University of Montana Books

This account of the Vigilantes of Bannack and Virginia City is well documented and verifies, or, is verified by, Dimsdale's account of the vigilantes. My great-grandfather, Bob Dempsey, was a citizen of Bannack and had a ranch between Bannack and Virginia City. He was not involved with the members of Plummer's gang but somewhat on the fringe of things. My grandfather James Dempsey married Ellen LeCompte in Virginia City. Williams was the leader of the vigilantes but did not want his name used in the Dimsdale account. This account is accurate and can be verified by historical records available. Vi

If you or your family have ever lived in Montana, this is a wonderful reference book. Have you ever wondered how some particular Montana town got its name? That's what Cheney's book will tell you. Every Montana city or town that ever had a postoffice is listed, and so are some that didn't. Many of these towns are completely gone-- only the names and a few fading family memories remain. In other cases, a single sturdy brick building sits in a field. And of course, the biggest towns in Montana, like Billings, Missoula, Great Falls and Butte, are listed too.

Unless you're the sort of person who reads dictionaries for fun, you won't want to read this all the way through. You might, however, want to dip into it over and over again. And you might want to make sure that your local library owns a copy, so you and others can do just that.

I bought this book at a bookstore in a little town in Montana while traveling through the state. It was in the "regional selections" category, but it really was so much more than that. This story is a moving (true) story of a young woman in Montana who marries a rancher in the period when the West was still being settled. Widowed at an early age and left to fend for herself and her young children, grit and a sense of purpose keep her going. It was a true joy to follow the life of this heroic woman through difficult circumstances. This book is a gem and I would highly recommend it, as I intend to read it again and again through life. Perhaps women will enjoy it more than men, and mothers will likely appreciate it the most.

This is a perfect book. Admittedly, the subject matter may not appeal to a broad audience, but any book so masterfully crafted must get a perfect score.

First, it is important to note that this book is less about roads than it is about landscapes and the meaning of changes to landscapes. The archives of the Montana Historical Society contain photos taken of road projects in the 1920s and 1930s. The federal government was just beginning to provide money for road construction at that time. These black-and-white photos show before and after views of how Montana was spending the money. Mr. Wyckoff selected a group of the photos and traveled the state during 2001-2003 re-photographing the scenes as closely as possible. In addition, he researched each scene by consulting people familiar with the history of the location, reviewing newspaper files, and finding other historical sources. It is obvious that gathering the material for this book required an enormous amount of time and work. The heart of the book is an introductory chapter, 58 two-page modules, and a closing chapter. There is also a Foreward written by William Cronon and what Mr. Wyckoff terms a Bibliographic Essay. Each part of the book is perfect in its own right, even the title.

Second, Mr. Wyckoff is a very good writer. Students at Montana State University must feel privileged to take a class in historical geography from Mr. Wyckoff.

The 27-page introductory chapter takes the reader through an overview of the field of re-photography and the science of historical geography. To illustrate, it analyzes two photos taken from the same spot near Fife, Montana, one showing the scene in 1922 and the other in 2001. The section also provides a sufficient overview of Montana history that a person unfamiliar with the state can easily understand the context of the modules that follow.

Each of the 58 modules has a pair of black-and-white photos taken about eighty years apart. The facing page of text analyzes the photos in terms of changes, or lack of changes, in the scene and what that might mean to the landscape itself or to the people who live there. The comments range from locally significant to those of import statewide or nationally. Some of the scenes are rural and Mr. Wyckoff points out changes in land use, crops, or the ecology of the area. For example, a large number of the photos show an increase in the number of trees on the landscape and the text discusses what happens in the absence of fire. Some shots are urban, such as the downtown scenes in Polson and Wibaux. The discussions highlight the differences that occur depending on whether the town is growing or not. Some modules describe the impact of railroads, mining, and other industries as they wax and wane. In some cases the roads of the 1920s have become interstate highways, and in other places they have returned to sagebrush or farmland. Often the text analyzes the changes in the broader context of Montana's economic, political, cultural, and ecological history.

The concluding chapter pulls together the implications of the changes and how trends established over the intervening eighty years might impact Montana in the future

I am giving the book as gifts or recommending it to people interested in Montana, particularly those familiar with the state's physical aspects. I also find myself recommending it to people with a general interest in history and as an example of how to develop a perfect book.

