Books like Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America

“Winter Brothers” is Ivan Doig’s second published book, a work that Doig has trouble classifying. He has settled on calling it a journal of a journal. It’s a study of the prolific writings of a Pacific Northwest pioneer of the 1850s and of Doig’s present day effort at spending a winter retracing the diarist’s steps while reading through a forty year collection of at least 2,500,000 handwritten words.Doig begins by trying to classify James Gilchrist Swan’s life as an oysterman, schoolteacher, railroad speculator, ethnologist, lawyer, judge, homesteader, linguist, outfitter, explorer, customs agent, author, bureaucrat, artist, and clerk, finally calling him a diarist because of the mounds of writings carefully scribed in tiny, immaculate handwriting. Although Swan struggled at keeping all his roles in order, never gaining a sense of security in any of them, he always kept immaculate records of his endeavors in the Puget Sound and Pacific Northwest coast regions.Swan originally came to the area in 1848. From 1859 to until 1898 he kept a day-to-day diary describing his frontier life, filling notebooks, sketch pads, diaries, school exercise books, and ledgers of all colors and shapes with small, compact script of both inked stylus and pencil. He meticulously recorded letters written and received, books borrowed and lent, and the details of his haphazard financial condition. He tucked addresses, Indian words and their definitions, and sketches of animals, Indian life, and the surrounding grandeur of the northwest into every available space, and tucking clippings of all sorts among the bindings.Doig was obsessed with reading every line and spent a winter’s season tracking Swan’s steps as they were recorded. He not only writes about passages salient to his shadowing, he comments on aspects of Swan’s life related to his periodic illnesses, his infatuation, at aged fifty six, with 16-year old Dolly Roberts, his constant need for alcohol, his constant finagling, and his mostly desperate financial condition. It’s an incredible record of the life and times of a brilliant and bewildering frontiersman.Ivan Doig is considered a leading writer of western literature although he would prefer that readers think of him as a chronicler of life regardless of the locale. He intends that the prose in every book he writes be charged with poetry. Most writers aim for that but Doig is one of the few who can pull it off. This book is a devotional to the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, the integrity and resourcefulness of its natives, and to the dedication of Swan and Doig, two talented writers of different centuries.