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Sid Gustafson, novelist and doctor of veterinary medicine, born under the Rocky Mountain Front during the year of the Horse, read James Willard Schultz’s Montana Indian frontier novels as a youngster. Literarily imbued with the spirit of the horse and buffalo Blackfeet Indians whilst living among them, he creates realistic allegories of contemporary Montana culture. In addition to a career as literary novelist, Sid is an animal advocate, father, pacifist, former professor of equine studies, practicing veterinarian, social commentator, and journalist calling for respect and compassion due animals with varying success.
Sid lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he raised his children Connor and Nina. He writes, teaches, and practices his natural approach to equine veterinary medicine up and down the Rocky Mountain Front Range.
His debut novel Prisoners of Flight was published in New York in 2003, and Horses They Rode, Riverbend Publishing, the second novel, was released in 2006 to regional acclaim. Horses They Rode was a finalist for the High Plains Book of the Year Award.
Sid was born in Montana, as were his children and parents. He grew up in the shadow of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and frequently travels to New York, where he practices equine medicine.
Literary influences include Halldor Laxness, James Willard Schultz, Dan Cushman, Iris Murdoch, Harper Lee, Malcolm Lowry, Alan Sillitoe, and Ken Kesey, as well as the beat writers and Montana novelists. The author is indebted to the writers James Welch, Greg Keeler, Doug Peacock, Andrea Peacock, Neil McMahon, William Hjortsberg, Alan Weltzien, Jim Harrison, Shelby Brown, Tess Jacobs, Peter Bowen, David McCumber, Deidre McNamer, Dan Lahren, Bethany Blankenship, and many others for their guidance and support.
The journey to becoming a novelist involved reading novels and writing short stories. Sid Gustafson has published numerous short stories in a variety of magazines, including Montana Crossroads Magazine, Rosebud, Thema, and Big Sky Journal. He currently is awaiting publication of his collected short stories and novellas, and uses the short story form to compress his storytelling style. As in his novels, imagery carries the narrative momentum. His Montana stories are included in three acclaimed letterpress fiction anthologies published by Birch Brook Press.
Both of his published novels were born as short stories. "Brakeman" was published in 1997 in Montana Crossroads Magazine, and a version of that story subsequently appeared as the first chapter of HORSES THEY RODE, the popularity and success of the story impelling the writing of the novel.
"Prisoners of Flight" was a short story published by Thema Magazine in 1998, later expanded and published in New York as the novel of the same name. Sid continues tp pursue the art of short fiction, continuing work on period pieces set in his cherished Blackfeet Country.
His next book to be published in 2009 is entitled The Language of Natural Horsemanship, a non-fiction exploration of man's contemporary relationship with the horse. SWIFT DAM, his third novel, awaits publication.

Sid is named after his uncles who lost their lives in WWII. Dr Gustafson's grandmother, Florence Johnson Galt, graduated from the Normal School in Dillon, MT, currently the University of Montana Western. Florence was the mother of Captain William Wylie Galt who lost his life in WWII. Captain Galt was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for actions above and beyond the call of duty defending the principles of freedom and welfare. Additionally, Dr Gustafson's paternal namesake uncle, Sid Gustafson, lost his life in Africa under similar heroic WWII circumstances. The two were close friends. The US Army awarded Sid the Silver Star posthumously, the highest commendation the Army awards. The French awarded Sid the Medal of War. Uncle Sid was a superb and sensitive horseman, and his concern for the well-being of horses is remembered and emulated.

In addition to being a novelist, Dr Gustafson is a journalist and social commentator, writing for the New York Times and Big Sky Journal. He attended Washington State University, graduating with a BS degree in 1976, and a DVM in 1979. He attended Montana State University and the Untied States Air Force Academy prior to being accepted to vetschool. He began his equine veterinary career at Playfair Racecourse, practicing in Spokane Washington for four years. He also practiced at upstate standardbred tracks in New York, Buffalo Raceway and Batavia Downs, as well as the thoroughbred tracks at Canandaigua and Saratoga Springs. He moved back to his homestate of Montana and practiced briefly in Cut Bank before moving to Bozeman and establishing a private mixed practice. He manages the health of all species of animals, domestic and wild.

