Savage West

The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage

O. Alan Weltzien

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781948908870
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Thomas Savage (1915—2003) was one of the intermountain West's best novelists. His thirteen novels received high critical praise, yet he remained largely unknown by readers. Although Savage spent much of his later life in the Northeast, his formative years were spent in southwestern Montana, where the mountain West and his ranching family formed the setting for much of his work.O. Alan Weltzien's insightful and detailed literary biography chronicles the life and work of this neglected but deeply talented novelist. Savage, a closeted gay family man, was both an outsider and an insider, navigating an intense conflict between his sexual identity and the claustrophobic social restraints of the rural West. Unlike many other Western writers, Savage avoided the formula westerns— so popular in his time— and offered instead a realistic, often subversive version of the region. His novels tell a hard, harsh story about dysfunctional families, loneliness, and stifling provincialism in the small towns and ranches of the northern Rockies, and his minority interpretation of the West provides a unique vision and caustic counternarrative contrary to the triumphant settler-colonialism themes that have shaped most Western literature. Savage West seeks to claim Thomas Savage's well-deserved position in American literature and to reintroduce twenty-first-century readers to a major Montana writer.

CHAPTER ONE

Childhood and Adolescence, 1915–1936

My God! Here was my life!

THOMAS SAVAGE, April 1983

DURING THOMAS SAVAGE’s final visit to his home country, he drove up Horse Prairie, forty miles southwest of Dillon, Montana, and 1,500 feet higher, to Bannock Pass (7,684 feet) on the Continental Divide and Idaho-Montana border. He held a can of beer and looked near and far at this intimately familiar panorama—and dividing line—from his childhood. There’s nary a building in sight, in 1983 or now, for that matter.

The scene’s grandeur and tiny traces of human presence astonished him as though he cannot believe he sprang from such country.

Bannock Pass separates Horse Prairie, a high dry valley of scattered ranches, from the Lemhi River Valley just west beyond the Beaverhead Mountains, another high dry valley with scattered ranches. Given Savage’s later New England life, urbane manner, and career as a writer, well might he have doubted his improbable origins in this remote corner of the northern Rockies. Yet Savage was a son of the sagebrush with town a far distance. The Yearian Ranch of Lemhi, Idaho, home of his mother’s family, and the Brenner Ranch of Horse Prairie, home of his stepfather’s, remained the psychic centers of his long life. He wrote about them repeatedly.

The Gilmore and Pittsburgh Railroad, a spur line built 1909–10 between Armstead, Montana, and Salmon (and Gilmore), Idaho, and informally known as the “Get Off and Push,” regularly stopped at the Brenner siding, which included a post office and tiny store (until the 1930s). It linked the cattle ranch into which Savage’s mother married and the sheep ranch run, mostly, by his maternal grandmother. Savage claimed, even late in life, to still dream regularly about this railroad, which ceased operation in 1939. He fondly recalls the ride over Bannock Pass, winding down Canyon Creek through a canyon to Leadore (“Junction”), Idaho, where the track split and where, with his mother and little sister, he’d ride the northwest spur some miles farther to the Yearian Ranch. He recalled boxed lunches, maybe fried chicken and oranges. The G&P in effect launched Savage as a novelist since he centered The Pass on the construction of the G&P and its triumphant arrival in “Salmon City,” Idaho.

That little railroad, which backed through a tunnel just below Bannock Pass, connected sparsely settled country only a couple of generations after initial white settlement. Elizabeth (Beth) Yearian Savage (1890–1957) gave birth to Thomas, her second child, in Salt Lake City (April 25, 1915), and soon brought him home to Lemhi, Idaho. By that time her marriage to Tom’s father, Benjamin Harrison Savage (1889–1971, title character of The Liar, 1969), was floundering. By all accounts the headstrong Beth, the oldest child, returned to the Yearian fold with baby and without Ben Savage—a man as handsome, in a period way (i.e., an “Arrow Collar man”), as he was superficial and unsuccessful: “all show and no go,” it was said. In a letter written in old age, Tom Savage claimed Beth gave up her first baby, a daughter (born February 25, 1912), for adoption in response to her mother’s (Emma R. Yearian’s) deep grief upon the death of Beth’s younger brother, Tom-Dick (Emma’s favorite child), of appendicitis at age eleven (September 18, 1911). Savage would not discover this sister, Patricia (“Pat”) McClure Hemenway, until middle age. His headstrong mother and grandmother became the models for all Savage’s strong-willed female characters.

