Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr., is best known for his writing about the American West. His three most famous novels--sometimes referred to together as a trilogy--cover the eventful decades between 1830 and 1890, vividly depicting the lives of Americans involved in the settlement process over three generations. Guthrie's most notable achievement in these books is his demonstrated ability to assert the range, complexity, and intensity of his large subject--the colonization of the Missouri and Columbia drainage basins by real people.

Part of Guthrie's sense of the West as an actual, rather than a mythical, place may be traced to the fact that he grew up there. Born in Bedford, Indiana, during the winter of 1901, he was transplanted that spring to the village of Choteau, Montana, where his father had been hired as principal of the high school. In his autobiography, The Blue Hen's Chick (1965), he describes his Montana childhood as colorful...