ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1920, thirty-nine years after Sitting Bull's departure, Wallace Stegner's family left the place he would someday call the “capital of an unremembered past.” The family caravan, a democrat wagon followed by a yellow-spoked, black and brass Model-T Ford, rattled down the old road, abandoning six years on the Saskatchewan prairie. From the Stegner's winter home in Eastend, they headed across the border toward Great Falls, Montana. There they would escape crop failure and begin a new life with indoor toilets, lawns, and streets with names, and where within a year, in some divinely orchestrated mundane perversion of artistic apprenticeship, Wallace Stegner would mow Charlie Russell's lawn.