Book review by The Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1991

... The cops love these free-wheeling, elite units. They were ostensibly created to combat terrorism, but have been used mostly to infiltrate and suppress liberal and radical political organizations and civil rights groups. They lift their members out of the routine of police work into something of a James Bond life. As Frank Donner points out in this excellently researched, thoughtful and well-detailed study of police spying, their excesses have been many. But Donner, who directed the American Civil Liberties Project on Political Surveillance, concludes with the chilling thought that the Red squads will be around long after there are any Reds.

Why wouldn't the police like them? The elite Red squads work on their own, usually reporting directly to the chief, operating outside normal department procedures. That's dangerous. Even worse, the squads are concerned more with political attitudes than with crime.

Their targets are chosen according to the narrow, conservative political views of the police and usually are selected in a Keystone Cop fashion. Among the Los Angeles Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID) targets, for example, was the organization advocating help for Soviet Jewry. This was an anti-Kremlin movement, but the intricacies of that obviously were too much for the PDID.

Worse yet, the information, and misinformation, gathered by these sleuths is fed into the growing number of intelligence networks maintained by federal, state and local law-enforcement organizations. In the computer age, if you attend a left-wing meeting in Echo Park, your name is likely to be spread as far as New York.

As Donner points out, the squads are not a recent invention. One of his most important contributions is tracing the history of the Red squads, showing how deeply rooted they are in American political, social and economic life....

...That set the pattern for the Red squads, a pattern that continues today. Whatever the city, said Donner, the goal and tactics are much the same: "police behavior motivated or influenced in whole or in part by hostility to protest, dissent and related activities perceived as a threat to the status quo."

...You might ask what's wrong with this. Don't the police need a way of detecting domestic terrorism? If somebody is going to blast the bank down the street -- or my newspaper office -- shouldn't the police be able to prevent it?

Of course they should. And failing to deal with that point is the book's weakness. The answer -- and I would have liked to have heard this from Donner -- is that law enforcement already has that capability through line officers investigating all sorts of crime. They're regular cops, subject to department oversight and discipline. Treat threats of terrorism the same way as threats of bank robberies, with the investigators subject to the same control -- civilian and uniformed -- as any other detectives. Demystify intelligence gathering.

Another weakness is the writing. Donner makes hard reading of a fascinating story that features famous exponents of nightstick justice, such as Red Hynes and Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo.

For that reason, this is a book for the experts, the scholars, attorneys, activists, journalists and others who have to deal with the Red squads.

And certainly it's a must for police academies, especially the LAPD's.

----
Book review by The New York Times, February 2, 1991

... the roots of repression in this country, and the role played by city police departments in silencing political dissent, are overlooked in the history books.

Frank Donner fills the gap in "Protectors of Privilege." His documented evidence stands in contrast to the secret accusations and invasions of privacy that characterize some urban police department dossiers. Mr. Donner, a lawyer and the director of the American Civil Liberties Project on Political Surveillance, has argued labor and constitutional cases before the Supreme Court. His new study of abuses by the cities complements his previous book, "The Age of Surveillance," which covered political intelligence on the Federal level.

Beginning in the last half of the 19th century, the repressive activities by urban police concentrated on demonstrations, mass meetings, rallies, picketing and parades. The tactics used by the police in response to the exercise of the constitutional right of peaceable assembly have included dragnet and pretext arrests, use of force or the threat of force, indiscriminate clubbings and mounted charges...

...About New York, Mr. Donner writes, "In contrast to the Chicago unit's wide-open, Dodge City style, its scorn for the law it was supposed to uphold, a claim to professionalism dominates the self-image of the New York City red squad (BOSS, as it has commonly been called, an acronym for its formal title, the Bureau of Special Services)." BOSS agents used cameras and video equipment for open surveillance of demonstrations. In the 1960's, it was also a common practice for detectives to flash fake press cards for undercover photography.

As a result of court decisions, the author says, the unit's "most objectionable practices" were stopped. But he does not venture a guess on the extent of BOSS's activities in New York today. Other cities covered in "Protectors of Privilege" include Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, Birmingham, Ala., New Haven and Washington.

Mr. Donner warns that police surveillance and dossiers require constant vigilance and that what took place crudely with clubs in the past may be revived quietly with computers and less traceable surveillance technology...

