Together, the book and movie get lots of credit or blame for turning Montana into a recreation destination. But “A River Runs Through It” turns more around the challenging relationship between Norman and Paul, and their father, the Rev. John Maclean of Missoula’s First Presbyterian Church. It ends tragically, with Paul’s murder.
In “Home Waters,” John Maclean reveals a confounding detail. The book and movie conclude with Paul being killed over a gambling debt at Lolo Hot Springs. He actually died after an unexplained beating in Chicago, where he was a newspaper reporter.
John Maclean said his father took the liberty of writing fiction, not memoir, in moving the location of his brother’s death. In doing so, Norman Maclean transformed Paul’s end from “a meaningless murder in a Chicago alley” into something more — and that something has resonated with readers ever since.
“He’d get fan mail, saying ‘I had siblings who were troubled and I offered something of myself and it was refused,’” John Maclean recalled. “They felt alone. But then they’d say how ‘I read the story about how this suffering was taken to an eloquent level, and I was comforted.’”
“Home Waters” contains another serendipitous anecdote of the Macleans’ time in Missoula: The impact of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. It notes how a group of soldiers at Fort Missoula enjoying a Sunday partying in town triggered an outbreak.
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