The Secret of the Writing: James Welch and the Drafting of Winter in the Blood

Abstract

ABSTRACT Winter in the Blood has an extremely interesting archival back story. Buchanan discovered in James Welch’s archives at the Beinecke Library at Yale University that, as a student at the University of Montana, Welch had already formed the thematic core of the novel nearly ten years before its publication. In a folder with a sticky note on it that reads “In his box in closet. ORIGINAL stuff from writing class!” rests a number of short stories that Welch wrote for a 1964 creative writing course. One of these documents is a short snippet of a story that features a young Indian man named Moses First Raise discovering a dead man lying along a trail in a ravine near a pen of cows. This plot event points to a similar plot event in the opening pages of the novel, though the point of view shifts around and confuses the relationship between the narrator, Moses, and the dead man. Moreover, it is the first time that the brother Moses appears in any of Welch’s other papers or published work. The article explores this and other elements of the compositional history of Welch’s masterpiece, Winter in the Blood.