BUTTE, Mont. — Circling crows appear like smudges on the pale winter sky, occasionally swooping to peck at frozen road-kill. The last few miles on Highway 15 from Helena to the Butte stockyards are harsh and not that pretty.
At the yard, Ralph Beer struggles against a 1,200-pound cow and the cold wind until the animal is finally in the auction stall. Then Beer lights a cigarette, perches on a rickety fence gate and muses on the state of literature in Montana.
If the stockyards seem like strange environs for serious discussions about literature, in Montana the talk can turn as quickly to rhyme and meter as it can to pork prices or irrigation problems. When he's not working his cattle ranch, Beer writes novels.
Without a city in the state--and roughly five people per square mile--Montana can claim hundreds of published writers and poets among its past and current residents, and hundreds of thousands of avid readers roaming its many bookstores. Just why that is and how Montana came to harbor the literary likes of A. B.Guthrie Jr., Ivan Doig, Wallace Stegner, Norman Maclean, Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, Patricia Henley, William Kittredge, James Welch, David Quammen, James Crumley and Rick DeMarinis, to name only a few, is a question not easily answered, but the speculating is a popular pastime.
One theory: "I can't say for sure," Bozeman poet Greg Keeler says. "Some of them were born here, and some of us came for the trout."
The size and distinctiveness of the Montana literary community has resulted in a unique publishing project. Last November, the 5-pound, 3-ounce, 1,161-page volume "The Last Best Place," an anthology of Montana literature, was published after more than four years of work by its editors.
The title, from a poem by the late Richard Hugo, longtime head of the creative writing program at the University of Montana and regarded by many as the father of the modern Montana writers' movement, suggests another reason why so many writers have found the state so conducive to work. "There's nobody there," novelist DeMarinis says. "In that wonderful isolation, you get to focus."
What began as a 100th birthday present to Montana for the state's centennial this year has turned into bookseller's legend. Barbara Theroux, owner of one of Missoula's 16 bookstores, Fact & Fiction, said: "I've never seen anything like the demand for 'The Last Best Place' in my 17 years in bookselling. I sold 500 copies, at $27.95, in less than three weeks. And that's unbelievable. Then the books were gone, but the demand was just as strong."
The book covers 180 years and 154 Montana writers. Brainchild of editors William Kittredge, creative writing professor at the University of Montana in Missoula, and writer-film maker Annick Smith, the book is organized chronologically, anthologizing fiction, poetry and personal testimonies, such as excerpts from the journals of explorers Lewis and Clark.
Published by the Montana Historical Society and distributed by the University of Washington Press, sales of "The Last Best Place" have exceeded all predictions. "The first run was 6,000 copies," said Alice Herbig, publicity director for the University of Washington Press. "And that was completely sold out in two weeks."
Locating the book outside Montana has been even more difficult. A second printing of 5,000 copies was shipped early this month to retailers around the country and, "it sold out in less than 10 days," Herbig said--at $40. (The first printing was subsidized by the Montana Historical Society.)
"We sold out of it completely," said Nola Butler of Butler and Gabriel in Westwood. "We could only get five copies. We've reordered."
A new printing is planned, Herbig said. "A lot of folks in L.A. haven't been able to get the book because the Montana booksellers were so on top of it," she said. "Hopefully by August, everybody will have it."
Ralph Beer, at 41, has always lived on the same 1,000 acres of Montana ranchland along Jackson Creek, except for a brief stint as a cowboy in British Columbia, and time out to get a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Montana in Missoula. The cattle he raises have been under the same brand--Lazy H Triangle--since 1909, and as he says, "that's a long time, even in Montana."
Though he spends most of his time on a horse or a mowing machine, Beer still finds time to do some teaching at nearby Carroll College in Helena, to be a contributing editor for Harper's magazine, and, of course, to write. Beer's first novel, "The Blind Corral," won the 1986 Spur Award, given for the best Western novel. When asked for his opinion about why the inordinate number of successful writers in the state, Beer takes a long draw from his cigarette and shrugs.