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Book Review: The Nation March 11, 1991

...Protectors of Privilege is the central panel in a triptych of domestic totalitarianism, painstakingly crafted by Donner over the past thirty years. The Un-Americans chronicled the nation's most loathsome inquisition and offered a sort of inverse hagiography of the inquisitors themselves. In 1980 came The Age of Surveillance, Donner's meticulously detailed account of the government's massive campaign of political snooping and harassment from the early red scares through the Nixon years.

Donner's purpose in Protectors of Privilege is deceptively simple: to describe the ways municipal police forces have monitored and muzzled dissent for over 100 years. It's subject of far broader significance than is suggested by the clucking criticism of red squads that generally surfaces from reform quarters. America's red squads are not just the regrettable but fundamentally inconsequential abuses of overweening cops. Red squads kill. That's been true from the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs in 1887 through the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton by Chicago police in 1969 through the deaths of five children and six adults in Philadelphia's bombing of MOVE in 1985. And what's more, these elite police units have had a profound effect on politics in America's cities.

Nearly every major city had (and many no doubt still have) a red squad with decades of spying, harassment and intimidation behind it. And each of those red squads had its own local quirks and wrinkles. Thus in Chicago in the 1960s, police were partial to collaborating with private-sector snoops from corporations like I.T.T., along with the F.B.I. and C.I.A.; in my own city, New Haven, the prurient obsessions of police officers inspired a years-long wiretap campaign of almost inconceivable scope, drawing into its auditory net thousands of individuals and organizations, from radical feminists to the local movie house.

But there's far more to Donner's account than regurgitation of news stories and court testimony. In The Age of Surveillance, he explained why the political intelligence establishment has such staying power. Its roots lie, he said, in "a nativist anti-radicalism." Then he went on:

Nativism is fear-centered, nourished by the twin myths . . . of an all-powerful internal subversive enemy and a permanently endangered national security, which deny vitality to the protected freedoms. . . .It has been sustained by a passionate tribal constituency, which seeks to implement its suppressive commitment at the decision- and policy-making levels of government....

Though the red squads soon took on a life of their own, that open alliance with industry-"the Bargain," Donner calls it - continued down to our own time. In the 1960s and 1970s in Detroit, for instance, Chrysler "provided the red squad . . . with information from its voluminous files concerning the political activities of workers. . . .In return, the police provided Chrysler with membership lists of allegedly subversive organizations and in some cases recommended the firing of activist employees." As recently as 1979, the Bargain was reiterated by the head of Philadelphia's Chamber of Commerce, who told the Federal Civil Rights Commission that "most businessmen . . . feel that police protection is so good that they are willing to put up with instances which, if they happened in their own family, would be intolerable."

The recent political history of America's cities can't be understood without taking into account the red squads.

...Donner is most impressive and original when carefully charting the shifts in police attitudes toward dissent-shifts rooted in an evolving climate of paranoia. In the late nineteenth century, he suggests, even the most extreme police officials envisioned their jobs as simply the protection of industry, and more broadly the preservation of public order. If intimidating radicals was the way to do it, then that's what they did. But by the early twentieth century, the purpose had changed considerably: "Clandestine surveillance . . . in particular discrete situations evolved into (intelligence' work focused on ongoing involvement with targets, not as an investigative means to a decision-making end, its blueprinted purpose, but as a (punitive) end in itself." The search for enemies, too, became an end in itself, utterly divorced from reality. Thus in the 1960s, police "insisted that evil plotters . . . were the source of ghetto unrest." This obsession with conspiracy, Donner notes, did not arise in a vacuum: HUAC, McCarthy and other Congressional investigators granted the police ever-broader definitions of subversion. "The transition from behavior to ideology, from suppression of violence to curbing peaceful dissent, was thus completed; the new, enormously expanded police mission was legitimated by our countersubversive political culture, which in turn was enriched by police contributions to its fear-based assumptions."

Donner opens more questions than he can properly answer. I'd like to learn more, for instance, about the connection between red squads and antivice crusades. It's a connection that appears over and over in the history of the rad-hunters. The nineteenth-century rise of the red squads occurred in an era of antivice efforts. Many recent antisubversive police campaigns, like New Haven's wiretap operation, were initially aimed at illegal gambling and other sins. Philadelphia's Mayor Rizzo earned his fame as a vice cop and Los Angeles police chief Parker believed that communism and vice were the twin scourges of American life...

