Nevada Oasis, and Bernard DeVoto

                                                                                                                                                   ©Michael S. Moore2015

Ah, the West. Always surprising. You head out across the northern Nevada desert--and see what turns up? 
I'm reading Bernard DeVoto, 1846: Year of Decision. His writing style can be annoying--kind of smart-alecky in a 1940s way-- but he certainly did the research and knew the country. His accounts of the emigrations along the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails in the mid-19th century are very much worth reading. Born in Utah, DeVoto was a card-carrying liberal of his era, and bold politically. Made a lot of enemies. Unafraid. But it's hard to escape the blind spots of your own era, isn't it? In DeVoto's history of American emigration, invasion and settlement of the West, Native Americans are granted none of the respect or due diligence carefully applied to his other subjects. He just has not done the research. Pretty much everything he writes about Native Americans reflects bitter prejudices that must have been the village wisdom during his upbringing in Ogden, Utah in the late 19th century, a time and place still very close to "frontier". DeVoto is an impressive narrative historian but whenever he writes about the Shoshone, Comanche, Apache, Kiowa, or Crow, he ends up sounding like an ignoramus.
I plan to read The Uneasy Chair, Wallace Stegner's biography of DeVoto. From an Amazon review: "Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah, both men were, as Stegner writes, "novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us." From this unique vantage point, Stegner follows DeVoto's path from his beloved but not particularly congenial Utah to the even less congenial Harvard where, galvanized by the disregard of the aesthetes around him, he commenced a career that, over three and a half decades, would embrace nearly every sort of literary enterprise: from modestly successful novels to prize-winning Western histories, from the editorship of the Saturday Review to a famously combative, long-running monthly column in Harper's, "The Easy Chair." A nuanced portrait of a stormy literary life, Stegner's biography of DeVoto is also a window on the tumultuous world of American letters in the twentieth century."