2. In fact, it was a thesis, titled “The Custer Controversy,” submitted for Utley’s master’s degree in 1952 from Indiana University.
3. Don Rickey Jr., a National Park Service historian and author of Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay (1963), a profile of the enlisted soldier’s life ca. 1866–91.
4. Edgar I. Stewart’s Custer’s Luck (1955; repr., 1971), a detailed chronicle of the Seventh Cavalry’s entire Little Bighorn campaign.
5. K. Ross Toole, editor of Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 1951–58, author of the influential Montana: An Uncommon Land (1959), and Andrew B. Hammond Professor of Western History at the University of Montana from 1965 to 1981.
6. R. G. Cartwright, a Lead, South Dakota, high school athletic coach and “Custer Hill” sleuth who spent years studying and reconstructing the Little Bighorn Battle.
7. Charles Kuhlman, University of Nebraska historian and farmer near Billings, Montana, who became a Custer expert and, after sixteen years of research, published the influential Legend into History (1951), a benchmark study of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
8. “The Hill” refers to the “Last Stand” core—a sagebrush slope and enclosed cemetery—of Little Bighorn National Monument. Major Edward Luce and wife, Evelyn: he served for many years as superintendent of what then was still called Custer’s Last Stand National Monument.
9. Utley eventually titled this “piece” about two Cheyenne boys “Suicide Fight,” and it was published in the American History Illustrated series (vol. 6, December 1971, 41–43).
10. Major Marcus A. Reno, second in command under Custer at Little Bighorn, whose three companies charged to the south of Custer’s, met heavy resistance, and retreated back across the Little Bighorn River. Later court-martialed and accused by many of cowardice.
11. Captain Frederick Benteen, third in command under Custer, and who hated him. Studying the battlefield two days after the June 25, 1876, battle, he declared that the Seventh Cavalry had reacted in “clear panic.” See Killing Custer (1994), by James Welch.
12. Lt. Charles C. DeRudio, of Troop A, Reno Battalion, survived the Battle of Little Bighorn and in its immediate aftermath endured thirty-six hours of “exciting adventure on foot to regain the command” after quitting Little Bighorn valley. His recollections were subsequently alluded to in the published account of another officer who survived with him.
13. “Ghost Dance,” an early reference to what was later titled The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963), Robert Utley’s second book, which Maclean had considerably influenced.
14. James Mooney’s pioneering The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896), published only six years after the Wounded Knee massacre, was for a long time the most influential study of that tragedy and the Wovoka movement that, in some respects, precipitated it.
15. The Chicago Brand Book, an occasional publication of a group of Chicago-area western history aficionados. One of Maclean’s talks before the group was published in their October 1958 issue.
16. Custer and the Great Controversy, Utley’s first book.
17. Jessie Burns Maclean’s illness in fact proved to be emphysema.
Letters to Marie Borroff, 1949–1986
1. R. S. Crane, influential University of Chicago English professor, and mentor and friend of Maclean’s. Crane led what became known as the neo-Aristotelian school of literary criticism at Chicago.
2. Longinus, a classical Roman poet and author of an influential literary treatise, “On the Sublime.”
3. Maclean is alluding to a year Borroff spent in Istanbul and the poems she wrote there.
4. Critics and Criticism (1952), a landmark volume of literary criticism edited by R. S. Crane. Maclean contributed to and helped edit this volume under Crane’s direction.
5. Maclean had delivered his talk “Criticism, History, and the Problem of Teaching” at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, in September.
6. Nina Berberova (1901–1993), Russian émigré writer known for memoirs, criticism, and fiction. Borroff met Berberova when both taught at Smith College. Berberova was a lecturer at Yale from 1958 to 1963, when she moved to Princeton University.
7. The relevant stanza, from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” is
As lines, so loves, oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel
Though infinite, can never meet.
8. In fact, Borroff had been appointed Director of Graduate Studies in English.
9. The poem, “Floating,” appears in Borroff’s book of poems Stars and Other Signs (Yale University Press, 2002).
10. “The Boss” = R. S. Crane.
11. The postcard is entitled “Seeley Lake from Double Arrow Lookout.” On it, Maclean writes:
Marie, my dear, this is my first home. You have to like the cold to like it here. I think it is beautiful. Last week it snowed three days in a row—July 17, 18, 19. When the clouds lifted, the mountains had snow to their base. I fished in a cold stream two of the afternoons, and caught my limit. N. M.
12. Maclean is referring to what would become “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim’” and “Retrievers Good and Bad.”
13. This story would become the novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky.
14. Chauncey B. Tinker, William Lyon Phelps, and John M. Berdan were all professors of English at Yale.
15. Borroff explains, “Norman is talking about a creek whose name is now spelled ‘Wetasse’ and pronounced with three syllables. But it started out simply as ‘Wetass,’ two words merged in to one, and was later bowdlerized. Norman loved that.”
16. Maclean is referring to a lecture on Wallace Stevens that Borroff delivered at the University of Chicago. Borroff recalls that the lecture “must have been an important occasion because someone introduced Norman, who then introduced me. When your introducer is himself introduced, that’s heady stuff!”
17. Borroff’s “book on the American poets” was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1979 as Language and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore.
18. Borroff’s poems “Dirge for the Living” and “Mischa Levitzki” (referred to below) are both collected in her book Stars and Other Signs.