...Donner lays the decline of the red squads at the feet of a shifting public mood in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. He may be right. But that decline also coincides with the flight of major industry from the cities; perhaps the red squads simply ran out of privilege to protect. And it's a telling tribute to the political strength of the nation's permanent government that red squads and the F.B.I. have proved considerably harder to rein in than HUAC and similar legislative. efforts.

When Donner began his investigation, he could not have foreseen the worldwide evaporation of the Red Menace or the Persian Gulf war. But recent events raise an inevitable question: Since the century-old fear of world communism has ended but dissent has not, what shape will America's future red squads take? Donner himself points to the resurgence of private-sector snoops: It's a development that harks back to the days of Haymarket, when private Pinkertons were industry's first line of defense against labor agitation.

And what about enemies? Of course the gulf war has resurrected that favorite inspirational figure for red squads, the Fanatical Foreigner. Today's nativists can also point to such "outsiders" as lesbian and gay activists in groups like ACT UP. And then there's the war on drugs: With gunplay-prone crack dealers feeding fears of both violence and social decay, police forces in a number of cities of cities have revived intelligence squads buried in the 1970s. In New Haven, a police intelligence squad formed last year to combat drug gangs showed up with a video camera at a recent antiwar rally.
--
Monthly Review November, 1991

Perhaps the central irony in Frank Donner's new book about the political repression practiced by urban police forces revolves around the word "terrorism." Touting their activities as necessary to protect American society against the vaguely defined forces of terrorism, the nation's red squads have routinely practiced that which they supposedly guard us against. They use violence and intimidation against their political enemies with a ruthlessness and flagrant disregard of legality that is all the more terrifying because it is done in the name of the law...

...Opportunism explains only part of the picture. Though bureaucratically aggressive red squads hyped the dangers of urban unrest to justify increased allocations, they also believed in their work. The ideology that governed their activities determined their choice of targets. Most of them were the expected ones--peace activists, student radicals, and, above all, black militants. Cultural antagonism, Donner believes, accounts for the brutality of the crackdown on such groups and individuals.

Still, the inclusion of such innocuous organizations as the Chicago chapter of the League of Women Voters suggests that the process got out of control--and not just in the Windy City. There is, however, an underlying rationality in the seemingly indiscriminate choice of targets. By identifying themselves as the guardians of order, local police forces came to view all of their critics, no matter how law-abiding, as a threat to that order. Self-protection became as much a part of their mission as traffic control. As a result, the red squads came to devote considerable resources to harassing those organizations and individuals that opposed illegal police activities.

In the process, law enforcement received a much lower priority than the disruption of dissent. Surveillance, widespread though it was, prevented few if any crimes. The urban riots of the late 1960s caught local police departments completely unprepared. In those cases where red squad surveillance did provide advance warning, as, for example, with both the 1969 SDS Days of Rage and the Black Panther murder of Alex Rackley in New Haven, the police did not intervene. Nor was the surveillance of radicals any more productive after the fact; red squad investigations involved so many illegalities that most prosecutions based upon them were thrown out of court.

In any event, law enforcement was not the name of the game. The maintenance of order, in the intolerant manner in which the red squads defined it, was. During the 1960s and early 1970s, maintaining order meant repressing dissent through the intertwined techniques of surveillance and disruption. Although much of the surveillance was under cover, much--like the ubiquitous police photographers at demonstrations--was overt and expressly designed to intimidate. Red squad activists enjoyed discomfiting their targets by addressing them by name at demonstrations. Pretext arrests combined harassment with information gathering and, at least in Philadelphia, may well have been devised to trigger violence. Wiretaps, burglaries, and other covert operations were routine, though illegal. Even in a city with a liberal administration, like New Haven in the 1960s, the police wiretapped over a thousand people.

Informers were ubiquitous, by far the most widely used method of surveillance and disruption. Not only did they provide material for the files, but as agents provocateurs they encouraged the groups they infiltrated to undertake exactly those illegal and provocative activities that would justify the continuing police attention to them. Undercover agents found that their supervisors expected them to turn in lurid reports and the more compliant informers often produced them, even if they had to propose the operations themselves. This was the case, for example, in New York where eager police agents within the Black Panther Party planned bombings and then supplied material for them. Equally important were the activities of undercover agents in sabotaging their organizations' legitimate work.