Sid Gustafson, father, novelist, equine veterinarian, journalist, horseman and equitarian

Bibliography

NOVELS:
PRISONERS OF FLIGHT debut novel, The Permanent Press, Sag Harbor, NY— literary fiction 2003 ISBN 1-57962-088-4

HORSES THEY RODE Second novel, Riverbend Publishing
publication Fall ’06, literary fiction ISBNs 13: 978-1-931832-74-8, ISBN 10: 1-931832-74-9

NON-FICTION:
THE LANGUAGE OF NATURAL HORSEMANSHIP, under contract, publication in 2009, Eclipse Press, Lexington Kentucky
FIRST AID FOR THE ACTIVE DOG a guidebook, Alpine Publications, Loveland, CO 2003 ISBN 1-57779-055-3

FICTION ANTHOLOGIES:
THE SUSPENSE OF LONELINESS, TEARDROPS, short fiction,
STORIES OF THE FORLORN, Letterpress Edition, Birchbrook Press, Delhi, NY ISBN 0-913559-83-0
TALES FOR THE TRAIL SEQUEL, short fiction, ADVENTURES IN AIR, LAND, AND WATER, Letterpress Edition, , Birchbrook Press, Delhi, NY ISBN 0-913559-85-7
FRESH FICTION FOR FRESH WATER FISHING, short fiction, DOLLY DICK, Letterpress edition, Birchbrook, ISBN 0-913559-84-9

Poetry Anthology
POEMS ACROSS THE BIG SKY
ISBN: 0979518504
"The Big Open" (Ingomar Montana)
Many Voices Press

EDUCATION:
Washington State University Pullman, WA
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, ‘79
BS Veterinary Science, cum laude '76

PUBLISHED SHORT STORIES AND POETRY, a partial listing:
Searching for Montana Horseracing, Big Sky Journal, Spring 2009
THE COLOR OF ELK, Big Sky Journal, Fall 2007
TIME, short fiction, Big Sky Journal, Bozeman, MT Winter 2005
THE BIG DRY, short fiction, Big Sky Journal, Bozeman, MT Winter 2004
1973, short fiction, Thema Magazine, Thema Literary Society, Metarie, LA fall 2003
UNVANQUISHED, short fiction, Thema Magazine, Thema Literary Society, Metarie, LA summer 2003, ISSN 1041-4851 Nominated for the 2004 Pushcart Prize
PRISONERS OF FLIGHT, short fiction, Thema Magazine, Thema Literary Society, Metairie, LA, Autumn 1999. Nominated for the 2000 Pushcart Prize.
AGE, fiction, Inkwell Magazine, Manhattenville College, Purchase, NY May 2000
HI-LINE, fiction, spring 2003, Thema Magazine
WHISTLE, fiction, Zone 3 Literary Magazine, spring 2003
THE COLOR OF ELK, fiction, BIG SKY JOURNAL featured fiction, Autumn 2007, October publication
PLUME, prose poetry, The School of Southern Literature, DeadMule.com
BRAKEMAN, fiction, Montana Crossroads Magazine, Livingston, MT 1997
SPRINGSPRUNG, Ariel XVII, Poetry Anthology of Triton College, Chicago, IL National winner, Salute to the Arts Poetry Competition, 1999





Interview:

The novelist SID GUSTAFSON interviewed by Wendel Ingraham…

WI: What brought you to write SWIFT DAM?
SG: I wanted people to know about the Indians I was raised amongst, the Blackfeet.
WI: People do not know?
SG: Not many.
WI: What don’t they know?
SG: What the Indians are up against.
WI: And what is that?
SG: The prejudice towards them and their acculturation troubles.
WI: Sounds abstract. Could you be more specific?
SG: Persistent racism. Difficulties with cultural acceptance, the pains of cultural change.
WI: What is it you most seek for Indians?
SG: Compassion. Knowledge. Accpetance. Indians. Indians have much to show and teach. We should listen. But first we must change society’s view of Indians. We must develop compassion for them, knowledge of them, understanding of their plight. Understanding our collective plight, and how they may help us. In helping us, they help themselves, help us all.
WI: Sounds like a lament of lost ways.
SG: Yes, perhaps. My elegy to the Blackfeet. There are other, more prominent elegiasts. Shultz, Grinnel, Russell, Welch. I do what I can to engender understanding of the Blackfeet, and all native peoples. I am bereaved by their Columbian history. How Manifest Destiny vanquished their way.




Selected literary reviews:

HORSES THEY RODE, a novel
Washington State Magazine, Summer 2007
Reviewed by Brian Ames