Savage’s tenth novel, I Heard My Sister Speak My Name (1977)—a.k.a. The Sheep Queen (2001)—has long been judged his most autobiographical novel, and as I’ll claim, though it’s a fiction, Savage stays remarkably close to unchanged family history throughout it. Autobiography is masked as autobiographical fiction. Thus, The Sheep Queen provides unique, detailed insight into his life story, however fictionalized. Regarding his parents’ divorce, for example, we read in The Sheep Queen, “When [Beth] left him, my father was a salesman for a cigar company, a job that took him into poolhalls and bars; there they would have found him charming with his looks, his stories and comic monologues. His scenes from Shakespeare were impressive.” (p. 216) Savage inherited the same wit and charm.

His most trenchant rendition of his parents’ failed marriage occurs in The Liar (1969), Savage’s sixth novel.

Beth Yearian divorced Ben Savage in 1917 on the grounds of infidelity (cf. The Liar, p. 218; The Sheep Queen, p. 216) and returned home to Lemhi, Idaho, from Seattle, where the Savages had temporarily lived. The same year, Savage married his second wife, Hazel Baldwin whom, after nine years, he divorced, soon after marrying his third, Marjorie Wood. He stayed married the longest to his fourth wife, Dorothy “Dottie” Ritchie who, after his death, would live with Tom and Betty Savage for a while. Beth took little Tom up Yearian Creek with her as she herded a band of her mother’s sheep (there being a manpower shortage because of World War I enlistments; cf. Sheep Queen, pp. 216–17). Savage much later summarized his mother’s endless ranch work in her three years between marriages: “Three summers my mother herded sheep. Three winters she tended to the big house and scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees. Three springs she cooked for the lambing crew and little later for the sheepherders. She was the last one in bed at night.” (The Sheep Queen, p. 217) Her steady hard work manifested itself in her son’s discipline in his writing career.

Savage retained a sharp memory of the 1918 influenza epidemic, which struck months after his third birthday. Reminiscing, he wrote his cousin, Janet N. S. Moore, “Then the Flu hit, and we wore gauze masks that my mother washed each day and hung to dry over the fireplace. And then she got the flu, and I recall my terror when the ambulance came to take her to the hospital. She survived . . .” (May 15, 1998)

Soon after the flu epidemic, Beth changed Tom’s world at the Yearian Ranch. Just before he turned five, Beth married Charles (Charlie) Brenner, third and youngest son of Horse Prairie’s Brenner Ranch, on March 23, 1920, in Butte, Montana. They honeymooned in British Columbia’s Fraser River Valley. Savage would later characterize Beth’s remarriage as her double duty—to her mother, the Sheep Queen, and to her son without a father. In The Sheep Queen, he states, “I believe my mother looked on the marriage as her duty to me. I think she hoped Charlie would adopt me, and I would be secure forever.” (p. 219) This marriage brought the Brenner (cattle) Ranch into Tom’s life, and it would remain his prototype of all that’s destructive in the ranching world.

The landscapes of Tom’s childhood and adolescence remain almost as unpopulated now as in his day. Montana remains one of the largest and least populated states, and Beaverhead County sprawls across its high, mountainous southwest corner. Larger than Connecticut, the county takes more than half a day to transit from northwest to southeast (incl. today’s Interstate 15). Cattle considerably outnumber people per square mile a century after Savage’s childhood, since Beaverhead County counts well under 10,000 people and features three traffic lights (all in Dillon). Today it’s fewer than two people per square mile and a century ago, fewer yet. Most Americans would judge the Horse Prairie ranching community as the proverbial back of beyond. It’s a forty-five minute drive from Dillon, the distant county seat, even factoring in Interstate 15 for the first eighteen miles.

The preponderance of sagebrush, with willow browse lining Horse Prairie Creek and its tributaries, its dun slopes giving way to broad bands of lodgepole pine and rocky ridges above them, might disenchant those accustomed, say, to verdant landscapes. This little north-south valley, like Bannock Pass capping its south end, viscerally represents Big Sky Country where landscape looms and people don’t. We’re tiny inside it, as are the infrequent sheds, barns, or houses. In these visual panoramas—and the Yearian Ranch, above a narrow swatch of the Lemhi River with the Lemhi Range rising immediately west (and the Beaverheads just east and above it), affords similar panoramas—people barely figure.

These big, open landscapes feel unimaginable to Americans from either coast, or the Midwest or South for that matter. The scale and the paucity of built environment scare most away. Savage’s son, Russell, provided a hyperbolic outsider reaction when he wrote, “my father . . . was raised on a cattle ranch in a part of Montana which closely resemble[s] something which can be seen, with the help of a strong telescope, on the mountains of the moon.” As a teenage New Englander, Russell claimed “it looked to me a lot like the dark side of the moon—red dirt, rock, and sagebrush and not much else.” Russell Savage’s incomprehension, if not outrage, typifies those accustomed to smaller scale, more settled and populated topographies—or those who have difficulty, to borrow a title, getting over the color green. Outsiders from any distance typically fail to enlarge their aesthetic lenses: those who spend any time in Horse Prairie usually love it and remark about its big open scale.

