Of David Thomas, the late detective novelist James Crumley wrote, "All of the old Missoula hands feel the same way about Dave: as if he is the national treasure of our small, but extended nation, a nation founded on those sixties ideals of love of language, a respect for hard work, friendships closer than blood . . . Dave Thomas has spent those years actually working at jobs most of us gave up in our youth, working on the railroad as a tie gang laborer, worked construction as a laborer, clean-up, and wheeled endless barrows of concrete . . . and obviously, he spent long hours writing in bars, on the roadside, and locked in small rooms all over the West working at his craft and art . . . the lonely ecstasy of putting down the words, doing the work all alone." - James Crumley, from the Forward to Thomas's Buck's Last Wreck (1996)