Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools Part 32

=bowers=:--_Bower_ is from the German word _bauer_, meaning a peasant,--so called from the jack or knave; the right bower, in the game of euchre, is the jack of trumps, and the left bower is the other jack of the same color.

=chaparral=:--A thicket of scrub-oaks or th.o.r.n.y shrubs.

=euchred=:--Defeated, as in the game of euchre.

=Judge Lynch=:--A name used for the hurried judging and executing of a suspected person, by private citizens, without due process of law. A Virginian named Lynch is said to have been connected with the origin of the expression.

"=diseased=":--Tennessee's Partner means _deceased_.

=sluicing=:--A trough for water, fitted with gates and valves; it is used in was.h.i.+ng out gold from the soil.

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY

Why is the first sentence a good introduction? Compare it with the first sentence of _Quite So_, page 21. In this selection, why does the author say so much about names? Of what value is the first paragraph? Why is it necessary to tell about Tennessee's Partner's earlier experiences? Who were "the boys" who gathered to see the shooting? Why did they think there would be shooting? Why was there not? Why does the author not give us a fuller picture of Tennessee? What is the proof that he had "a fine flow of humor"? Try in a few words to sum up his character. Read carefully the paragraph beginning "It was a warm night": How does the author give us a good picture of Sandy Bar? Tell in your own words the feelings of the judge, the prisoner, and the jury, as explained in the paragraph beginning "The trial of Tennessee." What does the author gain by such expressions as "a less ambitious covering," "meteorological recollection"? What does Tennessee's Partner mean when he says "What should a man know of his pardner"? Why did the judge think that humor would be dangerous? Why are the people angry when Tennessee's Partner offers his seventeen hundred dollars for Tennessee's release? Why does Tennessee's Partner take its rejection so calmly? What effect does his offer have on the jury? What does the author mean by "the weak and foolish deed"? Does he approve the hanging? Why does Tennessee's Partner not show any grief? What do you think of Jack Folinsbee? What is gained by the long pa.s.sage of description? What does Tennessee's Partner's speech show about the friends.h.i.+p of the two men? About friends.h.i.+p in general? Do men often care so much for each other? Is it possible that Tennessee's Partner died of grief? Is the conclusion good? Comment on the kind of men who figure in the story. Are there any such men now? Why is this called a very good story?

Some time after you have read the story, run through it and see how many different sections or scenes there are in it. How are these sections linked together? Look carefully at the beginning of each paragraph and see how the connection is made with the paragraph before.

THEME SUBJECTS

Two Friends A Miner's Cabin The Thief The Road through the Woods The Trial A Scene in the Court Room Early Days in our County Bret Harte's Best Stories The Escaped Convict The Highwayman A Lumber Camp Roughing It The Judge The Robbers' Rendezvous An Odd Character Early Days in the West A Mining Town Underground with the Miners Capturing the Thieves The Sheriff

SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING

=Two Friends=:--Tell where these two friends lived and how long they had known each other. Describe each one, explaining his peculiarities; perhaps you can make his character clear by telling some incident concerning him. What seemed to be the attraction between the two friends? Were they much together? What did people say of them? What did they do for each other? Did they talk to others about their friends.h.i.+p?

Did either make a sacrifice for the other? If so, tell about it rather fully. Was there any talk about it? What was the result of the sacrifice? Was the friends.h.i.+p ever broken?

=Early Days in our County=:--Perhaps you can get material for this from some old settlers, or from a county history. Tell of the first settlement: Who was first on the ground, and why did he choose this particular region? What kind of shelter was erected? How fast did the settlement grow? Tell some incidents of the early days. You might speak also of the processes of clearing the land and of building; of primitive methods of living, and the difficulty of getting supplies. Were there any dangers? Speak of several prominent persons, and tell what they did.

Go on and tell of development of the settlements and the surrounding country. Were there any strikingly good methods of making money? Was there any excitement over land, or gold, or high prices of products?

Were there any misfortunes, such as floods, or droughts, or fires, or cyclones? When did the railroad reach the region? What differences did it make? What particular influences have brought about recent conditions?

=The Sheriff=:--Describe the sheriff--his physique, his features, his clothes, his manner. Does he look the part? Do you know, or can you imagine, one of his adventures? Perhaps you will wish to tell his story in his own words. Think carefully whether it would be better to do this, or to tell the story in the third person. Make the tale as lively and stirring as possible. Remember that when you are reporting the talk of the persons involved, it is better to quote their words directly. See that everything you say helps in making the situation clear or in actually telling the story. Close the story rather quickly after its outcome has been made quite clear.