Police departments recruited both professional and civilian informers. The numbers are unknown, but may well have reached five figures. By the late 1060s there were over two thousand professional and amateur spies in Chicago alone. For regular police officers, undercover work was a rapid route to advancement. Some civilians enlisted for patriotic reasons, others were police groupies who hoped that working with the red squad might get them a job with the force. In Philadelphia policemen's wives became "pin money" spies. The activities of these informers varied. Some took on single assignments; others, like Chicago veteran Sheli Lulkin, who infiltrated eighty-eight separate organizations, made it a career.

All of these police activities--overt and concealed--were clearly designed to destroy the targeted organizations. In some cities, notably Philadelphia, which experienced a virtual reign of police terror under Frank Rizzo in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the harassment blossomed into a full-scale physical attack on all dissent. Elsewhere, the use of violence was a bit more discriminating: it targeted the Black Panthers. And it was successful. Though Donner does not try to assess the extent to which this repression contributed to the decline of the radical left in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the scope of red squad activism, as well as the self-defeating paranoia that it understandably encouraged within the left, could not but have made a massive contribution to the demise of the movement.

By the late 1970s, many of the red squad abuses were themselves under attack. In the post-Watergate backlash against illegal government activities, there were attempts to curb local red squads. Legislative investigations and litigation revealed the extent of the police lawbreaking and produced legislation or legal settlements that required the destruction of files and the imposition of restrictive guidelines. Even so, many of the abuses persisted. Police departments often ignored the new regulations. They lied and stonewalled when pressed about their failure to destroy files and their continuing surveillance of legal dissent. Moreover, as the judicial and political climate turned conservative, even the limited constraints on the lawlessness of the law of the late 1970s became hard to enforce.

The most effective constraint against police misbehavior seems to be financial. When socked with massive awards for damages, local politicians do try to keep their cops in line. But the main victims of police repression rarely sue. As the recent police brutality cases in New York and Los Angeles reveal, the most serious violations of individuals' civil liberties may well stem from the day-to-day racism of the ordinary police, not the more specialized activities of local red squads. Race is too central to the American polity to exclude the routine harassment of African-Americans from an account of urban police repression. Since Donner is hardly optimistic about the changes of curbing illegal police behavior, when we expand our definition of the nature police behavior, when we expand our definition of the nature of that repression beyond the assault on political and cultural dissidents that Donner charts, the prospect is even grimmer. Still, thanks to Donner's work, we can at least recognize the enemy.

Ellen W. Schrecker teaches history at Yeshiva University and is the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University, 1986).

---
The New York Times, June 11, 1993:

Frank J. Donner, a civil liberties lawyer who was an expert on the use of government surveillance and informers to discourage political dissent, died yesterday at a hospice in Branford, Conn. He was 82 and lived in Hamden, Conn.

The cause was cancer, his family said.
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The dictionary covers all the major dialects of Upper Chehalis, including Satsop, and is the definitive and exhaustive source of linguistic information on this now moribund language. The fruit of over 40 years of devoted research to a native american language and its speakers, this book continues to play a role in the ongoing cultural and spiritual revival of the Chehalis people and their associated clans. Though technical in nature and using a phonolgy just a bit daunting for the average reader, this dictionary will feed the hunger of young indigenous students who long for what was lost in the cultural transmission of their heritage. Of particular interest to the average reader is the importance of plants and animals from the rainy Chehalis valley. The vocabulary of the dictionary mirrors the daily conversation of all the folks of south west Washington, both native and non-native. The bibliography of Chehalis texts is complete, and Professor Kinkade should be congratulated for his use of all of Franz Boas' original notes, among other sources, which have been languishing in Philedelphia's American Philosophical Society Library for most of the 20th century. My favorite word from Upper Chehalis is the onomonopoedic "qwaqw" for the raven. As a child in the Satsop valley, I knew the presence of the spirits of those who had walked before. After years of searching, I now have the words for many of the sights, sounds, and thoughts of that moist, gray, green, wild world.

