Back	Books by Vardis Fisher

Idaho writer Vardis Fisher is remembered, if at all, for his novel Mountain
Man, which was the inspiration for the superb Sydney Pollack film Jeremiah
Johnson, starring Robert Redford. Fisher was a child of the frontier, born
1895 in Idaho and living in virtual isolation, on the Snake River bottoms,
for most of his childhood. At a time when Hemingway was identified as "the
Idaho writer" because he had a cabin in Sun Valley, this authentic, cranky,
and powerful voice of the region was writing a few hundred miles away, in his
Hagerman hermitage on the Malad River. (For a complete brief bio, see my
entry on Fisher in the Utah History Encyclopedia.)

He began his career as a Naturalist, writing well-received
semi-autobiographical fiction comparable to the work of Erskine Caldwell,
James T. Farrell, and Thomas Wolfe, then in 1939 he won the Harper Prize for
his historical novel on Brigham Young and the Mormons, Children of God, a
book alternately praised and vilified by Latter-Day Saints. The remaining
thirty years of his career wre devoted to Western Americana and an ambitious
project called The Testament of Man, a series of twelve historical novels set
in periods from the Pleistocene to the modern era and tracing the
"psychohistory" of Western mankind.

He was by no means a great writer or even, I'm afraid, a great thinker. I
encountered his work at a time when I needed an intellectual mentor, and his
fierce mix of scathing honesty and relentless pursuit of historical truth,
his strangely bipolar voice (alternately that of a preaching mystic and
sneering sceptic), and his lyrical naturalism were precisely what I needed. I
studied my character in his pages, everything from the fiction to his strange
book on the writer's craft. And when, as a precocious teenager, I wrote a fan
letter, shyly asking if we could correspond, his response ("Stop looking for
fathers.") was predictable and appropriate. My affection for his work is that
of a child for his admirable parent. I love him in spite of his flaws; I
respect the strength and integrity of his mind; and I make no more apologies.

Unfortunately, very little is in print regarding Fisher, either of his own
books or books about him. The list below is selective and subjective rather
than complete.

Many of his best books were printed in multiple paperback editions, and they
often turn up in used bookstores. If you are looking for a particular title
and cannot find it locally, I recommend two sources for secondhand books,
ABEBooks, which is a search service linked to used book stores all over the
world, and Powells Bookstore in Portland. A recent check in ABE garnered 387
Fisher books, ranging from a $2.25 reprint of Mountain Man to a signed first
edition of Passions Spin the Plot for $300.

Fisher's Writing  Western Americana
Children of God. Fisher won the Harper Prize for Fiction in 1939 for his
historical novel that traces the beginnings of Mormonism from New England to
1890. Mormon historian Leonard Arrington praises the book highly, but it has
generally been criticized by Mormons for being irreverent and by non-Mormons
for being too sympathetic. As you might expect, the reason is that Fisher's
view is so balanced and unbiased that it irritates everybody. There is no
more painless way to gain a thorough understanding of the meaning of the
Mormon experience. Fisher's picture of Brigham Young is especially sharp.
It's almost certainly a primary source for Henry Hathaway's peculiar Mormon
film, Brigham Young, Frontiersman. Hardcover copies of the Opal Laurel
Holmes/University of Idaho reprint are fairly easy to locate. Try Powells
on-line. 0891908315
The Mothers. This is Fisher's best Western novel, the story of the Donner
Party. Highly recommended. Fisher finds the perfect mix of heroism and horror
in his telling of this nightmarish incident of the Oregon Trail era. Bernard
de Voto included the Donners in his The Year of Decision, an extremely
readable history of the American West focused on the five years immediately
after the Mexican War (1846-1850), and California novelist George R. Stewart
wrote a historical account of the Donner Party, Ordeal by Hunger. Of all the
Donner literature, Fisher is the place to begin.
Tale of Valor. Fisher's novel on the Lewis and Clark expedition was
extraordinarily controversial for its time because it focused on the grimy,
bloody, Naturalistic reality of the trip rather than the high-minded
aspirations and mythology. While its authenticity is unquestionable, the
racist attitudes toward the Indians will be offensive to many readers.
Fisher's ambiguous relationship with the Indian people's is the subject of my
contribution to a forthcoming (September 2000) collection of essays on Fisher
from the University of Idaho. Available in a hard-to-find reprint edition,
today Tale of Valor offers an interesting contrast with Stephen Ambrose's
Undaunted Courage and Bernard de Voto's The Course of Empire. Note: If you
are interested in the Lewis & CLark Expedition, you might also want to see
Fisher's controversial book on the death of Lewis which is, of all things,
currently in print: Suicide or Murder?: The Strange Death of Governor
Meriwether Lewis. Ambrose cites Fisher's scholarship in his own book.
Pemmican. Fisher's novel on the fur trade that anticipates many of the themes
in Mountain Man. Set in northern Canada during the early years of the
Hudson's Bay Company, it tells the story of a young Scots trapper and his
love of a white girl raised as an Indian.
City of Illusion. Set in Virginia City, Nevada, during the mining rushes, the
story of the Comstock Lode. Not a typical Fisher book, and far less engaging
than a half dozen others, but it mysteriously gets reprinted in paperback
fairly regularly.
Mountain Man. Fisher's hymn to the rugged individualist, much beloved of the
Rendezvous crowd (a sort of SCA for the West), this is certainly his
best-known, if not his best novel. I find it likeable and readable, but not
the best introduction to the topic and very oddly Romantic for a writer who
seemed to specialize in reducing the Romantic notion to its sweat-soaked
reality. Although Mountain Man is a grim and violent story by the standards
of its publication time, compared to the new 'realism' of writers like Larry
McMurtry and the eyeball-sucker school of post-modern fiction, the violence
seems less extreme. What remains is the record of Fisher's own love affair
with his home country. The novel was the inspiration for Robert Redford and
Sydney Pollack's excellent western, Jeremiah Johnson.

