‘New & Purty’
Thoughts on change
“She’s gone, goddamn it! Gone.... The whole shitaree. Gone, by God, and naught to care savin’ some of us who seen ’er new.”
So spoke an old Mountain Man in A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s magnificent 1947 novel The Big Sky. The character was speaking to a pair of greenhorns headed up the Missouri River into what is now Montana in the mid-1830s. As far as that old Mountain Man was concerned, Montana was already over, a sentiment that poured cold rain down on the poor young fellers who were thrilled to be in the deep wilderness that, to them, still looked “new and purty.”
And that was almost two centuries before “The Yellowstone Effect.”
I first read The Big Sky when I was 13 years old, and I remember that passage well, because it encapsulated Guthrie’s deep theme:
“I had a theory, not original, that each man kills the thing he loves. If it had any originality at all, it was only that a band of men, the fur-hunters, killed the life they loved and killed it with a thoughtless prodigality perhaps unmatched.”
That notion tripped a trigger in me, and I’ve carried it around ever since. At the age of 13, you’re supposed to be looking ahead to all the wonderful adventures that life holds in store, and there I was, pining with a deep nostalgic ache for an era that was gone 130 years before I was born. I know. Weird kid.
