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CHAPTER SIX West of Desire: Queer Ambivalence in Montana Literature KARL OLSON Before we were a nation, long before, a Spanish explorer of the continent,bravely lost in the wilderness,wrote,“We always held it certain that, going towards the sunset, we should find what we desired.” —A. B. Guthrie Jr.,“West Is Another Word for Magic” [B]efore they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian A dam is built in Montana. Its construction is the central event in two Montana novels, set on opposite sides of the Continental Divide and in juxtaposed ethnic communities. In D’Arcy McNickle’s Wind from an Enemy Sky the dam cuts off the water supply of the Little Elk tribe, a culture that is itself being methodically diverted by white infiltration. Developer Adam Pell is baffled by the shockwaves set off by his project. His nephew is murdered while working on the dam; a sacred bundle entrusted to his care ends up misplaced,“tattered and profaned”; and the tribe Pell professes to admire in the West is thrown into turmoil by the anti-Indian policies Pell supports in boardrooms back East. A Little Elk elder, not unaware of the tribe’s role in its troubles, notifies his people: “That man from the East took the water from the mountains and spread it over the land, and some of our people will say it was a good thing. Maybe he is a good man—I watched him, and that is what I think—and yet he will destroy us”(187). In the fiction of A. B. Guthrie Jr., the dam finally breaks, wiping out a town 102 Gay and Lesbian Literature Under a Big Sky and scarring the valley. Guthrie’s dam is the culmination of westward expansion efforts that stretch back nearly a hundred years to the period of his first novel, The Big Sky. The Big Sky’s mountain man Boone Caudill plunders his way across the territory, blazing a wide trail for the nation building that will eventually pave over his Edenic dream.“It’s all sp’iled,”he finally acknowledges to fellow trader Dick Summers.“The whole caboodle....This here finger pulled the trigger.I reckon I sp’iled it all.”Dick concurs:“[E]verything we done it looks like we done against ourselves” (385). In The Last Valley Mort Ewing, an early homesteader, watches his fellow settlers transform the Teton Valley by “overgrazing and overcropping and timber up on the headwaters that never should have been cut.” Surveying the aftermath of the dam’s breach, he declares: “At every turn, sometimes it seems to me, man fucks himself”(265). Providing too little or too much, the dam illustrates Americans’ struggle to control a geography that fluctuates between the“savage, competitive world and the gentle cooperative world” (Bass 80). While nature appears to set the ambivalent terms of our contract with the West—“The camas with the blue flower will save you from starvation; the one with the white flower will poison you” (DeVoto “Foreword” xi), Bernard DeVoto cautions—colonialism hauls its own carpet baggage into this environment. Guthrie perceived Montanans to be “on both sides of the fence . . . margins on one hand, masses on the other”(“Preface”xviii). Today, Jared Diamond asserts in Collapse, Montanans are confronted by the fact that “long-standing and continuing opposition to government regulation is responsible for degradation of the beautiful natural environment”(64–65).This is,DeVoto claims,a“simple ambivalence”(Western Paradox 348), and—as it relates to the land—the most obvious. “You could love such a country but you were bound to hate it, too—and the splits in the Western soul begin right here”(DeVoto“Foreword”xi). It follows then that Montana writing is “dialectical to the core, representing competing responses to common concerns” (Egan xxvii).1 Guthrie’s and McNickle’s novels are essential chapters of this canon and provide a natural introduction to this discussion. Guthrie’s interlinked historical novels are “obsess[ed] with the disintegration of landscape”and characterized by“a voice of romantic despair” (Blew 205).“Each man kills the thing he loves,” Guthrie lamented in 1954.“We kill the thing we love because we don’t have clean choices and...

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