We are mountains, wide streams, big lakes, more mountains. We have our sunsets and moonscapes, thunder clouds that roll up a valley.
But for an A.B. Guthrie sky, we must head east - not far, a couple of non-Interstate 90 hours will do it.
“It took me months to get through it because I would cry over the eloquent parts - and I thought the whole thing was eloquent,” Miller writes in an introduction to an essay of her father's, recently discovered, that she has titled “Occupation Sheepherder.”
I was a fledgling school teacher in Valier, not far from where Bud Guthrie lived and wrote at his home outside of Choteau. I looked out my window, front or back, and said: “Yeah.”
Guthrie wrote wind and sky. The first, on his pages and sweeping off the Rocky Mountain Front, you push out of mind until urged otherwise. The second frames everything.
There is just one direct reference to sky in “Occupation Sheepherder,” which is all of eight pages long. Guthrie uses the headstone inscription in a Choteau cemetery as his touchstone: “Peter Saddler/Lost His Life In Storm/May 23, 1902/Occupation Sheepherder.”
He wonders what drove and drives such fatal devotion to a herd of sheep, what manner of men “see the far line of the skyline and the vacant land between and feel that here is life?”
It has been 60 years since “The Big Sky” was published, 16 since Guthrie died. Between those two events, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Way West” and “These Thousand Hills,” “Arfive” and “The Blue Hen's Chick,” “The Last Valley” and “Fair Land, Fair Land” settled into the collective Montana psyche.
To suddenly be offered a dose of Guthrie's fresh and familiar prose, we have his niece in Missoula, Miller in Butte, and the School of Journalism at the University of Montana to thank.
Some of the details of “Occupation Sheepherder” will remain vague. It was probably written in the 1940s or 1950s, guesses Charlie Hood, former dean of journalism at UM, who wrote a foreword for the book.
It's possible Guthrie typed it out before he produced “The Big Sky,” published in 1947, or “The Way West,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950.
He spent the early and last years of his life in Choteau but likely wrote the essay in Kentucky, where he worked for the Lexington Leader for 30 years.
“Occupation Sheepherder” is Guthrie's first writing to be published since his death in 1991. Why not while he was alive?
“That is the mystery,” said Miller, whom friends and family call Gus.
In those days, her father was published by the likes of the Saturday Evening Post and the Saturday Review of Literature. “Maybe he didn't think it was very saleable,” Miller speculated. Or, “Maybe nobody was interested in sheepherders.”
“Maybe,” offered Peggy Haugen Bloom, “he said, Janie, here's something that didn't work, and maybe I'll polish it up some day.”
Bloom's mother, Jane, was Bud Guthrie's younger sister. He came to Missoula to live with her for three years in the late 1960s after his first marriage ended in divorce, and in the house on Evans Avenue, Guthrie worked on “Arfive.”
When Jane died in the late 1980s, Bloom cleaned out the house. One of the things she boxed up was “a little nondescript, white, down-at-the-edge, aged typewriter paper box,” Bloom said.
It contained a few letters Guthrie had written to his sister, some family pictures and the manuscript, typed on onionskin paper, now known as “Occupation Sheepherder.”
Bloom stored the collection away in her own home and all but forgot about it.
“I knew they were important, but in the current rush of my life, I didn't really read the story or look at the letters,” she said.
About two years ago, when she came across “this kind of forgotten old box,” Bloom saw the story, read it and said she “thought it was stellar.”
She made copies and sent them to her cousins. Miller took it from there - with gusto.
“It's, quote-unquote, a new piece of Guthrie, previously undiscovered,” she said. “I mean, if you found a piece of Hemingway, a piece of Steinbeck - any of those notable writers, say, of the age that my father would be now - you can't just put it back in the attic and wait for somebody else to discover it.”
Miller helped Steinbeck with his Montana chapter of “Travels With Charlie” when she worked at Viking Press in New York. She introduced her father to contemporaries who had become her friends at the publishing house, including Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey.
Like her father and several family members, Miller is a UM graduate (1960). She has donated her papers and some original covers of her father's books to the school, though “the majority of his original manuscripts reside someplace else - I think they're at Yale,” she said.
After clearing her plan with Herb Luthin, Guthrie's stepson and manager of his literary estate, Miller approached Jerry Brown, then dean of the journalism school at UM.
What if a limited edition copy of the long-lost sheepherder piece were printed, with proceeds going to the Guthrie Reading Room in the school's new home, Don Anderson Hall?
Brown jumped on board and his successor, Peggy Kuhr, has carried the mantle this fall. Miller said she knew just the person to produce it - Peter Rutledge Koch, an old friend who launched his printing career in Missoula in the 1970s and has acquired an international reputation for his work out of Berkeley, Calif.
“You can't just call him a printer. He's a printer/artist,” Miller said.
Koch's shop produced 250 copies on letterpress, and hand-bound each into an attractive wrapper. They were numbered, signed by Miller, Hood and Koch, and are on sale for $100 at The Bookstore at UM. Kuhr said $90 from each sale will go to the J-school.
Guthrie's sheepherder essay begins: “He wasn't the only one, in that storm or others, who perished because he would not forsake the sheep that weren't his.”
Despite its murky origins, it's vintage Guthrie.
“It is fine, fine writing,” Miller said. “We tend now to become so flowery and so overblown. It was always my father's admonition, don't get tied up with adjectives and adverbs. They will destroy your message. And they do.
“If somehow that gets through to a new generation of writers and journalists, so much the better.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
Limited edition
Two hundred fifty hand-bound copies of A.B. Guthrie's long-lost essay “Occupation Sheepherder,” including introductions by Helen Guthrie Miller and Charlie Hood, are on sale for $100 at The Bookstore at UM (243-1234) and online at montanabookstore.com.
Proceeds go to the University of Montana School of Journalism and the Guthrie Reading Room in Don Anderson Hall. Call the journalism school at 243-4001 for more information.
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