A. B. Guthrie's trilogy and the Turner thesis.

Abstract

The West has always attracted the American. Historically the West provided an opportunity for individual success. Taking this thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner, an historian, presented a paper in 1893 outlining the results of the various American frontiers on the American character. Turner proposed that the United States is a product of successive frontiers from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific and back to the Great Plains. Because of these repetitive frontiers and the continued lure of free land and advancing settlements, Americans are uniquely independent, materialistic, practical, self-reliant, buoyant, acutely alert individuals. Incorporating the various frontiers and character traits outlined by Turner, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., a contemporary Western novelist, presents a trilogy of novels of the frontiers and their effects on the characters who challenge the West. The Big Sky is set on the high plains and mountain ranges, frontiers of the mountain men whose adventurous spirit opened up the western lands. The second novel, The Way West, takes place on the wagon train trails from St. Louis to Oregon, as settlers, intent on material success, free land, bounteous crops, cross the prairies to begin a new life. These Thousand Hills unfolds in the hills of Montana where a young dreamer hopes to set up a ranch on the last of the open lands left in the united States. In each of these novels Guthrie incorporates the strengths of the characters as they battle and conquer the vast sweep of the West.