HORSES THEY RODE
By Sid Gustafson '77
Riverbend Publishing, Helena, Montana, 2006
Midway through Sid Gustafson’s new novel, Horses They Rode, I found myself put in mind of all the second chances I have had. His take on the reknitting of family, friendship, and one man’s tumultuous life is such a story—a tale of second chances where hope effervesces across a storyscape of high country, horse corrals, drunkenness, and regret that seems, at moments, irresolvable. It’s a wholly American novel, for of course, America is a land forgiving of first mistakes—where a shot at trying again is fair and right.
Wendel Ingraham, Gustafson’s protagonist, is a ranch hand who has roamed Washington State’s Inland Empire, Idaho’s panhandle, and Big Sky Country on a multi-year binge, leaving a daughter and a broken marriage in his wake. A series of experiences, including encounters with a high-school sweetheart and with mentor, companion, and part-time Blackfoot medicine man Bubbles Ground Owl, leads to his sobriety and amends.
Wendel and Bubbles take jobs as hands on a ranch where they worked as youths. And this is where the novel cries its message in earnest. The protagonist is never so competent as when he’s reunited with his beloved horse. The symbiosis that is rediscovered between them, a language of faithfulness and trust, portends atonements awaiting Wendel. A gathering of horsemen and their mounts prompts language from Gustafson that is a gorgeous but gritty admixture of potential:
“Whoever they were, whatever breed of horsemen, they brought horses and they brought hope, hope that horses could revive a manifest heart.”
At the ranch there are additional reconciliations required of Ingraham. In their execution, he emerges whole, “. . . grateful for all the people who’d gathered to live the life they knew best, everything and everyone connected, men and animals, fishes and birds, grass, trees and stars.”
As in his first novel, Prisoners of Flight, Gustafson often joyfully eschews writing conventions. By turns, his forms are starkly tangible or cloaked in mythology. His prose is exuberant and accessible. Rhythmic, he often reads like a long poem: “Parents want their children with them, children of the land, something about having your children with you on the land, native children on native land.”
Horses They Rode is a one-sitting book. And it’s the kind of book about something important in a world full of books about unimportant things. People should like it.—Brian Ames ’85



Horses They Rode
Sid Gustafson
Riverbend Publishing, Helena, MT, 2006. 288 pages. $24.95
hardcover.
Reviewed by O. Alan Weltzien, Professor of English, UM-Western
DRUMLUMMON VIEWS—FALL 2006–WINTER 2007 249