During his final visit to Dillon and Horse Prairie, standing atop Bannock Pass (7,684 feet) with a can of beer and surveying his past in this panorama almost entirely bereft of human sign, he exclaimed “My God! Here was my life!”: a comment later repeated to Dillon interviewers. By then it felt both intimately familiar and impossibly remote. Out of that tension Savage defined his American West. That last visit to Dillon (April 1983) proved a crucial episode in Savage’s psyche, further loosing the floodgates of memory. This biography repeatedly references that visit, which sheds bright light on the writer’s harsh ambivalences about his first geography and its fraught presence in his fiction.

But the sense of seemingly impossible remoteness, Savage’s birthright, never left him. He addresses it in the Contemporary Authors interview (January 11, 1989) published the year after his final novel: “I think the difference in Westerners has to do with the fact that they feel it’s impossible to look at the Rocky Mountains—or to look at the horizon, which is equally vast—and consider that there is such a thing as Europe or neighbors or anything else.” Savage compensated for rural remoteness with European sports cars and decor. A dozen years earlier in The Sheep Queen he’d stated the same thing: “it was difficult for some to look out on the awesome Rocky Mountains and consider the prosaic fact of Europe.” (The Sheep Queen, p. 93) Most Americans—urbanites or suburbanites—can’t imagine such remoteness. The valley’s population likely peaked in the homesteader boom (1900–20), after which surviving ranchers bought out abandoned places, and the population shrank as holdings were consolidated. Savage hailed from a place with few, widely scattered neighbors.

Having lived in southwest Montana for over a quarter century, I understand Savage’s perspective, one difficult for outsiders to accept. That peculiar combination of size and apparent emptiness constitutes a fundamental image and lure in the Intermountain West apart from its cities and suburbs. This image, of course, iconically defines notions of Western American frontier that held sway for generations—and still do in vestigial versions of pop culture. Savage repeatedly painted this canvas, as it came naturally to him, and in the foreground he anatomized particular strains of loneliness and frustration ensuing from it.

Yet students of American history, let alone Montana history, have actually heard passing reference to what I call Thomas Savage Country because it constitutes a small strand of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery route west. What we call Horse Prairie represents part of Sacajawea’s Lemhi Shoshone tribe’s home country, and the home place of what would become the Brenner Ranch forms the spot where the Corps turned west, following Trail Creek up to Lemhi Pass (7,373 feet) where they first stood on the Continental Divide (August 12, 1805). On their route east William Clark’s contingent of the split crew returned to lower Horse Prairie, recovering a cache that included tobacco. For most of the nineteenth century, geographers believed Meriwether Lewis’s verdict that Lemhi Pass, west of Horse Prairie and ultimately a stagecoach route, constituted the headwaters of the Missouri River system. It’s not. But apart from this famous white passage in the early nineteenth century, and the Nez Perce passage in August 1877, following the Battle of the Big Hole, this high remote valley remained unknown except to prospectors and ranchers. It remains little known beyond Beaverhead County.

When Beth Savage brought her toddler home to Lemhi, Idaho, she brought him to a family ranch begun by her grandparents forty years earlier. Thomas Yearian (1864–1963), Savage’s maternal grandfather, was a cattleman, lifelong Democrat, and second fiddle to his wife, Emma Russell Yearian (1866–1951), known in the family as “Big Mama.” Tom Yearian’s family reached Bannack, Montana Territory, from Illinois in 1866, moved south to Horse Prairie two years later, and later moved across the Divide, having purchased the Joseph Pattee Ranch at Lemhi, Idaho Territory. The grandson-writer named after him claimed that Tom Yearian’s father, George, discovered gold in Jefferson Davis Creek in 1870 and ultimately, bought three ranches in the Lemhi River Valley. He likely sold some claims initially to William A. Clark, who became the first of Butte’s three Copper Barons and a famously corrupt politician.

George Yearian sold other claims to John Brenner, Savage’s paternal step-grandfather, who managed to lose $100,000 on a dredge-boat operation there. In a letter Savage stated, “after the dredge-boat failed in its search, the heavy machines, the generators and so forth, ended up in sheds beside the big log barn where also was stored silver and china from the house that burned in 191[3].” It amused Savage that both sides of his family crossed paths in a remote gold diggings in Horse Prairie, on a creek named after the Confederate president, and that the Yearians emerged much more flush as a result. Savage wrote the archetypal story of a prospector finding gold more than once.