Informatively written by historian, archivist and educator Charles Mutschler, Wired For Success: The Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railway, 1892-1985 is the exciting and enthusiastically recommended story of the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railway, how it became a pioneer electric railway system, and the impact it had on America from the late 1800's to the modern day. Black-and-white photographs combine with narrative description so real it transports the reader into a bygone era of railroading history.

I've read all of Mildred Walker's novels and have often wondered why they were set in Vermont, the Midwest or in Montana and how the author had such different stories to tell in each novel. Reading about where the novelist spent much of her life and with whom, it all made sense. I am anxious to re-read each novel, and compare my memory with the insights that Ms. Hugo had added about the circumstances under which they were written.

It was fascinating to read about about how Mildred Walker kept her life as a novelist separate from her life as a mother. And characters in her novels may not have been people she enjoyed associating with in life.

Thank you Ripley Hugo, for adding to my enjoyment of your mother's books!

First off, I haven't seen the movie, so this will not be a comparison piece. Norman Maclean's novella is an inspirational story, definitely poignant and touching as so many others before me have stated. This work melds nature, heritage, human emotions, and even metaphysics like none I've ever encountered. In its poetic and deeply probing style, A River Runs Through It compares favorably with the work of Robert Penn Warren, my favorite author.

I cannot think of another novel that is as satisfying in both literal and conceptual dimensions. On one hand, this is a story of a family told in a fly-fishing setting. On the other hand, this is a study of the nature of existence and human consciousness. Just as an aside, maclean's memory of the intricacies of fly-fishing and the events of 50 years prior is simply astounding. Even if he's filling in the details with literary license, it doesn't diminish his astonishing gift.

I have gleaned from this novel the concept that true knowledge eludes us, what we are left with is "a lifetime of questions." This is only one of many questions handled deftly by the author. This is a classic never to be forgotten; I wish I could give it more stars.

I am invariably disappointed by movies "based on" a book if I've read the book first. After seeing A River Runs Through It (Columbia Pictures, 1992) recently, I felt compelled to read the book by Norman Maclean upon which movie is based. Even for a clueless fly-fishing rookie like me, the book is charming in a bucolic and unpretentious sort of way. Moreover, the screenplay deliciously - and accurately - reflects the panache and élan of the print version. Prodigious chunks of the screenplay are lifted verbatim from this disarmingly simple novella of just over 100 pages, with a few minor differences.

Some Differences:

The chronology of events is slightly different. Norman's wife Jessie appears much sooner in the book than in the movie. In fact, Norman and Jessie are married by page 9 and Norman meets his insufferable brother-in-law, Neal, at the train on page 29 well after Jessie becomes Mrs. Norman Maclean. In the movie this incident occurs before Norman and Jessie are married.

Also, Norman's mother is a more full-bodied, three-dimensional character who makes chokecherry jelly for her boys and, along with Paul, was "the central attraction" of every family reunion (p. 78). Also receiving more attention in the book is the fishing fiasco with Neal, and how Neal got fried to a crisp under a hot Montana sun. In the movie, Paul's pursuit and ultimate triumphant landing of the "unbelievable" fish occurs toward the end of the film. In the book, it's Norman who catches the big fish in the Big Blackfoot River, and he does so early on - before page 22.

Additional minor differences include:

- The timeline is slightly altered from book to movie. The opening lines in which an elderly Norman recalls his father's advice to write down his stories occurs far back in the book, which opens with, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing...."

- No mention is made of Norman attending Dartmouth or being offered a university professorship in Chicago in the book - plot devices invented for the movie.

- Norman's courtship of Jessie, a major movement within the movie, doesn't appear in the book, where the couple is already married the first time we meet Jessie.

- In the movie, both brothers seem evenly matched in their fly-fishing skills. In the boo,, Paul is "a master," his skills far superior to Norman's (see pp. 42 and 43).

- Norman's offer to "help" Paul, made while he's driving an intoxicated Paul and his girlfriend home from a night on the town in the movie, is clumsily offered while the brothers are fishing in the print version.

- Rev. Maclean's "you can love completely without complete understanding" is a comment made to Norman in the book (p. 103), not part of a church sermon, as it appears in the movie.

