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Show MOUNTAIN TIMES Joining the Tribe of Benny By Stephen Trimble I the self-congratulatory hype of centennial celebrations blanketing Utah, I keep yearning for a wise and critical voice .with a broader view. In the daily news, I am constantly appalled by the short-sighted decisions of our leaders. I yearn for someone who acknowledges that we must learn from the past and look farther into the future than the next election, someone passionate about understanding reality and willing to risk their status and power to speak the truth. The voice I dream of is Bernard DeVoto’s. intellectual father, the full-blown Bernard DeVoto turned out to be something like the illegitimate off- spring of H.L. Mencken and Annie Oakley, in Stegner’s words. DeVoto worked as volcanically as he pontificated, reading and researching mountains of words, traveling the West to work out the exact routes of explorers. He wrote a series of bad novels - good practice for his masterful histories. His trilogy about the exploration and settling of the West: Across the Missouri, The Course of Empire, and The Year of Decision: 1846, won him Ogden in 1897 coincides with the more official anniversaries of statehood and pioneering. Though DeVoto escaped from Utah as soon as he could and spent considerable energy deriding his roots, he became an impassioned champion of the West in the 1940s and the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a Bancroft Prize. As much as he ridiculed his smalltown origins, he reveled in the romantic history that created the possibility of his western childhood. No one has better captured the drama of the opening of the West and the relationship of that drama on its stage, the Western land- ‘50s. scape. The centennial of DeVoto’s birth in His 1942 book, The Year of Decision: 1846, should be the required guide for all of us pondering Utah's early days in this new decisive time. Bernard DeVoto? I'll bet many Wallace Stegner, whom DeVoto saw as his protégé and who wrote DeVoto’s biography in 1974, described him as “flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, running scared all bis life, often wrong, often spectacularly right, a MNS LL LL OL times infuriating, and never, never dull.” In The Year of Decision, DeVoto told many stories at once — everything that happened in America in 1846, from the Mexican War to the overland migration to the machinations of Washington politics as they related to his characters. He wrote with disdain of John Charles Fremont, with grudging respect of Brigham Young, and with love of his cherished mountain men: Jim Clyman, Jim Bridger, Tom pages on their journey again lived in the West. He turned down the chance for a secure academic life and instead created an independent life in New England teaching, editing, and above all, writing. From his Harper’s column, “The Easy Chair,” he spouted forth opinions from 1935 haps a few patches of snow left still like until his death outcrops of chalk just below the ridge, to the south the more desolate Oquirrhs Utah heard for Harvard of him. in 1915 in 1955; He left and never “volcanic” was the favored word to describe his approach. Conserving the public lands canting westward toward the end of of the West became his focus in the last decade of his life, and his crusades the lake, and then those bright, amaz- from “The Easy Chair” were pivotal in and the sun striking a white fire from them and from the whiter sand. ee in the same passage, DeVoto the history of American conservation. Wallace Stegner, whom DeVoto saw as his protégé and who wrote DeVoto’s biography in 1974, described him as “flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, running scared all his life, often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull.” Born to a jack-Mormon mother and a Catholic ing waters with peaks rising from them cknowledged the pull of this land on his own psyche, almost thirty years after he had left: There is one who remembers it below the Atlantic fall line, to whom east is always the direction You Deserve This Kind of Pampering across America, he brought them into Salt Lake Valley, riding down from Big Mountain with the Apostle Orson Pratt: He came down past the benches of the prehistoric lake to a plain of sage and stunted oak brush smelling of dust under a brazen sun . . . the line of the Wasatch stretching south with per- haven't always ready to risk speaking his mind But all of this passion was rooted in scholarship and field work and understanding. e would insist that we study the history of our place. Understand its context — ecological, historical, sociological. Learn our home landscape well enough to love it truly. Admit its limits. He would remind us of the rewards of understanding its nature, its history, and its cultures: “Remember that the yield of a hard country is a love deeper than a fat and easy land inspires, that throughout the arid West the Americans have found a secret treasure.” Wallace Stegner dedicated his DeVoto biography, The Uneasy Chair, to “the Tribe of Benny” — to all those who were challenged and enlarged by his words. Sign me up. I’m looking for other converts, too. In a culture with an increasingly short memory, where television sound bites replace sweeping narratives of history, where the greedy promises of developers and boosters disguise the true ferocity of the desert, I yearn for who, like DeVoto, leaders thunder real issues, whose informed about opinions address our real crises. @ Fitzpatrick, and the rest. Wi he found a good story — the Mormons driven into the wilderness in search for Zion or the Donner Party — he told it with relish. He despised the boredom of academic histories. As he told one of his students, “When you get a scene, play it!” After following the Mormons for 466 readers into the lake. The cottonwood leaves flutter always beyond the margins of awarenes .. . March starts the snows withdrawing up peaks that have not changed much, sagebrush is a perfiume and a stench, and at midnight there is a lighter line along the ridge where the sky begins. A stern and desolate country, a high, bare country, a country brimming with a beauty not to be jound elsewhere DeVoto believed that the events of 1846 determined the destiny of America, making inevitable the Union victory in the Civil War. In the West, we may well have reached a time of decision just as momentous. The frontier is filling in The beauty and space and resources that drew mountain men and immigrants in the last century are central to the new “War for the West.” The title of Bernard DeVoto’s 1947 article, “The West Against Itself,” could have been a headline from last week’s TIME magazine. Nearly 50 years ago, he wrote: “A few groups of Western interests, so small numerically as to constitute a minute fraction of the West, are Hell-bent on destroying the West.” Sound familiar? DeVoto understood that knowledge was high-octane fuel for his imagination. He was bold, opinionated, where you will see the Wasatch ridge and west the house of the sky where the sun sinks PAGE 13, Ava] available at Vie 2 DEVOTED TO Retreat LA Oa as mS agen SI AND SPIRIT 5 IRONHORSE DR. Ola eexI UN am Nd nar PARK CITY * 649-6363 We also DUR og ae selection: BIST Aveda & ru ratag Crd Loti tae is |