James Welch: 1940-2003

It ran small in today’s Spokesman-Review. You could just barely catch the headline on page B6 of the Region section. It read:

“Montana author,
Welch, dies at 62”

That’s Welch as in James Welch , the Missoula writer whose works include “Fools Crow,” “The Death of Jim Loney” and “Winter in the Blood.” Welch, the reports say, died Monday of a heart attack. He’d been under treatment for lung cancer.

But those are just words. And not very many of them. For those of us who take in the occasional literary reading at Auntie’s Bookstore — which as we all know is one of the best independent bookstores in the entire Pacific Northwest — Welch’s story was much more than what was described in that small obituary.

Welch was the gentle, friendly man who made numerous trips to Spokane over the years. He was the man who read from his books in a manner so low-key that he never could capture the power of what he’d put on the page. He was the mentor who helped give younger writers such as Debra Magpie-Earling the early push they needed. He was the guy who took a chance meeting with a character in a Marseilles cafe and turned it into his novel “The Heartsong of Charging Elk.” He was the man committed to telling the Indian side of The Battle of the Little Bighorn, which he did in his book “Killing Custer: The Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians.”

He was one of a kind. The region is poorer for his absence. And so is literature.