COLLATERAL READINGS

How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar Bret Harte The Outcasts of Poker Flat " "

The Luck of Roaring Camp " "

Baby Sylvester " "

A Waif of the Plains " "

How I Went to the Mines " "

M'liss " "

Frontier Stories " "

Tales of the Argonauts " "

A Sappho of Green Springs and Other Stories " "

Pony Tracks Frederic Remington Crooked Trails " "

Coeur d'Alene Mary Hallock Foote The Led-Horse Claim " " "

Wolfville Days Alfred Henry Lewis Wolfville Nights " " "

The Sunset Trail " " "

Pathfinders of the West Agnes C. Laut The Old Santa Fe Trail H. Inman Stories of the Great West Theodore Roosevelt California and the Californians D.S. Jordan Our Italy C.D. Warner California Josiah Royce The West from a Car Window R.H. Davis The Story of the Railroad Cy Warman Roughing It S.L. Clemens Poems Joaquin Miller

Appropriate poems by Bret Harte:--

John Burns of Gettysburg In the Tunnel The Lost Galleon Grizzly Battle Bunny The Wind in the Chimney Reveille Plain Language from Truthful James (The Heathen Chinee)

Highways and Byways in the Rocky Mountains Clifton Johnson Trails of the Pathfinders G.B. Grinnell Stories of California E.M. s.e.xton Glimpses of California Helen Hunt Jackson California: Its History and Romance J.S. McGroarty Heroes of California G.W. James Recollections of an Old Pioneer P.H. Bennett The Mountains of California John Muir Romantic California E.C. Peixotto Silverado Squatters R.L. Stevenson Jimville: A Bret Harte Town (in _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1902) Mary Austin The Prospector (poem) Robert W. Service The Rover " " "

The Life of Bret Harte H.C. Merwin Bret Harte Henry W. Boynton Bret Harte T.E. Pemberton American Writers of To-day, pp. 212-229 H.C. Vedder Bookman, 15:312 (see also map on page 313).

For stories of famous friends.h.i.+ps, look up:--

Damon and Pythias (any good encyclopedia).

Patroclus and Achilles (the Iliad).

David and Jonathan (the Bible: 1st Samuel 18:1-4; 19:1-7; chapter 20, entire; 23:16-18; chapter 31, entire; 2d Samuel, chapter 1, entire).

The Subst.i.tute (Le Remplacant) Francois Coppee (In _Modern Short-stories_ edited by M. Ashmun.)

THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY

WOODROW WILSON

(In _Mere Literature_)

Our national history has been written for the most part by New England men. All honor to them! Their scholars.h.i.+p and their characters alike have given them an honorable enrollment amongst the great names of our literary history; and no just man would say aught to detract, were it never so little, from their well-earned fame. They have written our history, nevertheless, from but a single point of view. From where they sit, the whole of the great development looks like an Expansion of New England. Other elements but play along the sides of the great process by which the Puritan has worked out the development of nation and polity.

It is he who has gone out and possessed the land: the man of destiny, the type and impersonation of a chosen people. To the Southern writer, too, the story looks much the same, if it be but followed to its culmination,--to its final storm and stress and tragedy in the great war. It is the history of the Suppression of the South. Spite of all her splendid contributions to the steadfast accomplishment of the great task of building the nation; spite of the long leaders.h.i.+p of her statesmen in the national counsels; spite of her joint achievements in the conquest and occupation of the West, the South was at last turned upon on every hand, rebuked, proscribed, defeated. The history of the United States, we have learned, was, from the settlement at Jamestown to the surrender at Appomattox, a long-drawn contest for mastery between New England and the South,--and the end of the contest we know. All along the parallels of lat.i.tude ran the rivalry, in those heroical days of toil and adventure during which population crossed the continent, like an army advancing its encampments, Up and down the great river of the continent, too, and beyond, up the slow incline of the vast steppes that lift themselves toward the crowning towers of the Rockies,--beyond that, again, in the gold-fields and upon the green plains of California, the race for ascendency struggled on,--till at length there was a final coming face to face, and the masterful folk who had come from the loins of New England won their consummate victory.

It is a very dramatic form for the story. One almost wishes it were true. How fine a unity it would give our epic! But perhaps, after all, the real truth is more interesting. The life of the nation cannot be reduced to these so simple terms. These two great forces, of the North and of the South, unquestionably existed,--were unquestionably projected in their operation out upon the great plane of the continent, there to combine or repel, as circ.u.mstances might determine. But the people that went out from the North were not an unmixed people; they came from the great Middle States as well as from New England. Their transplantation into the West was no more a reproduction of New England or New York or Pennsylvania or New Jersey than Ma.s.sachusetts was a reproduction of old England, or New Netherland a reproduction of Holland. The Southern people, too, whom they met by the western rivers and upon the open prairies, were transformed, as they themselves were, by the rough fortunes of the frontier. A mixture of peoples, a modification of mind and habit, a new round of experiment and adjustment amidst the novel life of the baked and untilled plain, and the far valleys with the virgin forests still thick upon them: a new temper, a new spirit of adventure, a new impatience of restraint, a new license of life,--these are the characteristic notes and measures of the time when the nation spread itself at large upon the continent, and was transformed from a group of colonies into a family of States.

