Even more successfully than its predecessor, "The Big Sky." Mr. Guthrie's ["The Way West"] repossesses the past and gives a sense, not of fiction, but of the Western experience itself as it was totally known a hundred years ago by the men who underwent it, who chose it, and who were re-created by it as Western Americans. Mr. Guthrie writes with modest but sure art, especially in his feeling for the idiom of Western talk and for the narrative style proper to it.

In so far as we are conscious of the author at all, it is not of a romancer making the most of the color and drama of the early narratives but of a man who loves the Western mountain country….

With the same imaginative conviction as "The Big Sky" in practical knowledge of everyday life—cooking over buffalo chips, for instance, or fording the violent...