The Big Sky
GUTHRIE
Hardcover
(Houghton Mifflin, March 15, 1965)
The Big Sky is a 1947 Western novel by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.. For Wallace Stegner it is "the best" of the six novels in Guthrie's sequence dealing with the Oregon Trail and the development of Montana from 1830, the time of the Mountain Men, to "the cattle empire of the 1880s to the near present."[1] The first three books of the six in the chronological sequence (but not in the sequence of publishing) -- The Big Sky, The Way West, and Fair Land, Fair Land-are in themselves a complete trilogy, starting in 1830 and ending with the death of Boone Caudill and later the death of Dick Summers in the 1870s.