[The one unfailing link that joins The Big Sky, The Way West, These Thousand Hills, Arfive and The Lost Valley] is Guthrie's insistent use of the Western landscape as the distinguishing mark of the West, as the very heart and soul and body of whatever the West means. All the complexities and contradictions of the Western experience are finally seen in and judged by the interaction of characters and the landscape—that landscape which includes the earth, sky, space. And just as the idea of the West includes an enormous variety of ingredients, often paradoxical, so the landscape includes a variety of roles in Guthrie's novels: it may be at one and the same time, or at different times, mistress, friend, deadly foe, victor, victim, deity. Whatever else Guthrie may be doing or not doing, he is not simply sentimentalizing the glories and beauties of the land. Although he obviously finds moments when these beauties are present, more importantly he has an unwavering respect and regard for the power and force and strength—physical and spiritual—of that land in space under the big sky. (p. 65)
Guthrie saw the meaning of America in terms of the Western movement. All along, Guthrie's aim had been to write a series of novels on the Western movement in which he attempted to interpret American life. Such an ambitious aim would support the view that Guthrie's fictional purpose was indeed high and that his historical purpose was big. Too, he wrote of real events from a real world, and his books are gounded on his respect for research and facts, a virtue which even his harshest critics seem to grant. Along with regard for the facts was his equally important desire to suggest the spiritual qualities of the movement, and his use of landscape, sky, and space became the primary implement for suggesting these qualities. In these ways, Guthrie is the Western realist who treats the physical and historical West plus the idea of the West and moves between fact and dream.
