To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Note
Wallace Stegner
1909-1993
Robert Thacker
High on a list of Canadian books not written
by Canadians is Wallace Stegner's Wolf
Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of
the Last Plains Frontier (1962). Its reputation
among prairie people is enormous,
and that reputation is an enduring one:
although an odd mix of memoir, narrative
history, and fiction, Wolf Willow evokes the
essences of prairie space: "Viewed personally
and historically" Stegner writes early on,
"that almost featureless prairie glows with
more color than it reveals to the appalled
and misdirected tourist. As memory, as
experience, those Plains are unforgettable;
as history, they have the lurid explosiveness
of a prairie fire, quickly dangerous, swiftly
over" (4). Visiting the area of his boyhood
home in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where he
lived from 1914 to 1920, Stegner notes the
scent of the shrub wolf willow and, through
it, he rediscovers still within himself the
"sensuous little savage" he had been forty
years earlier; together with that former self,
he responds once more to "the circle of the
world" created by prairie space (25). Building
upon these recognitions, Stegner then
tells the history of the Cypress Hills, a history
he learned later and long away from
Saskatchewan, one that he was denied as a
schoolboy but that he claimed emphatically
as a writer in Wolf Willow. Looking at
Eastend once again—though he calls the
town Whitemud—Stegner proclaims his
connection: "If I am native to anything, I
am native to this" (20).
His writing—broad in its range and
detailed in its knowledge—shows that he
came to know the history and being of
southwest Saskatchewan as well as any;
and, as the short stories included in Wolf
Willow demonstrate along with his early
novel, On a Darkling Plain (1939), this was
the very history Stegner himself lived
through there as boy during the latter years
of the first war, even if he did not comprehend
it then. Its history, and other histories
too (the Mormons, John Wesley Powell, Joe
Hill), are made vivid in his work, both
imaginative and profound. More pointedly,
Stegner used his Saskatchewan years and
those that followed as the basis for his
depiction of the western portions of this
continent, the places he knew best; for him,
place and feeling were symbiotic. Derived
from personal associations like those elaborated
in Wolf Willow, such connection with
wild nature, he wrote, is "a means of reassuring
ourselves of our sanity as creatures,
a part of the geography of hope" (Coda 153).
The recollected trip home to Saskatchewan
which structures Wolf Willow is such an
exploration of landscape, to be sure, but it
is much more than that—it is a reassurance
of the relation between a particular place
and a particular person, one born of intimate
connection made early in life.
For Stegner, that place was Eastend—
adjacent to the Cypress Hills, a place
emblematic of pioneering, a place fecund
with human history: Native and Métis,
explorer and trader, Mounted Policeman
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