Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Stegner is a gifted, intelligent writer, able to turn the people and events of history into compelling reading. The opening section of the book describes the experience of being on the plains and specifically in the area where Stegner was a boy. And it lays out the geography of that land -- a distant range of hills, the river, the coulees, the town -- which the book will return to again and again.

The following section evokes the period of frontier Canada's early exploration, the emergence of the metis culture, the destruction of the buffalo herds, the introduction of rangeland cattle, and then wave upon wave of settlement pushing the last of the plains Indians westward and northward. A chapter is devoted to the surveying of the boundary along the Canada-U.S. border; another chapter describes the founding of the Mounted Police and its purely Canadian style of bringing law and order to the wild west.

The middle section of the book is a novella and a short story about the winter of 1906-1907. In the longer piece, eight men rounding up cattle are caught on the open plains in an early blizzard. Stegner builds the drama and the peril of their situation artfully and convincingly. The final section of the book returns to Stegner's memories of the town and the homestead, ending with his family's departure for Montana.

Stegner lived at a time and in a place where a person born in the 20th century could still experience something of the sweep of history that transformed the American plains. I've read many books about the West, and because of his depth of thought, his gifts as a writer, and his unflinching eye, Stegner's work ranks for me among the best. I heartily recommend this book.


Stegner's Homage To The Frontier As It Was Lived   February 2, 2000
24 out of 25 found this review helpful

Wolf Willow is one third local history of the Cypress Hills area of Saskatchewan, One third compelling fiction and one third memior.

The book is an intimate, knowing portrait of the area and an insightful meditation of what living on a frontier was like, not just writing about it or seeing romanticized movies.

While Stegner sometimes suffers from being the creative writing professor he was, for my time and money he remains the preeminent literary voice of the West. As with almost all of his work, Wolf Willow is an engrossing read and will leave you thinking long after you close the back cover.


Growing up on the northern plains.   May 22, 2002
Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Wallace Stegner grew up on the prairie frontiers of North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and Montana, and in the mountains of Utah. As is indicated by the subtitle, this volume combines history, a memoir, and historical fiction. Readers who have spent significant time on the snow swept northern steppes may find a small part of themselves, and of this land, in Wolf Willow. ...
"On those miraculously beautiful and murderously cold nights glittering with the green and blue darts from a sky like polished dark metal, when the moon had gone down, leaving the hollow heavens to the stars and the overflowing cold light of the Aurora, he thought he had moments of the clearest vision ... In every direction ... the snow spread; here and there the implacable plain glinted back a spark - the beam of a cold star reflected in a crystal of ice." (The scene evokes in me a powerful memory, as I recall often standing alone on just such "murderously cold" snow blanketed prairies and gazing into those "miraculously beautiful" night skies.)


History--By One Who Lived It and Payed Attention   October 10, 1997
ezreid@inav.net (Iowa City, Iowa)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful

Wallace Stegner spent a large part of his childhood on nearly the last terrestrial frontier in Continental North America, a harsh corner of southwestern Sasakatchewan. Wolf Willow tells the story of that experience, other great stories about the history and culture of the region, and Stegner's views on going back to the town he grew up in. In reading Wolf Willow, you begin to realize the depth of the loss we've suffered as Western humanity has moved almost exclusively into homogenized, plasticized communities without an iota of the challenge or color Stegner experienced in his youth. Will there ever be another writer like Stegner? Probably not, unless we somehow recapture the crucible of existence chronicled so magnificently in Wolf Willow.


Sweet Dust and Dandelion Wine of Youth   December 15, 1999
jack schaaf
13 out of 16 found this review helpful

Stegner, whose ambitious works stand as one of the finest legacies of fiction in any language, chronicles his early years in the praries of Dakotas and nearby provinces with some of the most poetic and dignified prose ever offered. Like the author's Angle of Repose, Recapitulation, or Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wolf Willow provides a window to West as experienced by youth; as opposed to merely read. Anyone raised in the West near canyons, who knows the smell of pinon and pepper tress or simple brush of wind over open space of grasslands will identify with and appreciate this gift of autobiography. It breathes like dandelion wine uncorked years after being stored. Highly recommend