Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

Author:John McPhee
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2011-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

“Hole” was a term used by the earliest whites to describe any valley that was closely framed by very high mountains. It was used by David Jackson, who essentially had his valley to himself, running his trap lines in the eighteen-twenties in the afternoon shadows of the Teton Range. Over time, bands of outlaws followed him, then cattlemen, and eventually homesteading farmers, whose fences invaded the rangeland, creating incendiary tension and setting the scene for the arrival of Shane, who came into the valley wearing no gun and “riding a lone trail out of a closed and guarded past.” A farmer offered him employment, and he accepted—earnest in his quest for a peaceful life. The farmer asked Shane almost nothing of his history but felt he could trust him and imagined a number of ways in which the man might be needed on the farm. Deep in the stranger’s saddle roll was an ivory-handled Colt revolver that came out of its holster with no apparent friction, had a filed-down hammer and no front sight, and would balance firmly on one extended finger. The farmer’s young son quite innocently discovered the gun one day, and hurried to his father.

“Father, do you know what Shane has rolled up in his blankets?”

“Probably a gun.”

“But—how did you know? Have you seen it?”

“No. That’s what he would have.”

“Well, why doesn’t he ever carry it? Do you suppose maybe it’s because he doesn’t know how to use it very well?”

“Son, I wouldn’t be surprised if he could take that gun and shoot the buttons off your shirt with you a-wearing it and all you’d feel would be a breeze.”

Shane, of course, was a fictional character, but the era he represented was a stratum of the region. In the opening words of the novel, by Jack Schaefer, “He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89.” He also glanced “over the valley to the mountains marching along the horizon.” The geography is vague, but Schaefer evidently had in mind a place beside the Bighorn Mountains. When Hollywood took up the story, though, and prepared to spread it from Cheyenne to Bombay, the valley that Shane would ride into seemed an almost automatic choice. Its floor, as he slowly moved across it, was generally as flat as the bottom of a lake. Incongruous in its center were forested buttes, with clear cold streams running past them. In many places, the flatness was illusory, for there was random undulation and, for no apparent reason, a lyrical quilting of stands of dark pine and broad open stretches of pale-green sage. There were ponds, some of them warm enough to hold trumpeter swans for the winter; and lying against the higher mountains were considerable lakes. Mountains were everywhere. On three sides of the valley, they went up in fairly stiff gradients—the Mt. Leidy Highlands, the Gros Ventre Mountains, the Snake River Range. On the western side—without preamble, without foothills, with a sharp conjunctive line at the meeting of flat and

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