While I have striven to evoke the city of Manitowoc and the town of Wisdom as they might have appeared to a youngster more than sixty years ago, I have taken liberties whenever needed for plot purposes. Similarly, my version of Crow Fair is largely imaginary, and I apologize for the story’s necessity that the great gathering coincide with the Fourth of July, when in actuality Crow Fair takes place the third weekend in August. I can’t resist adding that my own experience at such a gathering dates back to the mid-1950s, when my family and I, residents of the Blackfeet Reservation in season sheepherding for three years, never missed attending “North American Indian Days” in Browning. Some memories take deep root.
At the time of this story, 1951, the small Blackfeet Reservation community of Heart Butte had no high school and hence no Heart Butte Warriors team of famous basketball proficiency as I portrayed. But since then, Heart Butte has attained a high school and the Warriors have twice been Class C state basketball champions, an example of life copying art that can only make an author grin.
While Highpockets, the Jersey Mosquito, and the other haymaking hoboes are creations of my imagination, their tradition of following the crops derives from the magisterial study of transient harvest workers in American society, Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West by Mark Wyman.
Donny’s on-the-bus session with Jack Kerouac is of course of my own making, with the exception of the first paragraph in his inscription for Donny (“You think about what actually happened” et al.), which can be found on page 36 of Writers on Writing, edited by Jon Winokur.