Think you know your Western literature?
Answer 15 or more correctly and count yourself among the true
Western literati.
1) Where were David Brower,
Charles Park and John McPhee camping in the first section of
Encounters with the Archdruid?
2)
Which fictional fishing village in Washington was the site of Kabuo
Miyamoto’s trial for allegedly murdering a man with a fishing
gaff?
3) “Yuki” Uchida and her family were sent to Topaz
Internment Camp in which Western state during World War
II?
4) In Cormac McCarthy’s novel Cities of the
Plain, the ranch where John Grady Cole and Billy Parham
work is located in which New Mexico city?
5) Where did
Paul and Norman Maclean go fly-fishing and get lessons in
Presbyterian theology from their father?
6) Where did
fictional rancher Gilbert Wolfscale live in Annie Proulx’s short
story “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”
7) Where
were the Chavez brothers headed to work in the strawberry fields
when their van crashed during a chase with the Border
Patrol?
8) Where is Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy, the
inspiration for Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the
Archbishop, buried?
9) Where was Buster the
hermit crab’s transplanted home?
10) What is the setting
for George Stewart’s 1951 novel Sheep
Rock?
11) What Western state did Mark Twain
wind up living in for more than six years, despite his intention to
spend only three months there seeing all that “was new and strange
and then hurry home to business?”
12) Where does the
fictional Navajo cop Jim Chee call home?
13) Where is
Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western
Mind, based?
14) Victor Joseph and Thomas
Builds-the-Fire – two of Sherman Alexie’s main characters from his
novel The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heaven – live on what Indian reservation?
15)
Rudolfo Anaya’s coming-of-age novel, Bless Me,
Ultima, took place in and around what New Mexico
town?
16) What was the event that provided the
inspiration for John Nichol’s Milagro Beanfield
War?
17) Who was the basis for “Doc” in
Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and where is the inspirational marine lab
located?
18) After his travels erode into disappointment,
in what Rocky Mountain city does Sal, of Jack Kerouac’s On
the Road, confront the possibility that his journey may
have been a failure?
19) What is the name and location of
Ken Kesey’s fictional logging town in Sometimes a Great
Notion?
20) The Monkey Wrench Gang escapes into
which labyrinthine complex of canyons in Utah?
21)
Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer-winning Angle of
Repose features what Rocky Mountain mining
town?
ANSWERS:
1. Glacier Peak Wilderness, Wash.
2. San Piedro (David Guterson’s Snow Falling on
Cedars) 3. Utah – near the town of Delta
(Yoshiko Uchida’s Journey to Topaz) 4.
Alamogordo 5. The Big Blackfoot River, Mont.
(Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It) 6.
Elk Tooth, Wyo. 7. Watsonville, Calif. (Ruben
Martinez’s Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail)
8. St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe, N.M.
9. Tucson, Ariz. (Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide
in Tucson) 10. Black Rock Desert, Nev.
11. Nevada (Mark Twain’s Roughing It)
12. The banks of the San Juan River near
Shiprock, N.M. (Tony Hillerman’s novels) 13.
Montana’s Smith River Valley 14. Spokane Indian
Reservation 15. Guadalupe, N.M.
16. The Tierra Amarilla, N.M., Courthouse Raid
of June 5, 1967 17. Ed Ricketts; his office is
located at 800 Cannery Row, Monterey, Calif. 18.
Denver 19. Wakonda, Ore. 20.
The Maze in Canyonlands National Park 21.
Leadville, Colo.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Literary trivia of the West.
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