of a Salvator Rosa [a Titian] . . . that I might be enabled to give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object . . . that fills me with such pleasure and astonishment.” The title also reveals the double sense of nostalgia and urgency which underlies so much of the more recent writing about Montana and the West: the term last best place suggests the destruction of other “best” places and the imminent fall of Montana. In A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, Boone Caudill, dreaming of the freedom and wildness of the West, runs away to his mountain-man uncle, only to find a disillusioned alcoholic complaining of the despoiling of his adopted land: “I mind the time beaver was everything,” Uncle Zeb said. His voice had turned milder and had a faraway tone in it, as if the whiskey had started to work deep and easy in him. Or was it that he was just old and couldn’t hold to a feeling? “I do now. Everywhere it was poor doin’s, them days, not to trap a good pack every hunt. And now?” He fell silent, as if there was nothing fitting a man could lay tongue to. In a poem by a young contemporary writer, Paul Zarzyski, the presence of ballistic missile silos brings rural Montana into the disturbing modern world, into a land .. .still festering cavalry repeating carbines to the surface—shrapnel through old scars—where cattle stir, moon to salt lick to moon, this veteran wind once bulletproof, this distance no longer dark, no longer living out of sight and range. The anthology is arranged in eight sections (Native American Stories and Myths; Journals of Exploration; Stories of Early Pioneers and Indians; Reviews 283 Writings About Butte; Remembering the Agricultural Frontier; Literature of Modern Montana; Contemporary Fiction; Contemporary Poetry),each intro­ duced by an informative and thoughtful essay. The editing of this anthology, which took over three years, is masterful: a random selection of entries will reward the reader with the verve and vividness and compelling drama of the writing. But the volume is unwieldy and daunting; I found myself avoiding picking it up to read for this review because it was so massive. I can’t see it being used—as it should be—as a text in high schools in Montana. Although the editors seem wedded to the idea of “one big book,” I think Montana literature would be better served if the material were divided into two volumes, one of early works, the other of modern and contemporary writing. Another small improvement that mightbe considered for future editions:page headings not only of the section titles, but of the authors as well. That would make it easier to dip into the collection—the most enjoyable way, I find, of reading an anthology. All in all, though I’m weighed down by the size, I’m elevated by the inspiring contents of this marvelous anthology of both familiar and unfamiliar works. NANCY PROTHRO ARBUTHNOT United States Naval Academy Misbegotten Muses: History and Anti-History. Richard C. Poulsen. (New York: Peter Lang. American University Studies, Series IX: History; vol. 32, 1988. 211 pages, $36.50.) Unhappy with the restrictions...