- Maclean's wry wit and sandpaper humor are completely lost in the movie, probably due to its thematic focus and time constraints. In print, both are as fresh and flavorful as a stream-to-skillet Rainbow trout.

Similarities:

- Rev. Maclean's teaching techniques for casting are directly from the book, metronome and all (pages 2-4)

- Paul vs. father in the Battle of the Oatmeal (p. 7)

- Paul's "shadow casting" technique (p. 21)

- Norman's clipped conversation with the Irish desk sergeant after Paul's been jailed for a drunken fist-fight (pp. 23-25) is an abbreviated but verbatim version of what appears in the book.

- Black Jack's Bar appears on page 30 and Old rawhide" puts in her swarthy appearance on page 31.

- Norman's brother-in-law, Neal, spins fab fibs at the bar about tracking and trailing otters on page 33. (However, Neal doesn't spend the night with Old Rawhide after picking her up at the bar, as implied in the movie. Instead, he wakes up at his mother's with a hellacious hangover and a couple of annoyed brothers-in law who are raring to go fishing - and tolerate the family picnic that follows.

- Neal stores his flies in a fly box; Paul uses his hat band)

- "Three things we're never late for" in Montana include church, work and fishing, a line delivered by Brad Pitt in the movie as Paul, appears on page 34 in the book.

- Rev. Maclean's comment about Paul's decision to change the spelling of the family name appears (ages 80 and 81)

- "Three more years before I can think like a fish" - Brad Pitt as Paul in the movie; p. 101 in the book.

- Rev. Maclean's musings about how to help someone who won't take help are recited by Tom Skerritt in the movie almost verbatim. (See p. 81)

- Events surrounding Paul's death, narrated by Robert Redford in the move, are word-for-word from the book (pp. 102 - 104). In print context, Rev. Maclean's subsequent question about "which hand" of Paul's had the broken bones makes more sense in the book because the author spend more time discussing casting technique and hand strength than the movie had time to develop.

Maclean provides additional details about intricacies of fly-fishing and casting that allow the uninitiated to better understand and more fully appreciate fly fishing as an art form. Readers are "hooked" without being drowned beneath mind-numbing minutia or tangled webs of technicalities. Maclean occasionally waxes lyrical with poetic descriptions such as :

"It was a beautiful stretch of water, either to a fisherman or a photographer, although each would have focused his equipment at a different point. It was a barely submerged waterfall. The reef of rock was about two feet under the water, so the whole river rose into one wave, shook itself into spray, then fell back on itself and turned blue. After it recovered from the shock, it came back to see how it had fallen." (pp.16, 17)...

Below him was the multitudinous river, and, where the rock had parted it around him big-grained vapor rose. The mini-molecules of water left in the wake of his line made momentary loops of gossamer, disappearing so rapidly in the rising big-grained vapor that they had to be retained in memory to be visualized as loops. The spray emanating form him was finer-grained still and enclosed him in a halo himself. ... The images of himself and his line kept disappearing into the rising vapors of the river, which continually circled to the tops of the cliffs where, after becoming a wreath in the wind, they became rays of the sun. (p. 20)

The Story

Occasionally coarse, the story itself is gently nuanced with "four count rhythms," "roll casting," the difference between a "brook" and a "creek" or a "number four or six fly," and "setting the hook." The story moves along at a gracious pace, dignified without dragging. The text evinces a deep - albeit clumsy - bond of mutual affection and admiration between brothers. Maclean's love of his Montana roots, his knowledge of the land, its people, scenery, culture, history, and fly-fishing - are keenly weft throughout the warp and woof of this narrative. It's also clear that Norman "knew" his brother without fully understanding him.

Characterization

As in the movie, the main characters in the print version of A River Runs Through It are cleanly drawn and genuine. Drawing readers into the story like moths to a flame, each character has his or her own special kind of luminosity. These people are gracious and yet sharp, gentle but not simple. They are linked but not necessarily connected. The Maclean family is at once close and yet distant, as if they've breathed in some mysterious quality of spaciousness from the Montana skies. Mother, father, and elder brother all know that Paul is in some kind of trouble, yet feel helpless to help him.

The theme of "help" pops up throughout the book like an overnight mushroom. Norman's struggle to understand and help his brother is more emphatic in the book than in the movie (pp. 37, 38, 81). But what kind of help and how to give it are questions no one can fully answer. This is summed up sagely by Rev Maclean:

"You are too young to help anybody and I am too old, he said. `By help I don't mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.

