Other editions of book Big Sky

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." 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.

Originally published more than fifty years ago, THE BIG SKY is the first of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.'s, epic adventure novels of America's vast frontier. THE BIG SKY introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, three of the most memorable characters in Western American literature. Traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. The story centers on Caudill, a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life and a longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, Caudill becomes an untamed mountain man, whom only the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief dares to love. With THE BIG SKY, Guthrie gives us an unforgettable portrait of a spacious land and a unique way of life.