The Blazed Trail | Page 3

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This etext was produced by Douglas E. Levy.

THE BLAZED TRAIL
by Stewart Edward White

TO MY FATHER-- From whose early pioneer life are drawn many of Harry Thorpe's experiences.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I: THE FOREST

PART II: THE LANDLOOKER

PART III: THE BLAZING OF THE TRAIL

PART IV: THORPE'S DREAM GIRL

PART V: THE FOLLOWING OF THE TRAIL


PART I: THE FOREST

Chapter I
When history has granted him the justice of perspective, we shall know the American Pioneer as one of the most picturesque of her many figures. Resourceful, self-reliant, bold; adapting himself with fluidity to diverse circumstances and conditions; meeting with equal cheerfulness of confidence and completeness of capability both unknown dangers and the perils by which he has been educated; seizing the useful in the lives of the beasts and men nearest him, and assimilating it with marvellous rapidity; he presents to the world a picture of complete adequacy which it would be difficult to match in any other walk of life. He is a strong man, with a strong man's virtues and a strong man's vices. In him the passions are elemental, the dramas epic, for he lives in the age when men are close to nature, and draw from her their forces. He satisfies his needs direct from the earth. Stripped of all the towns can give him, he merely resorts to a facile substitution. It becomes an affair of rawhide for leather, buckskin for cloth, venison for canned tomatoes. We feel that his steps are planted on solid earth, for civilizations may crumble without disturbing his magnificent self-poise. In him we perceive dimly his environment. He has something about him which other men do not possess--a frank clearness of the eye, a swing