Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [56]
As is told in this book, Berneta Doig's letters from February to June of 1945 were left to me upon the death of my uncle, Wally Ringer, and I want to particularly thank my cousins, Dan Ringer and Dave Ringer, for searching out and providing me the packet of letters their father wanted me to have. A word about my quotations from the letters herein: I am a writer, not a transcriber, and so when I felt it necessary for clarity of the storyline, I have shifted sentences into an earlier scene than their actual postmark, have taken out an occasional cumbersome bit such as "kind of," and standardized my mother's references to her mother as both "Mom" and "Mama" to simply "Mom," to try to lessen confusion. And for the miner's soliloquy on the wagon traffic jam in Deadwood, I have drawn on an early "oral history" interview of freight wagon driver Clarence Palmer, as provided me by the late Vernon Carstensen. As to the German POWs, the frequency of their escapes was even greater than my parents suspected; Arnold P. Krammer in "German Prisoners of War in the United States," Military Affairs, April 1976, points out that "the average monthly escape rate from June 1944 to August 1945 ... was over 100, or an average of 3 to 4 escapes per day."My reference to the "mortal evaporation" that Montana suffered in World War Two is based on the facts that Montanans, in proportion to population, served in the armed forces in numbers higher than the national average, and that Montana's war dead, again proportionally, was exceeded only by New Mexico's among the then-forty-eight states. (Montana also had been hard hit by World War One, when the state's incorrectly high draft call and high voluntarism combined to inflict the highest toll of war dead, proportionally, of all the states.) The specific theaters of combat in which residents of our area, Meagher County, served were compiled from issues of the weekly Meagher County News; my uncle's letter from the Pacific and my mother's obituary are both in the July 4, 1945 issue of that newspaper. And finally, the concept of the "Western Civil War of Incorporation," for which I am indebted to the historian Richard Maxwell Brown, his book No Duty to Retreat (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and its defining insight that "in the West the incorporation trend resulted in what should at last be recognized as a civil war across the entire expanse of the West—one fought in many places and on many fronts in almost all the Western territories and states from the 1860s and beyond."
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