 Personal Fiction
Fisher spent his childhood on a homestead in Swan Valley, now on the
inaccessible northern edge of Palisades Reservoir. He went to school in
Rigby, Annis, and Driggs, and left the region to attend school at the
University of Utah and then the University of Chicago. He married his
childhood sweetheart, Leona McMurtrey, and after a few tempestuous years she
committed suicide. He subsequently married twice more, and he began his
writing career after her death, which may well have been the single most
powerful influence on his work. Fisher's autobiographical fiction, The Vridar
Hunter Tetralogy, was published in the 1930's as a series of four books: In
Tragic Life, Passions Spin the Plot, No Villain Need Be, and We Are Betrayed.
In the early 1960's, he revised these books and brought them up to date as a
single volume called Orphans in Gethsemane (which, to complicate things
further, Pyramid Publications then reprinted as two paperback volumes called
For Passion, For Heaven and The Great Confession.) Of the printings,
revisions, and reprintings of the narrative, the one worth reading is In
Tragic Life, which depicts childhood in the American wilderness as something
rather different from A Little House on the Prairie.... In addition to these
books, he published two notable novels set in his lifetime in the Idaho
wilderness. Dark Bridwell I consider Fisher's best novel (followed closely by
The Mothers and In Tragic Life). It covers the same time and setting as In
Tragic Life, but it is about the family that lived across the river from the
'Hunters'. You can usually find used copies in Boise of a mass market
paperback with the title The Wild Ones. This is Dark Bridwell; there is only
one, fairly trivial difference from the original book aside from the title
change (the prologue is left out). The other oft-reprinted Fisher novel set
in twentieth-century Idaho is Toilers of the Hills, a novel about farming the
Driggs area, based on the life of one of Fisher's uncles.

The Testament of Man
In the late forties, Fisher began a series of 12 books with which he was
able, eventually, to offend everybody. The series began with a novel about
Neanderthal man (Darkness and the Deep), followed by a novel on the rise of
Cro-Magnon (The Golden Rooms), in which Fisher dramatizes the 'holy war' that
John Darnton takes as the historical basis for his recent novel, Neanderthal.
Two more novels are set in prehistoric cultures, then a novel each in roughly
the historical period of Abraham, Solomon, the Maccabees. The next two novels
are set in the time of the New Testament, followed by one for the Council of
Nicea and the Desert Fathers. The last "historical" novel is set in the
Middle Ages contemporary with St. Francis, and then the series leaps forward,
rather abruptly, to the revision of Fisher's autobiography. The idea was to
trace the neuroses of modern humankind back to their biological beginnings
and to the key psycho/social moments of our cultural history.(Don't giggle.)
With that agenda, the closer you get to the present, the less there is to
write about.