With Horses They Rode, his second novel, horse veterinarian Sid
Gustafson further establishes himself as a strong new voice among
Montana novelists. Gustafson, who grew up on a ranch near
Cut Bank, sets the majority of his novel in his home country, the
Blackfeet Reservation, and his consistently lyrical evocation of
place constitutes his greatest achievement. For readers who have
never set foot in Glacier County, Gustafson easily takes us there,
splendidly painting details of drainages and canyons (e.g. the Two
Medicine), of foothills and wide prospects where the grasses feed
some of the best horses in the world—or so Gustafson persuades
us. Protagonist Wendel Ingraham grew up riding in this country,
at home with the Blackfeet and as knowledgeable as they in the
vegetative rhythms of spring and summer and in the lore and
science of horseflesh. Horses They Rode shows Ingraham returning
to his roots and persuasively grounding himself in his home place.
Gustafson’s lifelong familiarity with the Blackfeet enables him
to persuasively present many minor characters as well as Bubbles
Ground Owl, sage and friend of Wendel’s. Though the plot omits
this northern reach of the Rocky Mountain front in winter, it does
not slight some bleak tribal realities, such as Bubbles’s drunkenness
and final decline and fall.
Horses They Rode could be called a restoration narrative, as its
plot arcs from Wendel’s shattered family life and drunkenness to
his returned health and stabilized identity as expert horse trainer,
ranchhand, and father. The latter proves the most important.
Most of the way through the novel, Gustafson reminds us
through Ingraham’s lover, Nancy/Nan, that “St. Wendel” was “the
patron saint of wanderers and wolves”. The plot begins with
Ingraham in Spokane, that life wrecked, and follows him home
past Whitefish and over Marias Pass. The following spring he
returns briefly to Spokane, ostensibly to buy bulls for Rip Ripley,
owner of the Walking Box Ranch north of Browning. The Spokane
interlude shows Ingraham at the Playfair Racetrack, those scenes
establishing his expertise as a trainer and providing the story of
Dharma Bum, the Montana-born thoroughbred who’s proven the
winningest horse in Playfair history. Gustafson thus playfully nods
to Jack Kerouac’s novel as he does to several other recent American
titles (e.g. James Welch’s Winter in the Blood) in his narrative.
Ingraham re-returns to Glacier County, this time with his young
daughter, Trish, and his lover, Nancy, a Whitefish skier and former
flame, in tow. Wolves wander but live as part of a pack, their
identities acutely social.
Gustafson has already surprised Ingraham and ourselves with
the arrival at the ranch of Paddy, his newly discovered son, product
of a liaison a decade earlier with Gretchen Ripley, the high-strung,
half-native daughter of the owners. Trish’s mother, Ingraham’s
ex-, is a Spokane Indian, so both his son and daughter are part
native. The novel traces his increasing confidence as young father,
fashioning his family in the soil that nurtured him. Wendel tries to
make up for the ten lost years between himself and Paddy, just as
he roots Trish in the camp and horse life he knows intimately. For
the most part, Gustafson succeeds in creating this contemporary
family. Wendel comes into his own as a father even as he finally
learns the reason for the sudden death of his own father, rather
than his gradual disappearance. I find the character of Paddy, a
ten-year-old who appears a rider well beyond his years, not always
convincing. This lost son seems too quickly at ease and too calm in
his quick love of his father. He enters and exits the plot abruptly.
Trish, on the other hand, always acts believably as a five-year-old
daughter who adores her father and who soaks up the minutiae of
his Reservation country like a thirsty flower.
In the character of Ripley, Gustafson has created an
unsurprising ranch owner, one well past his physical prime but still
the patriarch, worrying his aches and pains just as he worries the
future of the Walking Box. Ripley knows the current cost of land
and orders his hands, white and Blackfeet, around while trying to
suppress the memory of Wendel’s father saving his life. He lures
Wendel back to the ranch through a bet and a horserace (“a horse
for a ranch” called, aptly, “Summerhome”), the novel’s climax, and
Wendel is left working cattle and horses as he has been earlier in
the novel. The novel ends with Wendel on the ranch, his son the
likely inheritor of it all. More important is the firm sense that
Wendel knows the ranch and its rhythms of work, if anything,
better than the ostensible owner. He belongs to its ridges and
bottoms and coulees, perhaps more than Rip.
Gustafson opens with the door slamming in the face of
Wendel’s failed marriage: “And that was that for the family life
he’d always dreamed” (8). Its final eight chapters show that family
life blossoming like hardy perennials, more radiantly than ever,
particularly in the Palookaville—love that name—summer idyll. In
the brief Epilogue, following the death and burial of Bubbles, “the
horse dream” illustrates Bubbles bequeathing his “horse medicine
bundle” to Paddy, another native son and inheritor (285−86). In
Bubbles, Gustafson has created the tribal storyteller, repository of
collective wisdom, most at home training horses and repeating the
needed stories.
Clearly, Gustafson knows his way around horsetracks, and
the retrospective story of Dharma Bum at the Playfair Track
foreshadows the native horserace that climaxes the novel. The
great horse, Wendel’s creation and Trish’s inheritance, will travel
east to run at Saratoga for big bucks, but Wendel remains behind,
awaiting Trish’s seasonal return. If Paddy’s appearance as jockey on
Rip’s horse stretches credibility, the father-against-son competition,
in the third and final race, resonates symbolically, as does Bubbles’
drunken interference (which ironically throws the victory to
Paddy). Wendel loses the race to save his son, just as his father
sacrificed his life to save the owner’s. More importantly, Gustafson
paints all the details of the landscape scene—the level terrain of the
course, the Blackfeet crowds, the private, quiet post-race interval
with father and son—with complete assurance.
Gustafson has titled each of his twenty-eight chapters with
a word based upon –man or –men as suffix, and most of these
display facets of the protagonist, like a brightly lit jewel slowly
rotating in a display window. Wendel begins as “Brakeman,” a
freight train transient; the Epilogue, titled “Man,” gathers these
Ingraham facets together and glances at his successor, keeper of
the horse medicine bundle. Horses They Rode represents Riverbend
Publishing’s first original novel, and gracing the dustjacket’s
cover is an attractive painting, The Blue Horse, by Marietta King,
a Blackfeet artist. Gustafson is to be commended for his solid
novel, his lyrical cadences celebrating the union of an individual,
his family and acquaintances, and a tribe, with a particular
place. For the most part, his sometimes run-on syntax serves his
purposes, and his best sentences and paragraphs resemble poetry.
He brings to life the topographies of Glacier County just as he
does a cast of characters white and red. Gustafson has clearly
contributed to Montana’s rich literature of place and has joined
writers like James Welch and Deirdre McNamer in establishing
the Highline, particularly its western reaches near “the Backbone
of the World,” as a lush literary region.

He advocates natural approaches to equine health and consults regarding resolution of animal behavior issues. Much of his animal philosophy is embedded in his novels and short fiction. He is former Professor of Equine Studies at the University of Montana-Western in Dillon, MT where he developed the Natural Horsemanship Program. Based on an appreciation of equine behavior Dr Gustafson advocates natural approaches to equine health, training, and conditioning.

Sid Gustafson, novelist and doctor of veterinary medicine, born under the Rocky Mountain Front during the year of the Horse, read James Willard Schultz’s Montana Indian frontier novels as a youngster. Literarily imbued with the spirit of the horse and buffalo Blackfeet Indians whilst living among them, he creates realistic allegories of contemporary Montana culture. In addition to a career as... More