Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories (review)

The term “honyocker” packs a special punch in Montana. Associated with gullible homesteaders in the first two decades of the twentieth century, it gained currency—a dose of derision mixed with a tincture of grudging respect—in J. K. Howard’s celebrated Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (1943). David Mogen begins his excellent memoir with a semantic meditation upon the term and eventually locates his mother’s family story inside it. Mogen grew up in several small towns along Montana’s Hi-Line and in remote northeastern Montana; his father’s Irish cowboy family hailed from southeastern Montana (near Ashland). As he states in his conclusion, “I had a vision of writing a new book recovering the stories of those first generations, weaving together stories converging from the four corners of Montana” (225). That defines his success, as his memoir patiently gathers the disparate strands of his father’s and mother’s diverse heritages. In writing Honyocker Dreams, Mogen, the oldest of six, works as family historian (though not the only one) whose synthesis of extended family narratives matches his easy geographical embrace of Montana’s least populated and least written-about corners. It honors the “stories of this generation that is passing away, this generation that witnessed the closing of frontiers that their parents and grandparents opened to them, that survived the Depression and shaped the world that we ‘Boomers’ … were born into after the great war” (226). As such, it represents a strong contribution to the twentieth-century literary history of the Northern Rockies.

Though he spent his graduate-school years in New York City and his career in Fort Collins, Colorado, Mogen has never really left his native state, his annual fly-fishing trips a necessary return to his first and primary geography. He divides Honyocker Dreams into five sections, including “Endings and Beginnings” and an “Epilogue.” In the former, Mogen traces the dying and death (1997–98) of his itinerant school superintendent father, Harold, setting Harold’s voice and stories off against his own reflections; in the third essay from the end, he more quickly narrates his mother’s sudden, unexpected death (December 2001). He examines their lives in the process of more fully understanding his own identity. It’s a classic roots quest, Mogen seeking the stories that explain his relatives and revisiting the scenes of childhood and adolescence: tiny towns that, without exception, have shrunk even more in the past two generations. Sometimes Mogen steps like a ghost around the run-down, ruined, or occasionally transformed farm or town buildings and streets of Box Elder, Whitewater, Frazer, and Froid. He relives memories of his youthful self as a trumpet player, basketball player, explorer, and bookworm.

Mogen’s journey takes surprising turns. A great-aunt on his father’s side married into a Blackfeet clan, and in “Iniskim” he tells a beautiful story of his Blackfeet relatives and their gift to him. Mogen discovers that his father’s Irish relatives, several generations back, were related to copper king Marcus Daly, one of the wealthiest figures in Montana history. He also takes a solo backpacking trip into the Beartooths, a fly-fishing “vision quest” in which his dead father talks to him. Mogen deftly revisits the geographies of his past, resulting in an eloquent testimony to the grit and aspirations of his parents and his own talent as a lyrical chronicler.