"Help," he said, "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly." (p. 81)

Worthwhile Read?

A River Runs Through It is a satisfying story that's been faithfully represented on the big screen. In both you can hear the river roar, smell the beer, feel the baking afternoon sun or the cool splash of water on a hot, thirsty day as you watch a fish rise and grab an expertly tied "general," feel him jerk the line and run with it.

As for the book, is Norman Maclean Shakespeare? Nope. Does he need to be? Naw. Will A River Runs Through It make the NY Times bestseller list? Doubtful. Is this story worth the read? Yep. In fact, A River Runs Through It almost makes me want to "get the horse collar off my neck," wade into the Big Blackfoot and learn how to cast myself. Almost.

A River Runs Through It is a wonderful story of life in Montana, well, really life in general. In addition to a great story, this book contains some of the best uses of the English language in the 20th century. Highly recommended.

An excellent piece of literary work. From the time I received it, I couldn't set it down.

A River Runs Through It deals with tragedy, loss, and other such deep themes, but it's impossible for the reader to distant himself from the realization that much of the tragedy and loss inflicted on the family being explored is, in one way or another, the fault of the family members. While this does not automatically make the situations any less meaningful, it does chip away at the feeling that these tragedies were undeserved or unforseen.

The patriarch of the family is a stubborn, unyielding man who teaches his children by example to ruin another's fishing spot if he has better luck than you that day. His unyielding belief in the Biblical interpretation of a young earth and the scientific evidence of an old one is resolved by a stern splitting of the difference, by averaging the ages and coming up with a "medium aged" earth theory that he lectures to his sons. And when, as little children, they refuse to eat their veggies, the father shouts until he turns red, forces the child to stay at the table until the veggies are eaten, and then gives up in defeat when the child outlasts him.

Is it any wonder, then, when his youngest child grows up to be a free-spirited, gambling, immature man who simply cannot be talked out of his self-destructive tendencies? No one ever reasoned with him growing up - he was taught, by example, from day one that the most stubborn, unyielding person always wins. He was taught to never consider the needs and desires of others as anything but subbordinate to his own. It is difficult for me, therefore, to feel much pity for the bereaved family when the young man finally self-destructs - didn't they see this coming, every moment of every day? Didn't they train the child, every day, for years to reach this eventual moment?

Yes, the story is poignant. Yes, it is beautiful and touching. Yes, it should be read. But it should be read, I think, as a cautionary tale more than as a compassionate one.

This is Mr. Maclean's last book and it is a brilliantly written and thoroughly researched, illuminating and fascinating work of literary art. He gently and lovingly caresses lanquage, turning the story of an otherwise horrifying, murderous forest fire into epic poetry in a study of human failure, frailty and triumph.

It is a book that will be thoroughly enjoyable to anyone interested in the state of Montana and the power that nature holds over humanity. The Mann Gulch fire, which killed 13 young "Smokejumpers" in 1949, was one of the most famous- and ferocious- forest fires in history and was perhaps the most significant learning experience for the Forest Service in how to fight forest fires.

I loved this book. The detail and analysis resulted from decades of research and Maclean is a terrific writer. I love the piece-by-piece, methodical dissection of the story. I find this method of story telling and anaylsis similar to John Krakauer's "Into the Wild". I would like to see more maps and photos, but those that are included in the book are sufficient by most measures.

This is the quintessential non-fiction account of Mann Gulch. It creates the foundation of our study of wild fire behavior. I could not turn the pages fast enough. Many quotable descriptions and observations about the firefighting industry is timelessly captured in this book.

This is a book written about a fire that took place in Montana back in the 1940's during which a group of smoke jumpers lost their lives. It is so well written that I found it difficult to put down. This was the beginning of the study of "fire", and all it's elements, as a science. Fascinating. This particular book is being used as required reading in our local "California Department of Fire" CDF. I read it as an adjunct to the Search and Rescue Team to which I belong. I recommend this to anyone, especially those living in a possible fire danger area.

Any book that I spend a great deal of time checking maps and names, to see who survived, has hooked me. This did. The horror has caused much thought. Check out the song "Cold Missouri Water"