The pa.s.ses of these eastern mountains were the arteries of the nation's life. The real breath of our growth and manhood came into our nostrils when first, like Governor Spotswood and that gallant company of Virginian gentlemen that rode with him in the far year 1716, the Knights of the Order of the Golden Horseshoe, our pioneers stood upon the ridges of the eastern hills and looked down upon those reaches of the continent where lay the untrodden paths of the westward migration. There, upon the courses of the distant rivers that gleamed before them in the sun, down the farther slopes of the hills beyond, out upon the broad fields that lay upon the fertile banks of the "Father of Waters," up the long tilt of the continent to the vast hills that looked out upon the Pacific--there were the regions in which, joining with people from every race and clime under the sun, they were to make the great compounded nation whose liberty and mighty works of peace were to cause all the world to stand at gaze. Thither were to come Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Celts, Dutch, Slavs,--men of the Latin races and of the races of the Orient, as well as men, a great host, of the first stock of the settlements: English, Scots, Scots-Irish,--like New England men, but touched with the salt of humor, hard, and yet neighborly too. For this great process of growth by grafting, of modification no less than of expansion, the colonies,--the original thirteen States,--were only preliminary studies and first experiments. But the experiments that most resembled the great methods by which we peopled the continent from side to side and knit a single polity across all its length and breadth, were surely the experiments made from the very first in the Middle States of our Atlantic seaboard.

Here from the first were mixture of population, variety of element, combination of type, as if of the nation itself in small. Here was never a simple body, a people of but a single blood and extraction, a polity and a practice brought straight from one motherland. The life of these States was from the beginning like the life of the country: they have always shown the national pattern. In New England and the South it was very different. There some of the great elements of the national life were long in preparation: but separately and with an individual distinction; without mixture,--for long almost without movement. That the elements thus separately prepared were of the greatest importance, and run everywhere like chief threads of the pattern through all our subsequent life, who can doubt? They give color and tone to every part of the figure. The very fact that they are so distinct and separately evident throughout, the very emphasis of individuality they carry with them, but proves their distinct origin. The other elements of our life, various though they be, and of the very fibre, giving toughness and consistency to the fabric, are merged in its texture, united, confused, almost indistinguishable, so thoroughly are they mixed, intertwined, interwoven, like the essential strands of the stuff itself: but these of the Puritan and the Southerner, though they run everywhere with the rest and seem upon a superficial view themselves the body of the cloth, in fact modify rather than make it.

What in fact has been the course of American history? How is it to be distinguished from European history? What features has it of its own, which give it its distinctive plan and movement? We have suffered, it is to be feared, a very serious limitation of view until recent years by having all our history written in the East. It has smacked strongly of a local flavor. It has concerned itself too exclusively with the origins and Old-World derivations of our story. Our historians have made their march from the sea with their heads over shoulder, their gaze always backward upon the landing-places and homes of the first settlers. In spite of the steady immigration, with its persistent tide of foreign blood, they have chosen to speak often and to think always of our people as sprung after all from a common stock, bearing a family likeness in every branch, and following all the while old, familiar, family ways.

The view is the more misleading because it is so large a part of the truth without being all of it. The common British stock did first make the country, and has always set the pace. There were common inst.i.tutions up and down the coast; and these had formed and hardened for a persistent growth before the great westward migration began which was to re-shape and modify every element of our life. The national government itself was set up and made strong by success while yet we lingered for the most part upon the eastern coast and feared a too distant frontier.

But, the beginnings once safely made, change set in apace. Not only so: there had been slow change from the first. We have no frontier now, we are told,--except a broken fragment, it may be, here and there in some barren corner of the western lands, where some inhospitable mountain still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking to break the baked surface of the plains and occupy them in the very teeth of hostile nature. But at first it was all frontier,--a mere strip of settlements stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of the wilds: an untouched continent in front of them, and behind them an unfrequented sea that almost never showed so much as the momentary gleam of a sail. Every step in the slow process of settlement was but a step of the same kind as the first, an advance to a new frontier like the old. For long we lacked, it is true, that new breed of frontiersmen born in after years beyond the mountains. Those first frontiersmen had still a touch of the timidity of the Old World in their blood: they lacked the frontier heart. They were "Pilgrims" in very fact,--exiled, not at home. Fine courage they had: and a steadfastness in their bold design which it does a faint-hearted age good to look back upon. There was no thought of drawing back.

