The U.P. Trail

The U.P. Trail

The Project Gutenberg Etext of The U.P. Trail, by Zane Grey #14 in
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Title: The U.P. Trail
Author: Zane Grey
Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4684] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 27,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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ZANE GREY

THE U. P. TRAIL

... When I think how the railroad has been pushed through this
unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes; how at each stage of
the construction roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and
death, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside
stations in the desert; how in these uncouth places Chinese pirates
worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe,
gambling, drinking, quarreling, and murdering like wolves; and then
when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by
gentlemen in frock-coats, with a view to nothing more extraordinary
than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris--it seems to me as if this
railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live,
as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all
the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest,
the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary
work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require,
what was Troy to this?
--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON In ACROSS THE PLAINS

1
In the early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling yellow
and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and miles out
upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the undulating
prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding lines of
cottonwoods, to a slow, vast heave of rising ground-- Wyoming--where
the herds of buffalo grazed and the wolf was lord and the camp-fire of
the trapper sent up its curling blue smoke from beside some lonely
stream; on and on over the barren lands of eternal monotony, all so
gray and wide and solemn and silent under the endless sky; on, ever on,
up to the bleak, black hills and into the waterless gullies and through
the rocky gorges where the deer browsed and the savage lurked; then
slowly rising to the pass between the great bold peaks, and across the

windy uplands into Utah, with its verdant valleys, green as emeralds,
and its haze- filled canons and wonderful wind-worn cliffs and walls,
and its pale salt lakes, veiled in the shadows of stark and lofty rocks,
dim, lilac-colored, austere, and isolated; ever onward across Nevada,
and