"The Big Rock Candy Mountain" is Wallace Stegner's major novel about his barely disguised own life. In 1918 when the "Spanish Flu" hits the prairie, carried by soldiers on railroads, the family is in Eastend, Saskatchewan (called Whitemud in the book because of white clay deposits nearby) where Stegner's dad built a house. Thanks to Sharon Butala, the novelist, it's now a writers' retreat. Eastend is east and north of Valier, about a four hour drive.
For the first time there was money for the Stegners because the father was bootlegging. This is true. He did pretty well until "the big boys from Salt Lake City" shut him down. Not the cops, the competition.
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P. 254 (The two young sons have been in town and return with news.)
. . ."The flu's in town!" they said in a breathless burst. "Old Mrs. Rieger's got it."
Bo [the father] shut the door. "How do you know?"
"Mr. McGregor said. We were out behind the Chink's, and he called us and said not to play any tricks because the flu was in town and now all the kids are distributing flu masks and eucalyptus oil and we're going back right now."
"No you're not," Bo said. He looked at Elsa. "You chase these snickelfritzes up to bed. I'm going uptown to see what's going on."
"You won't be able to go now," she said, and the relief in her voice made him mad. [He had planned to make a run with his moonshine.] "The town will be quarantined."
"That quarantine's nothing but a word," he said. "The town really needs the stuff now."
"Go where?" Chet said.
His father pushed him into the dining room. "None of your beeswax. Go on up to bed, both of you."
An hour uptown told him nothing he didn't know. Nobody would be allowed in or out of town, but that just made him grin. He could imagine people sitting out along the roads in the cold to warn people. Like hell. They'd be sealed up tight in their houses. At ten o'clock he went home from the darkened and deserted main street, stoked the parlor heater for the night, and went up to bed. All the actual coming of the flu did was to make it sure that he could sell all the whiskey the Ford could carry."
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Bo's trip south to Chinook just across the line in Montana is a disaster. The weather is as it is today in Valier, sub-zero and almost too much snow to travel. Bo gets lost and spreads the flu wherever he goes. In Chinook everything is closed and people are hiding. The old man he tries to help dies in the car just as it turns over and the bottles smash. But all is not lost. The old man lives after all and gets hauled to Bo's home. Then both men are taken in a sleigh to the schoolhouse which is now an improvised hospital. The load of booze is mostly intact and the mom begins to sell it door-to-door. Soon she and one of the boys is sick. Chet (Stegner) is twelve and on his own. He's soon selling booze. To comfort himself, he begins to write an adventure story.
At first Chet copes pretty well, milking the cows, managing the house. He sells booze cheap, but then realizes that he could make big money and pushes the prices way up.
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p. 291 On the afternoon of the tenth day he was over at Chance's. He had spent a good deal of time there the last day or two. His own home had got heavier and heavier to bear, lonesomer and lonesomer in its dead stillness. Besides there wasn't much there to eat anymore. So he took milk to the Chances, chopped their wood, sat for hours in their warm kitchen listening to talk about the schoolhouse and the Death Ward where they put the people who were going to die. The Death Ward was the seventh grade room, his own room, and he and Ed Chance speculated on how it would feel to go back to school there where so many people had died -- Mrs. Krieger, John Chapman, old Gypsy Davy from Poverty Flat, lots of others. Mrs. Chance, still so weak she could barely totter around, sat by the range and wiped the tears from her eyes, and when anyone spoke to her she smiled and shook her head and the tears ran down. She didn't seem unhappy about anything; she just couldn't help crying.
Mr. Chance said, solemnly, that there would be many familiar faces missing when this was over. The old town would never be the same. He wouldn't be surprised if an orphan or two had to be adopted by every family in town. He pulled his sagging cheeks and said, "I'll tell you what, son, you're fortunate yourself. Many times in that hospital I said to myself that those poor Mason boys were going to lose a loving father, certain as grass is green. I'd lie there, and the first thing I'd hear, some old and valued friend had passed in the "Death Ward."
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Then the church bells begin to ring and many guns are shooting, "boom boom boom," but it's not about the flu. WWI has ended. His parents and brother come home just as the neighborhood had convened at the house to have a drunken celebration with the last of Bo's booze. He was enraged until Chet -- for the first time -- yelled back at him. When Bo realized how much money had been made, he softened. Soon he was back at his plans for how to climb "the Big Rock Candy Mountain," the Westerner's determination to somehow strike it rich and surpass all dreams despite every disaster.
The title of the book is from a song: "Sometimes alluded to as "The Big Rock Candy Mountains" - from the lyrics - this is a well known and original American folk song about a hobo who discovers a paradise on Earth. ... The first recording appears to be as recent as 1928, by Harry McClintock (1882-1957)." [Not the McClintock who wrote the "Old North Trail."] There are many versions online.
This is Burl Ives' version.
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