Word: mountain
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...event, piggybacking is here to stay. And for all their arguments, truckers will have a tough time selling their worries to any U.S. motorist who has crawled painfully up a long grade behind a line of exhaust-spewing tractor-trailers. Atop the same mountain grades where the Southern Pacific has its piggyback signs, another series of signs has been put up by California citizens' committees. Their message: "Write your Congressman. Make U.S. 40 four lanes." Either that, or, as the Southern Pacific says, put the trucks on piggyback...
These Thousand Hills is A. B. Guthrie's third, and least successful, novel in his multi-volume attempt to chronicle fictionally the epic of Western America's development. His first, The Big Sky, was an account of mountain fur trappers in the 1830's. The Way West, which won Guthrie the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, depicted the westward trek of Lije Evans and his wagon train to Oregon...
...Evans, grandson of Lije, is the central character of These Thousand Hills. He exemplifies the settlers of America's last frontier, the Mountain West, and the establishment there of the Cattle Kingdom. Lat begins his rise as a Montana rancher by breaking away from his religious, impoverished parents and signing up for a cattle drive from Pendleton through Boise to Fort Benton, Montana. In Montana, he turns his winnings in a horse race (Callie, his prostitute mistress loaning the initial capital) into a profitable ranch. The politically ambitious Lat must, however, renounce his shady past and marries a Hoosier schoolmistress...
...these faults were present in the other two works. Why is These Thousand Hills less powerful? Part of the answer lies in the fact that both The Big Sky and The Way West were built on Dick Summers, a nostalgic, self-sufficient mountain man, the finest character Guthrie has produced. But even more important, both books were given unity and direction by the utilization of physical movement through great distance in space. Guthrie conveyed this as successfully as did Tolstoy in War and Peace or Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn. In These Thousand Hills he gave himself less opportunity...
Good is represented by a simple-minded old shepherd (Spencer Tracy), the only man ever to climb The Mountain alone (actually the Aiguille du Midi, near Chamonix in the French Alps, where the location shots were made). Evil is the younger brother (Robert Wagner) whom the shepherd, in the absence of a midwife, "brought into the world with his own hands." When a plane rumored to be carrying gold crashes on top of The Mountain just as winter is setting in, little brother begs big brother to guide him up the mountain so that he can loot the plane...