The best books, in terms of readability and sustained interest, are Darkness
and the Deep, which handles the Neanderthal/Cro Magnon theme as effectively
as William Golding's The Inheritors and Bjorn Kurten's Dance of the Tiger,
and the book that speculates on the historical basis for the life of Jesus of
Nazareth, Jesus Came Again. The Desert Fathers book (variously reprinted as
Peace Like a River and The Passion Within) has a wiry, ferocious strength
about it, and the others will appeal if you are interested in the period they
cover.

Biography and Scholarship
Tim Woodward, Tiger in the Road, Caxton Printers
Boise newspaper columnist Tim Woodward's biography of Fisher is still in
print in hardcover and paperback. Woodward relies a little too heavily on
Fisher's 'autobiographical fiction' sometimes, but on the whole his picture
of Fisher's life is accurate and complete. Joseph Flora, Vardis Fisher,
Twayne Series
The Twayne Series often provides the only scholarly treatment of obscure
American writers. Professor Flora's is an excellent discussion of Fisher's
life and work, marred only by the fact that it was originally published some
thirty years ago, while Fisher was still alive and is therefore a bit dated
and biographically thin. Wayne Chatterton, Vardis Fisher, Boise State Western
Writers Series
Chatterton's pamphlet on Fisher is likely to turn up in used book stores in
the western states. An excellent overview of Fisher by someone who knew him.

The Fur Trade -- Fiction
Frederick Manfred, Lord Grizzly. The best novel about the Mountain Men, a
part of a great series of six novels, The Buckskin Man Tales, which traces
some themes from pre-white days to the end of the frontier. This one is the
story of Hugh Glass, a hunter with the Ashley Expedition which opened the
West to the American Fur Trade in 1823. Glass was mauled by a grizzly and
left for dead. He came to, splinted his broken leg, and with wounds most of
us would have died from he crawled two hundred miles back to the trading post
Ashely launched the expedition from. A few months later, healed and healthy,
he set out for the Upper Yellowstone to deal with the men who left him. The
truth is spectacular. Manfred turns it into a myth of comradeship and
selfishness.
A. B. Guthrie. The Big Sky. Classic Mountain Man novel of the 1940's. Made
into a film by Howard Hawks.
Don Berry, Trask. Novel about a fictional trapper. Highly regarded by
historians and literary scholars.
Don Berry, Moontrap. Berry's other fur trade novel. Berry is a Portland
writer known and respected by people who are knowledgeable about the fur
trade.
Harvey Fergusson, Wolf Song. Long out of print. A good novel on the Taos
traders. Made into a Gary Cooper movie longer ago than I can remember.
Winfred Blevins, Charbonneau. Fictional biography of 'Pompey' the boy born to
Sacajawea during the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Winfred Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks. Not a novel, exactly, but a
history of the fur trade meant for general audiences.
Bill Hotchkiss, Medicine Calf. The best part of a very odd four-volume novel
about the life of black mountain man Jim Beckwourth.

Nonfiction
Don Berry. A Majority of Scoundrels. In addition to his two excellent
Mountain Man novels, Berry has written a good popular history of the Fur
Trade.
Robert Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous. Biographies of mountain men by one of
the great historians of the American West.
Bernard de Voto. Across the Wide Missouri. An exceptionally fine book on the
American Fur Trade. De Voto weaves together the Ashley expedition, which
established the U.S. presence and the visit of Scottish lord George Drummond
Stewart, patron of painter Alfred Jacob Miller, to the Green River Rendezvous
of 1824.
Hiram Chittenden. The American Fur Trade of the Far West. Two-volume history
originally published in the nineteenth century.
Mari Sandoz. The Beaver Men. Popular history of the trappers by a Nebraska
writer.
Le Roy Hafen. Fur Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men of the Upper Missouri.
A multi-volume dictionary of fur trade biography. The University of Nebraska
has reprinted a selected single volume edition.
James Maguire, ed.A Rendezvous Reader: Tall, Tangled, And, True Tales of the
Mountain Men, 1805-1850. Folklore and tales from the fur trade era. Edited by
BSU Professor Jim Maguire and Arizona poet Peter Wild. In addition, there are
numerous book-length biographies of various mountain men, notably Jim
Beckwith, Jedediah Smith, Joe Meek, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, and Tom
Fitzpatrick.