Western Memoir

Since memoirs chronicle social history, they can provide readers with a broader understanding of daily life in the West from a variety of perspectives.

By Susan H. Swetnam

Let's Talk About It! Memoirs–autobiographical life stories–constitute one of the most abundant genres of western American writing, and reading memoirs promises rewarding insight into the western life. Autobiographies, in fact, could be argued to hold particular appeal to the region’s writers because of the conditions of life in the west. Scholars agree, first, that the experience of pioneering in and of itself encourages people to record their experiences, for they recognize that they are experiencing a new world whose circumstances should be preserved. Second, people are inspired to write autobiographies in periods when they perceive rapid change and understand that their descendants’ lives will be very different than theirs. Finally, writers tend to chronicle their lives when they have a clear sense of being different from mainstream culture, exotic somehow, and likely to be misunderstood. All of these factors have certainly colored westerners’ experience from the earliest days of settlement into the twentieth century.

In its loosest definition, "memoir" can mean any autobiography, but technically the term refers to narratives of personal recollection that go beyond simply chronicling interior thoughts and instead also depict important external events and people in the subject’s lives. They are "slices of life in a specific period" and "stories] of a generation," according to critics. Defining them this way suggests some of the ways that memoir can interest public library audiences. Since memoirs chronicle social history, they can provide readers with a broader understanding of daily life in the west from a variety of perspectives. Through memoir, readers can understand what it was like to be a child on an isolated Mormon frontier, or a depression-era homesteader, or what it is like to be a late twentieth-century Native American or smokejumper. Memoirs thus open reader’s eyes to a complex set of historical facts and challenging easy monolithic stereotypes about western experience. Memoirs can also invite readers to connect with others’ experience in a subjective way, sharing writers’ feelings about such things as coming of age, enjoying the natural world, and dealing with change to a place that they love. In memoir, one scholar writes, "the reader seeks confirmation of his or her own perception of reality in terms of perceptions experienced by another mortal." Reading memoirs thus encourages us to claim kinship to or to notice difference from those who have gone before us.

Readers should always remember, though, that memoirs are by definition subjective. As writers remember their lives, they tend to retrieve memories in terms of schema, mental record-keeping patterns that have already organized and assigned meaning to the events being recollected. Writers must also choose which events they believe most worthy of chronicling from among the huge masses of detail in their memories. Such decisions can be based on cultural assumptions, on models of other autobiographies, and on constructions of personal identity by which the writer defines his or her life. A writer who takes pride in her ability to be self-sufficient and adapt, like Grace Jordan, will thus emphasize different things in her memoir of isolated rural life than one who believes her need for intellectual and cultural stimulation is central to her life, like Mary Hallock Foote. Realizing that memoir writers all "lie," not maliciously, but inevitably, thorough the selective operation of memory, can ultimately be in itself a productive stimulus to discussion, as readers articulate the relative mind-sets of writers and discuss how those mind-sets influence the way that the writers experienced life. Readers may also discover memoirs which explicitly chronicle changes in writers’ mind-sets about the past, as Mary Blew’s Balsamroot does. They may also begin to become aware of their own schema, and to discuss the ways that their reconstructions of the past and of their own lives are relative.

Western memoirs come in many sizes and shapes, and many reading-discussion series are possible. A library, for instance, might choose a series of women’s memoirs of pioneering. Such a series could include Nanny Alderson’s A Bride Goes West, the quintessential brave pioneer woman chronicle which emphasizes the happiness which comes with facing adversity; for contrast, it might include Carol Ririe Brink’s memoir of frontier town life A Chain of Hands, which reveals pioneers as much more complex–and not quite as universally welcoming–social animals. Readers might also enjoy comparing Juanita Brooks’ vision of her Mormon girlhood in Mesquite, Nevada, Quicksand and Cactus; Grace Jordan’s upbeat Home Below Hell’s Canyon; Annie Pike Greenwood’s relatively dark We Sagebrush Folks, which describes life on an irrigation project near Twin Falls; and Nelle Portrey Davis’ cheerful North Idaho depression memoir, Stump Ranch Pioneer.

