“Home Waters”: A chronicle of a family and a river • Daily Montanan

John Maclean’s “Home waters” is more than the background story of “A river flows through.” He continues to tell the true story of the Maclean family, which differs from the fictional version of his father’s story. He sheds more light on the murder of his Uncle Paul by conducting his own investigation, finding new details, and recording the story of Meriwether Lewis, who travels through the Blackfoot River area.

He describes how Native Americans “left a trail along the river as they moved through the Blackfoot Valley and across the Continental Divide, back and forth to the buffalo hunting grounds on the Missouri River to the east.” He goes on to explain how this book connects to the Blackfoot River, his “home waters,” and points out the value of this beautiful resource. In a YouTube interview, he spoke about being “truthful” to nature and respecting other people’s right to a clean environment.

John’s father Norman Maclean described “A river flows through“ as a “love poem to my family.” Likewise, John’s book is a poetic thread that connects the two stories while filling in some gaps in the original. I was fascinated the whole time as I discovered parallels to my own life.

In Chapter 1, John describes how they made their annual trip to Montana: “The four of us, my parents, my sister Jean, and I, crammed into a car as laden with baggage as a pack mule loaded for the wilderness. One of our used black limousines was so plain that my father sighed and said it would have made a real preacher’s car, one that might have belonged to his father.”

This aptly describes my family’s journey as we moved from the East Coast to the wild west of Colorado in our black 1959 Chevy station wagon, affectionately known as the “Batmobile.” I, too, remember being “filled with the pioneer spirit” and seeing the “sprouted new corn that would quickly be knee-high by the Fourth of July.”

Another anecdote in the epilogue describes an incident involving Dottie, Uncle Ken Burns’ wife. “Ken’s wife, Dottie, was the only woman in the family, as far as I know, who fished. In the spring, when Little Prickly Pear Creek was muddy and high, she would get one of Ken’s Prince Albert tobacco tins and fill it with dirt and worms. Then she would take a fishing rod and go to a nice hole in the Little Prickly Pear just behind the chicken coops, hook a bunch of worms and throw the tackle into the hole. When a fish gobbled up the worms, she would turn around, put the rod on her shoulder and run like the devil up the bank to pull the fish out of the water.”

I cried while reading this story because the same thing happened to me the first time I caught a fish!

This was indeed a universal story that connected family, place and a love of nature. I felt part of the Maclean family and reading this book was a gift that strengthened my spiritual reserves and satisfied my inner resolve to make connections with my own family history.

Written with true passion at heart and discovering a hidden legacy of moral clarity from his Uncle Paul, John MacLean’s talent as a writer comes to the fore in “Home waters.”