Letters to Nick Lyons, 1976–1981
1. Maclean is referring to “Retrievers Good and Bad,” published finally in Esquire in 1977.
2. The Arnold Gingrich Literary Award of the Federation of Fly Fishers. Maclean did not win the award until 1989; Lyons himself won it in 1986.
Letters to Lois Jansson, 1979–1981
1. Subsequently published as “A Man I Met in Mann Gulch,” in part a profile of fire scientist Harry T. Gisborne, and reprinted in Norman Maclean (1988) in Confluence Press’s American Authors series.
2. Maclean is in fact referring to Regional Forester Percy D. Hanson, author of History of Mann Gulch Fire.
3. Gisborne was a pioneering forest fire scientist who figures prominently in Young Men and Fire. He died of a heart attack on November 9, 1949, while inspecting the site of the Mann Gulch fire. R. Wagner “Wag” Dodge was the foreman of the Smokejumper crew at Mann Gulch.
4. This issue of Life magazine featured an article about the Mann Gulch fire, illustrated in part by Peter Stackpole, one of the original staff photographers of Life.
5. A famous mountain profile north of Helena, Montana, and within the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness Area.
6. Maclean sent Mrs. Jansson a copy of A River Runs through It inscribed “To Lois Jansson: One of the true and few survivors of the Mann Gulch Fire.”
7. Walter Rumsey, one of the two survivors of the Mann Gulch tragedy. Maclean is referring here to the news of Rumsey’s death in a plane crash.
8. Bob Sallee was the other survivor of the Mann Gulch fire and the youngest member of the fated crew. A retired executive in Spokane, Washington, Sallee has si
nce the publication of Young Men and Fire granted an occasional interview and been featured in television specials devoted to the Storm King Mountain fire in Colorado and the Mann Gulch fire.
9. Arthur D. (“Duncan”) Moir Jr. was forest supervisor, Helena National Forest, at the time of the fire and was a witness before the board of review, having supervised the rescue operation.
10. Mount St. Helens, actually in Washington State, erupted May 18, 1980.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Bevis, William W. “Maclean’s River.” Chap. 11 in Ten Tough Trips: Montana Writers and the West. 1990. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.
Borroff, Marie. “The Achievement of Norman Maclean.” Yale Review 82, no. 2 (April 1994): 118–31.
Browning, Mark. “‘Some of the Words Are Theirs’: The Elusive Logos in A River Runs through It.” Christianity and Literature 50, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 679–88.
Butler, Douglas R. “Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It: Word, Water, and Text.” Critique 33, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 263–74.
Derwin, Daniel. “Casting Shadows: Filial Enactments in A River Runs through It.” American Imago 51, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 343–57.
Dooley, Patrick K. “Work, Friendship, and Community: Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through it and Other Stories and Josiah Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 53, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 287–302.
Egan, Ken. Hope and Dread in Montana Literature. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003.
Ford, James E. “When ‘Life . . . Becomes Literature’: The Neo-Aristotelian Poetics of Norman Maclean’s ‘A River Runs through It.’” Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 525–34.
Jamieson, Phillip D. “Young Men and Fire: Norman Maclean and the Pastoral Vocation.” Theology Today 52, no. 1 (April 1995): 102–7.
Maclean, John N. Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire. New York: William Morrow, 1999.
Maclean, Norman. “Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear.” In Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, edited by R. S. Crane et al., 595–615. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
. “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century.” In Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, edited by R. S. Crane et al., 408–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
McFarland, Ron, and Hugh Nichols, eds. Norman Maclean. American Authors series. Lewiston, ID: Confluence Press, 1988. This volume, anthologizing Maclean’s occasional writing with interviews and criticism, is indispensable for anyone interested in Maclean before Young Men and Fire. It includes ten pieces by Maclean (five of which are included in this Reader); two interviews; and seven “Essays in Appreciation and Criticism,” including essays by Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry.
, eds. Norman Maclean. Western Writers series, #107. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1993.
Proulx, Annie. Foreword to A River Runs through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Utley, Robert. Custer and Me: A Historian’s Memoir. Norman: University Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Weick, Karl E. “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster.” Administrative Science Quarterly 38, no. 4 (December 1995): 628–51.
. “Prepare Your Organization to Fight Fires.” Harvard Business Review 74, no. 3 (May–June 1996): 143–47.
Weinberger, Theodore. “Religion and Fly Fishing: Taking Norman Maclean Seriously.” Renascence 49, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 281–89.
Weltzien, O. Alan. “George Custer, Norman Maclean, and James Welch: Personal History and the Redemption of Defeat.” Arizona Quarterly 52, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 115–23.
. “A ‘Mail-Order Marriage’: The Norman Maclean–Robert Utley Correspondence.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 48, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 34–49.
. “Norman Maclean and Laird Robinson: A Tale of Two Research Partners.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 45, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 46–55.
. “Norman Maclean and Tragedy.” Western American Literature 30, no. 2 (August 1995): 139–49.
. “The Two Lives of Norman Maclean and the Text of Fire in Young Men and Fire.” Western American Literature 29, no. 1 (May 1994): 3–23.
Womack, Kenneth, and Todd F. Davis. “Haunted by Waters: Narrative Reconciliation in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It.” Critique 42, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 192–204.
Wood, R. C. “Words under the Rocks.” Christian Century 110 (January 20, 1993): 44–46.
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