Another series might consider men’s experience in rural west. William Kittredge’s Hole in the Sky is a tough tale of growing up on a remote ranch near Steen’s Mountain and traces Kittredge’s relationship with his father; Ivan Doig’s well-loved This House of Sky and A River Runs Through It chronicle family and landscape in Montana. Robert Laxalt’s Sweet Promised Land explores Laxalt’s father’s lonely life as a Basque sheepherder, including a return to the European homeland; William Studebaker’s Short of a Good Promise is a moving, funny account of growing up in Salmon, along with vivid accounts of family characters.

A third series might explore the perspectives of various ethnic groups on the contemporary west. Janet Campbell Hale’s Bloodlines is a wrenchingly personal and compellingly written account of growing up Native American in the mid-twentieth century; Hale’s contemporary, Yoshiko Uchida, describes Japanese experience in the internment camps of the Intermountain West in Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family. Alice Koskela’s The Pull of Moving Water chronicles the anxieties of growing up middle class in Emmett in the 1950s; the writers in Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region (ed. Bill Hoagland) offer a variety of perspectives–and a refreshing variety of tones–on the contemporary western experience.

Series might also be constructed around a coming-of-age theme, comparing male and female perspectives (Brink, Brooks, Kittredge, Studebaker, Koskela, Doig); they might explore frontier dreams/frontier realities and discuss how contemporary westerners construct their own identities based on their perceptions of the past (many of the works noted above would fit here, but the series should be sure to include Mary Blew’s Balsamroot, which considers this question directly); they might explore larger-than-life western stereotypes, including Victor Grant Smith’s The Champion Buffalo Hunter, Murray Taylor’s Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper’s Memoir of Fighting Wildfire in the West, and Annie Clarke Tanner’s A Mormon Mother. A very short series for readers who enjoy Brink might even compare Brink’s description of early western town life in Chain of Hands with her novel covering much of the same material, Buffalo Coat–an exercise which would allow readers to discuss explicitly the ways that writers make fictional and nonfictional shapes of the same memories.

Here is a list of some western memoirs, which vary greatly in their approaches and their tones, any of which would be well worth including in a public library discussion series.

A Selection of Western Memoirs

  • Alderson, Nannie T. A Bride Goes West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. [LTAI collection]
  • Blew, Mary Clearman. All But the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations of a Montana Family. New York: Viking, 1992.
  • -----. Balsamroot: A Memoir. New York: Viking, 1994. [LTAI collection]
  • Brink, Carol Ririe. A Chain of Hands. Pullman, WA: Washington State U. Press, 1993.
  • Brooks, Juanita. Quicksand and Cactus: A Memoir of the Southern Mormon Frontier. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1992.
  • Davis, Nelle Portrey. Stump Ranch Pioneer. Rept. Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1990. [LTAI collection]
  • Doig, Ivan. This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind. New York: Harcourt, 1980. [LTAI collection]
  • -----A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1979.
  • Foote, Mary Hallock. A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Rpt. San Francisco, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1972. [LTAI collection]
  • Greenwood, Annie Pike. We Sagebrush Folks. Rpt. Moscow: U. of Idaho Press, 1988. [LTAI collection]
  • Hale, Janet Campbell. Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter. New York: Random House, 1993. [LTAI collection]
  • Hoagland, Bill (ed.). Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region. Cody, Wyo: Rocky Mountain Press, 2000.
  • Jordan, Grace. Home Below Hell’s Canyon. Rpt. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. [LTAI collection]
  • Kittredge, William. Hole in the Sky: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1992. [LTAI collection]
  • Koskela, Alice. The Pull of Moving Water. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1999.
  • Laxalt, Robert. Sweet Promised Land. Rpt. Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 1986. [LTAI collection]
  • Smith, Victor Grant, ed. Jeanette Rogers Falcon. The Champion Buffalo Hunter: The Frontier Memoirs of Yellowstone Vic Smith. New York: Falcon, 1997.
  • Studebaker, William. Short of a Good Promise. Pullman: Washington State U. Press, 1999.
  • Tanner, Annie Clarke. A Mormon Mother. 1993. [LTAI collection]
  • Taylor, Murray A. Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper’s Memoir of Fighting Wildfire in the West. New York: Harcourt, 2000.
  • Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995. [LTAI collection]

Susan H. Swetnam is the author of several books, including Home Mountains: reflections from a western middle age, Washington State University Press, 2000 . She also teaches English literature at Idaho State University.

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