Just Finished Reading Centennial by James A. Michener

In the summer of 1976 I had signed up to take a summer college course in general American history...the young instructor in his opening lecture told the students that he wasn't that concerned about facts per se, but rather that we picked up on the trends being taught in the course.  I promptly dropped the class and switched to the same course but by a different instructor, a crotchety old man who taught from a scrapbook of different newspaper and magazine clippings he had assembled over the years.  And he covered facts, boy did he ever...as well as laying out his own admittedly biased worldview.  But I liked Mr. Theriault's way of teaching anyway...if you're not solidly based in historical facts then you're susceptible to any cockamamie idea floating around...and there are quite a few a these nowadays.  I say all this because James A. Michener's 1974 historical novel Centennial, set in a fictional Colorado county on the Wyoming border north of Denver, mixes the two approaches in a disconcerting way.  After reading it I feel I understand the trends and eras leading up to the present (the author's 1974, that is) while at the same time I became very uncomfortable with all of the "facts": the characters, locales, and events, while very similar to real historical people, locations, and events, are nonetheless fictional.  So now I have this very-well researched and described fictional mental picture that is in all likelihood a very faithful representation of what the area around Centennial, a made-up town along the real Platte River, was really like.  But that's the way it is with historical fiction, and I have to admit to greatly admiring Michener's attention to detail as well as his compassion and discernment in presenting all sides, good and bad, of his characters and the way societies and movements developed and declined there over the years...

Centennial is in essence a fictional history researcher's account of his commissioned area in northern Colorado, and he goes all the way back to the Earth's formation and the area's geological origins...then on to presenting life from the viewpoints of different animals populating the same region, including the dinosaur diplodocus, an early horse, a bison named "Rufus", a mother beaver, and a battle between a rattlesnake and eagle.  How this fictional researcher came across these experiences strikes me as being a bit dubious, but he presents them all as fact...as well as the stories of a Clovis spear-maker from nearly 10,000 BC and Lame Beaver, an Arapaho Indian warrior.  Don't get me wrong: I loved all of these little stories...and the book itself is by and large a collection of short stories bound in chronological order by the narrative connecting them all to the same geography.  I already greatly admired Michener's writing after reading his 1982 novel Space, which I recently reviewed.  I intend to embark on another Michener book in the near future, but I don't know which of his 40 novels it will be.  So if you're interested in getting a good sense of what it was like in the American west...more specifically northern Colorado just east of the Rockies, you'll get a lot of input from Centennial about geology, dinosaurs, mammoths, horses, beavers, rattlesnakes, eagles, Arapaho-Shoshone-Pawnee-Cheyenne-Comanche Indians, French traders, the Army out west, outlaws and the gun culture, the gold and silver rushes, white prejudice against Indians and Mexicans, German, Russian, and Japanese settlers, the Mexicans and their revolution, cattle drives, ranching, religious attitudes of the time, the tactics of land acquisition and control, farming beets and then wheat, the Dust Bowl, and the effects of urban development on the environment...just to name a few items...then I say go for it!