Tom Yearian met Emma at a country dance (he played fiddle, and Emma, a determined young schoolteacher, played piano), and they married April 15, 1889. In good, nineteenth-century rural American fashion, they produced six children in the next eleven years, the author’s mother, Elizabeth (Beth), being the firstborn. In 1901, having decided to get into the sheep ranching business, Emma secured a loan in a Dillon bank and, with her husband’s help, trailed their first 1,200 sheep over the Continental Divide to Lemhi. Tom deeply admired his grandmother who broke ground as a businesswoman and sheep rancher. Emma, a lifelong Republican and the first woman to represent Lemhi County in the Idaho Legislature (1931–32), was tagged “the Sheep Queen of Idaho” by a Salt Lake Tribune reporter, and it stuck. As affirmed in The Sheep Queen, “she knew long ago what her life would be, how she would manage it.” (p. 101) And she stuck to her plan.

Of the author’s grandparents, the Sheep Queen was easily the dominant one. Short and broad, she always towered over Savage’s imagination, particularly in the ways she pushed against gender conventions. The Idaho Statesman ran a lengthy retrospective about her (January 29, 1978) twenty-seven years after her death. She proved a canny rancher and family boss, eventually running 6,000 sheep on both the Yearian Ranch and leased land. The winter of 1918 brought so much cold and snow that the Gilmore and Pittsburgh Railroad hauled hay (with a 400 percent cost spike from 1917) that helped save the Yearians and other ranchers, an episode Savage borrowed for the climax of his first novel.

Emma was never refused a bank loan because of her track record and self-confidence, and she brought the ranch through the Depression. She secured her bank loans in Dillon through her reputation, and never mortgaged anything. In her day journal of February 21, 1916, she noted, “Fifty years old today and feel no older than at 25.” She bred Rambouillet rams with Cotswold ewes to maximize wool production. In a pair of posthumous profiles (January 22, 1978; January 29, 1978), Idaho Statesman staff writer Betty Penson quotes an old-timer who said, “She was so smart she just brained her way through anything.” At a dinner in Switzerland in 1929, Emma was introduced as a representative of the (52,000-member) National Business and Professional Women’s Club. By the early 1930s, the Yearians owned 2,500 acres. A Utah reporter who interviewed her in the 1930s, according to Penson’s retrospective, stated, “She looks like a mixture of the late Queen Emma of Holland and Mme. Schumann-Heink” [a stout German opera diva]. She was short and broad, one relative referring to her as “5’ by 5’.”

Tom Yearian, in extreme old age, sold the ranch in 1961, a decade after his wife’s death on Christmas Day, 1951. By then he’d also lost his favorite child: Beth, his firstborn.

According to Savage, Big Mama’s personal credo was captured in W. E. Henley’s poem, “Invictus” (1888), particularly the lines, “I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.” In old age, corpulent and with bad knees, she declared, “my spirit will never be broken.” In The Sheep Queen, Savage’s narrator-avatar adds, “She sometimes quoted the entire poem in a quiet, sepulchral voice—she had been trained in elocution. At the words, ‘My head is bloody but unbowed,’ she inclined her own head slightly and then snapped it up on her spine.” (p. 150) Savage also quotes stanzas from “Invictus” in Daddy’s Girl (1970), his seventh novel. Emma thus proved a model of deep civic involvement, lending her weight to many local organizations and charities. Emma was as easy with sheep shearers as political or religious leaders. Writing of her in his late essay, “Why a Pilgrim Traveled to Boston, and His Implausible Arrival There,” Savage stated, “When later on my grandmother went to Europe, she got along with Ambassador Dawes in Germany and with the Pope in Rome.” (A Book for Boston, 1980, p. 14) He inherited her drive for success and her flair.

The Yearians receive their most extended fictional treatment in The Sheep Queen—a re-titling he blessed in old age, as it honors his remarkable, high-octane maternal grandmother. That novel’s autobiographical narrator, with shrugging admiration, describes the Sheep Queen as unstoppable: “Emma was like a brushfire. When you checked her in one place, she flared up over there.” (p. 108) And in “Why a Pilgrim Traveled to Boston,” Savage paints the annual sheep shearing scene at the Yearian Ranch, when ten shearers arrive an early June evening and “Big Mama” greets them by name and inquires after their kin, eventually admitting to her grandson that she has been to Boston, addressing a convention at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Grandmother and grandson proved at their ea...