FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Chris Cauble, Publisher

Riverbend Publishing

Phone 1-406-449-0200

email ccauble@riverbendpublishing.com

ON SARPY CREEK – A buried treasure uncovered for
the first time since 1938

On Sarpy Creek is a novel that takes place on Sarpy Creek east of Billings. It was published in 1938 by Little, Brown and Company and then “forgotten” as the country went to war. Nonetheless, On Sarpy Creek is a small masterpiece that earned praise from Joseph Kinsey Howard and Bernard DeVoto, among others. Its author, Ira S. Nelson, lived in Montana as a young man. Regrettably, he never wrote another book and went on to live an obscure, peripatetic life.

We urge you to read the book’s afterword (shown below) to gain a more complete understanding of the book, its history, and its author. We think you’ll agree that On Sarpy Creek deserves a “second chance” to claim its place in the rich tradition of Montana literature. Among other things, we think it would make a great book for local book clubs.

On Sarpy Creek

a novel by

Ira Stephens Nelson

Synopsis

On Sarpy Creek is a family saga that unfolds in the decade after World War I in a small farming community in south central Montana. The novel’s first sentence sets the scene: "In the second year of the drought, Herman Linderman set out to call his neighbors together that they might pray for rain."

While the prayer meeting takes place, Case Gyler helps his young wife, Sareeny, deliver their first child beside a creek where they are camped. They have abandoned their attempt at homesteading and are returning to their family homes in Sarpy. It is a quintessential small town: "There were few families living close around the old homes of Sareeny and Case. But these few were rooted there with their years of living, by births and deaths."

The private lives of Sareeny, Case, and their neighbors provide simple, yet profound, human drama. Tender love, illegitimate births, a shocking murder, emotional trials, and bigotry shape the story as much as the relentless drought.

On Sarpy Creek

Ira S. Nelson

First published 1938, republished 2003

320 pages, trade paperback, $14.95

Bedrock Editions and Riverbend Publishing

Helena, Montana

Toll-free 1-866-787-2363

AFTERWORD

FROM THE NEW EDITION

On Sarpy Creek was published in 1938 by an author Little, Brown and Company called a “real discovery.” The discovery was to be short-lived and doomed to decades of obscurity, since Ira Stephens Nelson only published this one work of fiction in his lifetime. The manuscript made a real impression on all of the publisher’s readers, one of whom said, “I have seldom been more moved by a book. The simple unadorned style, the singleness of the point of view, the closeness to the earth, give the story a rare quality.” Almost 70 years later, the publishers of this reprinting of On Sarpy Creek share this reaction. The book deserves a chance to claim its place in the rich tradition of Montana literature.

There is very little known about the author. The dust jacket of the 1938 edition reads:

A native of Hominy, Oklahoma, where he was born in 1912 [it was later learned that Nelson’s birth was in 1909], Ira Stephens Nelson was educated in the country schools of Montana and at the Polytechnic Institute, Billings, Montana. He determined at an early age to become a writer, but in order to support himself he has held many jobs, some for a length of one day and others for as long as two years. His wage-earning career has been a varied one from typist to truck driver; at one time he was night nurse in an asylum for the insane. He has travelled all over the West as well as parts of Canada and Mexico, and has lived in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Iowa, and California. When he was five years old his foster parents settled on a ranch in Montana, the scene of his novel, and he lived there until he was twelve years old. Mr. Nelson, now a widower, was married at the age of eighteen. His present home is in California.

Optimistically, the publishers go on to say: “On Sarpy Creek is his first book.”

On Sarpy Creek, published with high expectations, received brief mention in two national newspapers, but no review in its hometown newspaper, the Billings Gazette. The novel then virtually disappeared. Authors’ prestige is subject to booms and busts, just like the Montana economy, or the Montana landscape with its cycles of drought and abundance. The last public mention of On Sarpy Creek was in Joseph Kinsey Howard’s 1946 landmark anthology, Montana Margins, where he said of the excerpt he included, “Here, in a glance into the mind of an aging and beaten man, is an unusually moving study of the bewilderment and despair born of relentless drought.”

Sarpy Creek is a tributary to the Yellowstone River in south-central Montana. It flows north out of the Spray and Little Wolf mountains. In 1857 a St. Louis fur trader, Peter Sarpy, had a trading post built on the Yellowstone at the mouth of the creek, and his men named the post and creek for him.

On Sarpy Creek is not the author’s autobiography. It is a work of fiction and imagination. There was a Sarpy Creek school. If there was a community like the one Ira Nelson describes, it has disappeared like countless other small towns that came and went on the northern plains early in the twentieth century.

Nelson died in 1994 in a veteran’s hospital in Georgia where he had been living and working as the caretaker of a large estate. He was reportedly working on an autobiography, but no manuscript has been found.