NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
March 26, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
Give a listen sometime to the earliest radio episodes of "Gunsmoke" in 1952, where William Conrad is the voice of Matt Dillon. The television version two years later would be called the first adult western, but I think the radio version was a little more advanced yet. Here we hear a Marshal Dillon who not only is not the fastest gun on the street, he's not even sure what he ought to be doing. He strides the plank walks of a Dodge that is filled with moral choices, and sometimes he messes up.
After about two episodes, though, he straightens out, and I'm sure that was no accident. Somebody told those writers to shape him up—the public wasn't ready for a post-modern western lawman. I wonder if we are now?
If so, then we'll find our man with a star in the novels of Larry Watson, a rising star in Great Plains literature. Born and raised in Rugby, N.D., he writes novels set in eastern Montana and western North Dakota. First came "Montana" 1948, then "Justice," and now "White Crosses," from Simon and Schuster.
As in the first two books, there's a lawman in the middle of "White Crosses"—Sheriff Jack Nevelson of Bentrock, Mercer County, Montana. His moral dilemmas begin in 1957 when he investigates a highway accident fatal to both Leo Bauer, the school principal, and June Moss, a graduating seniorwho have run off the road late at night, in a car with suitcases.
Sheriff Nevelson tries to avert scandal by engineering what today we would call a cover-up. It's a clue this deception is ill-starred when the town is chilled by a June snow. Meanwhile, the sheriff navigates one choice after another and proves himself all too human. Not to give away the ending, but if you've read the other Watson books, and you've had the feeling that eventually something really bad is going to happen, then you won't be disappointed—although you still may be surprised at the direction it takes.
The white crosses to which the title refers are those roadside crosses the Montana highway department erects at the sites of highway fatalities. Other states do similar things—some have those "Think" signs with the red crosses on them—but the Montana white crosses make a better literary symbol.
I recommend "White Crosses" for readers throughout the plains, and I can also recommend the cassette tape edition, read by Beau Bridges. His is a great voice for the befuddled everyman, Sheriff Nevelson. This is an opportunity to note, however, that when these New York houses issue an audio book set in the plains, they need to get somebody from the region to exercise a little quality control. I've noticed the same thing with Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage" and other fine titles on tape—these readers from the coast just can't pronounce things right. Bridges, for instance, keeps pronouncing "slough" to rhyme with "cow."
Some critics have said that Larry Watson has set out to demolish the frontier myth, to bring down the idols by creating sheriffs with feet of clay. I don't see it that way. It seems to me that he grew up on the plains, watched what went on in their small towns, watched the things people did, listened to what they said, and wrote about it. Personally, I've never met a Matt Dillon, but I've met some guys with fair likeness to Jack Nevelson.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866