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Not just in need of the most basic proofreader, the book contains dozens of factual errors. (I was particularly surprised that National Geographic would place the Missouri River in Fargo.) Not only does Heminway blandly repeat the same old stories, but in getting them wrong (not only does he botch the story of Charlie Russell's painting "Waiting for a Chinook," he even inflates its alternate title from "Last of the 5,000" to "Last of the 10,000") he does a tremendous disservice to anyone who would find this representative of Montana.
Avoid this book! If you want to read about this region, read Mark Spragg's "Where Rivers Change Direction" -- not only a more accurate book, but a truly eloquent memoir.
One of the pleasures of the book is Hemingway's gift for vivid word snapshots of people he encounters in Montana. His filmaker's eye rests briefly on organic rancher Tom Elliott, BLM archeologist Michael Kyte, outfitter Larry Lahren, horse whisperer Ray Hunt, ranch foreman Floyd Cowles, teepee manufacturer Don Ellis, and his motley neighbors in the Boulder River valley. The sketches are illuminations of ordinary lives rather than (a la Annie Proulx) a lepidopterological display of "characters". The book's other strength is the mini-biography of Stanley and Bab Cox, easterners like Hemingway, who owned the Bar 20 from 1933 to 1951 and who, unlike Hemingway, resided there continuously except for the war years. Hemingway's determined and ingenious research has unearthed a story worthy of a novel.
"Yonder", published by the National Geographic Society Adventure Press, is the worst-edited book I have encountered in some time. It is rife with typos: missing quotation marks, uncapitalized proper names, "souh" for "south", "there's" for "theirs", "Yate's" for "Yates'", "shooting match" for "shouting match", and a missing negative that turns a sentence about organic farming into nonsense. It is also guilty of dubious or incorrect word usage. Examples: three sheets of paper become in the next paragraph three sheaves of paper; a hinged bookcase hiding a door is called "trompe l'oeil". And what is one to make of this sentence? "While grounds for abandoning a six-year-old child seem inconceivable, we can speculate he justified his decision because, perhaps, he felt rejected by the Hydes, who clearly had never warmed to a man they regarded as a diffident provider, husband, and father."
Hemingway grafts a couple of self-contained essays (previously published articles?) onto the stalk of his narrative. They deal with native American activities in other parts of the state and artist Winold Reiss. These are interesting in their own right, but anti-climatictic after the drama of the Cox research.
"Yonder" will save future owners of the Bar 20 the trouble of playing detective in order to find out what John Hemingway was doing and thinking during his days in Montana.
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