Throughout chapter 1 of Medicine River, the author includes several letters that Will’s father, Bob, wrote to his wife, Rose, who is Will and James’s mother. After they split up, Rose refused to discuss him with her sons. Will finds the letters by picking the lock in a trunk and, rather than ask his mother’s permission, reads them in secret. When Rose discovers this, she is so furious that she hits Will and forbids the boys to pry into her private things. She not only rejects the idea that the letters also belong to them but also threatens to burn them. The fact that she had kept the letters rather than destroy them indicates that she retained some affection for him. Will removes some letters and hides them where he can continue to read them.

The letters reveal that Rose had remained in contact with her husband, as one of them indicates that she had sent him a photograph of the boys as he had requested. The overall impression the letters convey is that Will’s father was impractical and did not plan for the future. He seems to be drifting between jobs, at one point riding in a rodeo. The man never seems to have much money and has not provided financial support for his sons. The constant stream of excuses he provides seem to be lies: he mentions having called but gotten no answer and sending them Christmas presents that never arrived.

The chapter goes back and forth in time, from Will’s childhood when he first read the letters to the present, after his mother’s death, when his friend Harlen brings him the letters. Will’s boyish romantic perspective on his father, who by now has passed away, turned to bitterness, as he refers to him being “drunk.”