Ivan Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs in 1939 and grew up among sheep camps, ranch bunkhouses and small-town bars in Meagher County and along the Rocky Mountain Front near Dupuyer. His mother died on his sixth birthday. He was raised by his father, Charlie, a ranch hand, and his grandmother, Bessie Ringer, two people who did not always get along but who shared the job of raising him.
That story became “This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind,” published in 1978. The memoir was a finalist for the National Book Award and is still one of the most widely read books about growing up in Montana.
A career built on one place
Doig left Montana for Northwestern University, where he studied journalism, and later earned a doctorate in history at the University of Washington. He settled in Seattle and wrote full time for more than three decades, but most of his work kept returning to the fictional Two Medicine country and Montana’s small towns.
His novels include “English Creek,” “Dancing at the Rascal Fair,” “Ride With Me, Mariah Montana,” “The Whistling Season” and “The Bartender’s Tale.” They are full of homesteaders, schoolteachers, sheepherders and storytellers, and they are notable for their attention to the work people did and the words they used.
Doig died in Seattle in 2015. His papers went to Montana State University in Bozeman, which created the Ivan Doig Archive, and the Ivan Doig Center at MSU supports the study of the West.
In White Sulphur Springs, readers still come looking for the places in his books, which is about as good a measure of a writer’s hold on a town as there is.