The Big Rock Candy Mountain

In December 1904, Elsa Norgaard, a young Norwegian-American woman from Minnesota, arrives by train in Hardanger, North Dakota, to live with her uncle Karl Norgaard, a grocer. She has fled her family home after her widowed father married Sarah, Elsa's best friend, less than three years after her mother's death.

In Hardanger she meets Bo Mason, a dark, athletic young man who runs a bowling alley and a blind pig, or illegal saloon. Born Harry Mason in Rock River, Illinois, Bo grew up under the tyranny of a one-armed Civil War veteran father, ran away at 14, and drifted through carpentry, logging camps, railroad crews, and minor league baseball before settling in Dakota territory. He is restless, ambitious, and convinced that somewhere beyond the next horizon lies the place where he will make his fortune.

Despite her misgivings, Elsa falls in love with Bo. At a state trap shoot, he wins the North Dakota singles championship, and their romance deepens. A period of estrangement follows when Elsa witnesses Bo brutally punch a vagrant, but he courts her back by leaving game birds at her door. He proposes during a walk on the frozen prairie, and she accepts. They marry over her father's objections. Elsa longs for permanence: a home with hollyhocks and roses. Bo dreams only of making his fortune.

The early years establish the pattern that will define their lives. Bo runs a hotel in Grand Forks with his partner Jud Chain, a professional gambler, but the venture struggles. Elsa gives birth to two sons, Chester (Chet) and Bruce, after losing a baby girl at birth. When a drifter passes through with gold dust and tales of Klondike riches, Bo is electrified. Before the family can leave for Alaska, police raid the hotel's illegal bar and Bo flees. The family retreats to Elsa's father's farm in Indian Falls, Minnesota.

They reach Seattle, but the boys' scarlet fever consumes the travel season, and the Alaska plan collapses. Bo buys a small café in Richmond, a lumber town outside Seattle. His impatience with Bruce's childhood fears escalates into cruelty. One evening, discovering that Bruce has soiled himself rather than use the outhouse alone, Bo rubs the child's face in his own excrement. Elsa attacks Bo with a stick of firewood. Bruce's eyes cross inward in a paralysis of terror. Bo, ashamed, leaves for Canada. Elsa, unable to run the café alone, places the boys in an orphanage and eventually returns to Indian Falls.

Bo goes to Saskatchewan, where the Canadian Pacific Railway is opening new territory. He sells liquor to grading crews and prospers modestly. He writes Elsa letters describing the Whitemud River valley and its promise of wheat land, then travels to Minneapolis to plead with her, promising a house with four gables and a big verandah. Still in love with Bo and yearning for the permanent home he promises, Elsa capitulates. In June 1914, she leaves Indian Falls, praying this will be the real home at last.

The Saskatchewan homestead years are seen largely through Bruce's eyes. The family lives on open prairie stretching to the Montana border. Bruce, often alone while Chet works in town, inhabits a private world of gopher trapping, a pet weasel named Lucifer, and hymns sung in the flowered coulee, a shallow ravine thick with wildflowers. Bo's volatility persists: When Bruce cries over a failed Fourth of July outing, Bo backhands him, yet the next day takes the family to the Bearpaw Mountains in a trip that becomes one of Bruce's most treasured memories. The wheat crop fails, and the family returns to Whitemud for a bleak winter.

When the Spanish flu arrives in 1918, Bo drives to Montana to buy whiskey for the stricken town, returns through a blizzard that tips the car over, and arrives home half-frozen. Elsa and Bruce fall ill; 12-year-old Chet manages the household alone, selling whiskey and defending the stock at gunpoint against thieves. The venture proves profitable, planting the seed of Bo's permanent occupation.

The family moves to Great Falls, Montana, where Bo becomes a full-time bootlegger. After clashing with Heimie Hellman, a local criminal who tries to force him into a syndicate, Bo breaks free by running a load to Salt Lake City during a family "vacation," using Elsa and the boys as camouflage. The family settles in Salt Lake City, but stability remains elusive: They move through at least 12 houses in four years.

Chet becomes a star high school athlete, but at 17 he falls in love with Laura Betterton, a 21-year-old woman. When prohibition agents raid the house and handcuff both Bo and Chet, the humiliation shatters the boy. He elopes with Laura, and though the marriage is annulled at Elsa's urging, he remarries Laura three months later and vows never to live at home again.

Elsa discovers a lump in her breast; surgery reveals cancer requiring a radical mastectomy. Chet, working at a mine that closes, returns home defeated. In early 1931, he contracts pneumonia and dies at 23. Bo is devastated, unable to sleep, screaming in nightmares. He invests in a gambling house in Reno, Nevada, but a humiliating public assault by a dismissed dealer and Elsa's worsening health lead him to sell his share. Elsa's cancer has returned, with nodules under her skin and pain in her hip. She asks to return to Salt Lake City, where Chet is buried.

Through September and October, Elsa lies dying in a dark apartment. Bruce serves as her primary caretaker, administering morphine, while Bo, unable to cope, wanders downtown. Bo leaves for Los Angeles to pick up a whiskey load, knowing Elsa is near death. She dies at about 1:15 in the morning with Bruce at her side. After her death, Bruce discovers that Bo has given Elsa's best clothes, including the bed jacket Bruce gave her on her birthday, to his mistress. In a murderous rage, Bruce takes his father's revolver and goes looking for Bo but learns he has left town. The rage cools; he cannot kill deliberately. When father and son confront each other, Bruce unleashes a lifetime of grievances. Bo, weeping, tells Bruce he never wants to see him again. Bruce leaves for law school in Minneapolis.

Bo spends his final years in a cheap Salt Lake hotel, sick, broke, and alone. His left side is numb from a stroke, and his remaining money has gone into a worthless Nevada gold mine. His mistress, Elaine Nesbitt, treats him with contempt now that the money is gone. He writes Bruce increasingly desperate letters, finally sending his mine stock certificate as the last thing he has to give.

On the morning of Bruce's law school graduation, a telephone call brings the news: Bo has shot Elaine Nesbitt in the hotel lobby, then turned the gun on himself. Bruce drives to Salt Lake. In his father's room he finds pawn tickets, a cemetery deed with perpetual care paid for, and a tarnished silver shaving mug inscribed with Bo's 1905 trap-shooting championship. At the funeral, Bruce composes a silent counter-eulogy acknowledging both his father's destructiveness and his wasted talent: the energy, the charm, the stubborn will that under different circumstances might have made a notable man. Bo is buried beside Elsa and Chet. Bruce, the sole survivor, feels the weight of obligation to justify his parents' lives.