Steadily, almost calmly, they extended their seats. They built homes, and deemed it certain their children would live there after them. But they did not love the rough, uneasy life for its own sake. How long did they keep, if they could, within sight of the sea! The wilderness was their refuge; but how long before it became their joy and hope! Here was their destiny cast; but their hearts lingered and held back. It was only as generations pa.s.sed and the work widened about them that their thought also changed, and a new thrill sped along their blood. Their life had been new and strange from their first landing in the wilderness. Their houses, their food, their clothing, their neighborhood dealings were all such as only the frontier brings. Insensibly they were themselves changed. The strange life became familiar; their adjustment to it was at length unconscious and without effort; they had no plans which were not inseparably a part and a product of it. But, until they had turned their backs once for all upon the sea; until they saw their western borders cleared of the French; until the mountain pa.s.ses had grown familiar, and the lands beyond the central and constant theme of their hope, the goal and dream of their young men, they did not become an American people.

When they did, the great determining movement of our history began. The very visages of the people changed. That alert movement of the eye, that openness to every thought of enterprise or adventure, that nomadic habit which knows no fixed home and has plans ready to be carried any whither,--all the marks of the authentic type of the "American" as we know him came into our life. The crack of the whip and the song of the teamster, the heaving chorus of boatmen poling their heavy rafts upon the rivers, the laughter of the camp, the sound of bodies of men in the still forests, became the characteristic notes in our air. A roughened race, embrowned in the sun, hardened in manner by a coa.r.s.e life of change and danger, loving the rude woods and the crack of the rifle, living to begin something new every day, striking with the broad and open hand, delicate in nothing but the touch of the trigger, leaving cities in its track as if by accident rather than design, settling again to the steady ways of a fixed life only when it must: such was the American people whose achievement it was to be to take possession of their continent from end to end ere their national government was a single century old. The picture is a very singular one! Settled life and wild side by side: civilization frayed at the edges,--taken forward in rough and ready fas.h.i.+on, with a song and a swagger,--not by statesmen, but by woodsmen and drovers, with axes and whips and rifles in their hands, clad in buckskin, like huntsmen.

It has been said that we have here repeated some of the first processes of history; that the life and methods of our frontiersmen take us back to the fortunes and hopes of the men who crossed Europe when her forests, too, were still thick upon her. But the difference is really very fundamental, and much more worthy of remark than the likeness.

Those shadowy ma.s.ses of men whom we see moving upon the face of the earth in the far-away, questionable days when states were forming: even those stalwart figures we see so well as they emerge from the deep forests of Germany, to displace the Roman in all his western provinces and set up the states we know and marvel upon at this day, show us men working their new work at their own level. They do not turn back a long cycle of years from the old and settled states, the ordered cities, the tilled fields, and the elaborated governments of an ancient civilization, to begin as it were once more at the beginning. They carry alike their homes and their states with them in the camp and upon the ordered march of the host. They are men of the forest, or else men hardened always to take the sea in open boats. They live no more roughly in the new lands than in the old. The world has been frontier for them from the first. They may go forward with their life in these new seats from where they left off in the old. How different the circ.u.mstances of our first settlement and the building of new states on this side the sea! Englishmen, bred in law and ordered government ever since the Norman lawyers were followed a long five hundred years ago across the narrow seas by those masterful administrators of the strong Plantagenet race, leave an ancient realm and come into a wilderness where states have never been; leave a land of art and letters, which saw but yesterday "the s.p.a.cious times of great Elizabeth," where Shakespeare still lives in the gracious leisure of his closing days at Stratford, where cities teem with trade and men go bravely dight in cloth of gold, and turn back six centuries,--nay, a thousand years and more,--to the first work of building states in a wilderness! They bring the steadied habits and sobered thoughts of an ancient realm into the wild air of an untouched continent. The weary stretches of a vast sea lie, like a full thousand years of time, between them and the life in which till now all their thought was bred. Here they stand, as it were, with all their tools left behind, centuries struck out of their reckoning, driven back upon the long dormant instincts and forgotten craft of their race, not used this long age. Look how singular a thing: the work of a primitive race, the thought of a civilized! Hence the strange, almost grotesque groupings of thought and affairs in that first day of our history.

Subtle politicians speak the phrases and practice the arts of intricate diplomacy from council chambers placed within log huts within a clearing. Men in ruffs and lace and polished shoe-buckles thread the lonely glades of primeval forests. The microscopical distinctions of the schools, the thin notes of a metaphysical theology are woven in and out through the labyrinths of grave sermons that run hours long upon the still air of the wilderness. Belief in dim refinements of dogma is made the test for man or woman who seeks admission to a company of pioneers.

When went there by an age since the great flood when so singular a thing was seen as this: thousands of civilized men suddenly rusticated and bade do the work of primitive peoples,--Europe _frontiered_!