The Way West is a 1949 novel by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
It's about a group of pioneers who leave Missouri in 1843 to settle in Oregon. A failed politician, William Tadlock, rolls into Independence, Missouri, looking for people to join his wagon train to the Oregon Territory. Tadlock is an abrasive, obnoxious Jerkass, but lots of people want to go to Oregon. One of them is Lije Evans, a farmer, who joins the expedition partly out of wanderlust and partly because Lije the patriot doesn't want to see the British seize Oregon, ownership of the territory being disputed at that time. (The territory was divided between the two countries in 1846, with the USA getting the area around the Columbia River where all the pioneers were going.)
The train needs a guide, so they hire Dick Summers, a former Mountain Man who settled down to farming but is having his own wanderlust after the death of his wife. The wagon train heads west, and encounters most of the hazards familiar to people who played the video game: poisonous snakes, infectious diseases, hazardous river crossings, buffalo stampedes, and lack of access to water. Injun Country, however, is mostly averted. One of the running themes is how it was mostly the men who drove the impulse to head west. Lije's wife Rebecca sees no particular reason to leave their Missouri farmstead, and only goes because her husband insists.
Second of six novels in a series by Guthrie, all dealing with the settling of the West.
Tropes:
- Animal Stampede: Lije is acutely aware of the dangers of buffalo stampedes. Sure enough, a thunderstorm causes a huge buffalo herd to stampede right through the wagon train. Lije is petrified for his son who was out herding cattle, but Brownie is unhurt, and the pioneers manage to retrieve most of the cattle as well.
- Blowing Smoke Rings: Dick takes a puff of his pipe and then "blew smoke rings around it." He's demonstrating how he is at ease during a conversation with Tadlock the bully, which only pisses off Tadlock even more.
- But Now I Must Go: Dick Summers was once a mountain man who settled down to farm, but now, a childless widower, he feels the urge to go back to the mountains. At the end of the novel Lije tries as hard as he can to get Dick to stay with them and settle down in Oregon, but instead Dick leaves in the middle of the night while the rest are asleep.
- Call-Forward:
- Dick Summers is guiding the wagon train but he isn't particularly enthusiastic about white people colonizing Indian lands. After one incident where the wagon train shoots several buffalo, Dick reflects that the herds are getting thinner and the whites may wipe the buffalo out. They almost did; within 50 years of this time frame there were less than a thousand buffalo left, before the species was saved.
- When Lije suggests taking a shortcut that would theoretically get them to Oregon quicker but would require leaving the river, Dick answers that they'd wind up dying in the desert flats of eastern Oregon. A couple of years after the events of this story another wagon train took just such a shortcut and endured terrible suffering and a lot of dead on a route that became known as the Meek Cutoff
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- Comforting Comforter: Mercy, now pregnant after an ill-advised fling with the married Mack, approaches Brownie and agrees to marry him. She also tells him why and is honest enough to admit she doesn't love him. One night they are sleeping together in a wagon when Brownie pulls the blanket up to her neck, and Mercy is so moved by this gesture that she tells him she's beginning to care for him.
- Deadpan Snarker: Dick has his moments. The wagon train has had to resort to burning buffalo dung for fires because there simply isn't any wood to be had in the treeless prairie. When Lije worries about the large amounts of buffalo chips they'll have to gather for cooking fires, Dick says "They grow fast."
- Death of a Child: Tragedy strikes, and the dangers of the trail are demonstrated, when 10-year-old Tod Fairman dies after being bitten by a rattlesnake.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Lije Evans, the sympathetic protagonist, at one point thinks about how it would be nice to own a slave to do the drudge work. Multiple characters also call each other the N-word in a bizarre white-people-only version of N-Word Privileges.
- Delicate and Sickly: The Fairmans join the wagon train because they think that Oregon will be healthier for their delicate, fever-prone son Tod than the humidity of Missouri will be. Ironically, Tod dies by snakebite.
- Dramatic Irony: Brownie is thankful to Mack for being nice to the McBee family, poor white trash scorned by most of the rest of the pioneers. Brownie does not know that Mack has been having sex with Mercy McBee, the beautiful girl that Brownie is sweet on.
- Head-Turning Beauty: Luscious young Mercy McBee, who attracts the attention of all the single men in camp. She gets knocked up by Mack, a married man, but Brownie marries her.
- Injun Country: Mostly averted. Guthrie's novels were highly sympathetic to Native Americans and how their way of life was being destroyed by the white man. In the one fatal encounter between the wagon train and "Injuns", it's a white man, Mack, who murders a Kaw brave for no particular reason other than Mack being in a bad mood. The natives that the whites encounter are mostly friendly and do little more than steal a few horses and blankets. At one point Lije's son Brownie finds himself surrounded by some unfriendly Sioux and it seems like things might get violent, but Dick Summers comes galloping in, defuses the tension, and invites the Sioux to camp for a smoke.
- Jerkass: Tadlock, who is brusque and unfriendly and unpleasant, and carries around a whip in what basically is an intimidation tactic. He is initially elected as captain of the wagon train, but his obnoxious, confrontational manner leads the pioneers to depose him and elect Evans in his place.
- Kick the Dog: Tadlock's jerkassery is demonstrated in a scene where he gets a majority of the train to vote to kill all the dogs, in the theory that dogs will be a distraction and a drain on resources. Lije stares down Tadlock's minion McBee when McBee comes to kill his dog Rock, but later, near the end of the novel, McBee smashes Rock's brains in out of sheer spite.
- Lie Back and Think of England: The oddly happy ending to Mack and Amanda's Sexless Marriage. After some scenes where Mack yells at his frigid wife for not being willing to put out, he changes tactic. He says that he cares about her, but he's a man with needs and basically she has to help him out. She consents, and while she still doesn't seem to enjoy sex they are both content with their new arrangement.
- Morning Sickness: Naturally it's nausea that helps to alert Mercy to the fact that she's pregnant.
- Mountain Man: Dick Summers, who in his younger days was a mountain man and is one of the few white people familiar with the route to Oregon, which is why he's hired by the wagon train. He not only knows the land, he spent much of his youth living among the Indians and knows some of their dialects. Dick married a white woman and settled down to farm, but at the start of the novel she has already died, and Dick joins the wagon train basically because he wants a ride to get back to the mountains and his mountain man ways.
- The Pioneer: A bunch of white people decide to make a difficult, desperate journey to Oregon, mostly because they want to. Lije Evans is gripped with a sort of patriotic pioneer spirit, while Rebecca doesn't particularly see why they have to leave their nice Missouri Farm.
- Settling the Frontier: A wagon train sets out to Oregon in 1843. They have differing motives. Lije Evans goes mostly out of Patriotic Fervor. Tadlock has hopes of restarting his political career. Some probably shouldn't be there, like Byrd who is an honorable man but sort of weak: Evans considers the mild-mannered Byrd and thinks that he should be in town.
- Sexless Marriage: Mack's marriage with Amanda is sexless, because Amanda just...doesn't want to. Mack, who seems to be a relatively decent husband, is bitter and frustrated about this, and he's eventually driven into an affair with Mercy McBee.
- Start My Own: As the wagon train heads into the home stretch to Oregon, they encounter an agent who talks several of them into splitting off and heading to California instead. Tadlock leads the splinter group, and as Tadlock's smaller party leaves, Lije thinks about how Tadlock is taking the chance to lead his own train again instead of following Lije.
- Switching P.O.V.: The POV bounces back and forth between most of the characters at one point or another.
- Western Rattlers: Tod Fairman, a boy of ten, wanders away from the camp and is bitten by a rattlesnake. He dies.
