The domestication of the wild: From pioneer ordeal to accessible tourism

“ We were ten days upon this forest journey, from the time of our crossing the Maumee; and they were hard days, even to those of us long habituated to the hardships of border travel. Indeed, I know few forms of exertion that so thoroughly test the mettle of men as journeying across the wilderness. There are no artificial surroundings, either to inspire or restrain; and insensibly humanity returns to natural conditions, permitting the underlying savage to gain ascendency. ”

“ How much more respectable is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, or any woods—having real difficulties, not of his own creation, drawing his subsistence directly from nature—than that of the helpless multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard times! ”

“ There are guides and porters to carry the blankets for beds, the raw provisions, and the camp equipage; and the motley party of the temporarily decivilized files into the woods, and begins, perhaps by a road, perhaps on a trail, its exhilarating and weary march. The exhilaration arises partly from the casting aside of restraint, partly from the adventure of exploration; and the weariness, from the interminable toil of bad walking, a heavy pack, and the grim monotony of trees and bushes, that shut out all prospect, except an occasional glimpse of the sky. ”

“ It was, in fact, humiliating to reflect that it would now be profitable to exchange all my possessions for the woods instinct of the most unlettered guide. I began to doubt the value of the “culture” that blunts the natural instincts.
It began to be a question whether I could hold out to walk all night; for I must travel, or perish. And now I imagined that a spectre was walking by my side. This was Famine. To be sure, I had only recently eaten a hearty luncheon: but the pangs of hunger got hold on me when I thought that I should have no supper, no breakfast ”

“ Sometimes it is a love of adventure and freedom that sends men out of the more civilized conditions into the less; sometimes it is a constitutional physical lassitude which leads them to prefer the rod to the hoe, the trap to the sickle, and the society of bears to town meetings and taxes. I think that Old Mountain Phelps had merely the instincts of the primitive man, and never any hostile civilizing intent as to the wilderness into which he plunged. ”

“ Along such a thoroughfare many a rain-soaked pioneer has guided in days past the mud-plastered pack-horse which has carried the first beginnings of his fortunes. For what sustains the average settler through the early struggles of pioneering in the wilderness is chiefly the example of those who have done the same thing before, have lived as hard a life or harder, and have emerged as substantial farmers and leading settlers, respected throughout their district. ”

“ Nature is so pitiless, so unresponsive, to a person in trouble! I had read of the soothing companionship of the forest, the pleasure of the pathless woods. But I thought, as I stumbled along in the dismal actuality, that, if I ever got out of it, I would write a letter to the newspapers, exposing the whole thing. There is an impassive, stolid brutality about the woods that has never been enough insisted on. I tried to keep my mind fixed upon the fact of man's superiority to Nature ”

“ There is no need to measure heights, calculate bulk, or compare one sight with another in a territory where beauty and grandeur are spent so freely. The glory of the Sounds is not found in this cliff or that waterfall, in the elevation of any one range or the especial grace of any curve or channel. It comes from the astonishing succession, yet variety, of grand yet beautiful prospects, of charm near at hand contrasted with the sternness of the rocky and snowy wilderness which forms the aerial boundary of the background. ”

“ But, generally, when looking for the first time from an all-embracing standpoint like this, the inexperienced observer is oppressed by the incomprehensible grandeur, variety, and abundance of the mountains rising shoulder to shoulder beyond the reach of vision; and it is only after they have been studied one by one, long and lovingly, that their far-reaching harmonies become manifest. ”

“ The Adirondack wilderness is essentially unbroken. A few bad roads that penetrate it, a few jolting wagons that traverse them, a few barn-like boarding-houses on the edge of the forest, where the boarders are soothed by patent coffee, and stimulated to unnatural gayety by Japan tea, and experimented on by unique cookery, do little to destroy the savage fascination of the region. In half an hour, at any point, one can put himself into solitude and every desirable discomfort. The party that covets the experience of the camp comes down to primitive conditions of dress and equipment. ”

“ Peak after peak of the Southern Alps has fallen to European or Colonial enterprise, and the ambitious visitor to the Mount Cook region, in particular, will have some trouble to find much that remains virgin and yet accessible. For the unambitious, on the other hand, everything has been made easy. The Government and its tourist department has taken the district in hand almost as thoroughly as at Roto-rua, and the holiday-maker may count on being housed, fed, driven about, guided, and protected efficiently and at a reasonable price. Happily, too, nothing staring or vulgar defaces the landscape. ”

“ Any one, however, who is able to travel on horseback may be promised a rich reward if he follows the west coast, southward from the town of Hokitika, and passes between Aorangi and the sea, on that side. Between Hokitika and the Canterbury Plains the journey by rail and coach is for half its distance a succession of beautiful sights, the finest of which is found in the deep gorge of the Otira River, into which the traveller plunges on the western side of the dividing range. ”

“ At daylight we were astir; and, having pressed the principle of fire into our service to make a pot of tea, we carefully extinguished it or sent it into another place, and addressed ourselves to the climb of some thing over two thousand feet. The arduous labor of scaling an Alpine peak has a compensating glory; but the dead lift of our bodies up Nipple Top had no stimulus of this sort. It is simply hard work, for which the strained muscles only get the approbation of the individual conscience that drives them to the task. ”

“ A spirit of loneliness, of fearful isolation, seemed to hover over the restless waters upon the one hand, and those vast silent plains on the other; sea and sky, sky and sand, met the wearied eye wherever it wandered. The scene was unspeakably solemn in its immensity and loneliness; while irresistibly the thought would wander over those fateful leagues of prairie and forest that stretched unbrokenly between this far frontier and the few scattered and remote settlements that were its nearest neighbors. ”

“ There is a popular theory, held by civilians, that a soldier likes to die in battle. I suppose it is as true that a woodsman would like to “pass in his chips,”—the figure seems to be inevitable, struck down by illness and exposure, in the forest solitude, with heaven in sight and a tree-root for his pillow.
The guide seemed really to fear that, if we did not get out of the woods that night, he would never go out ”

“ On the one hand, there would be the sharpness of the senses, the keen instincts (which the fox and the beaver still possess) , the ability to find one's way in the pathless forest, to follow a trail, to circumvent the wild denizens of the woods; and, on the other hand, there would be the philosophy of life which the primitive man, with little external aid, would evolve from original observation and cogitation. It is our good fortune to know such a man ”

“ At its worst, however, the eastern region may claim to be serviceable to the lover of scenery as well as to the sheep-farmer. Its thinly-grassed slopes, bare rocks, and fan-shaped shingle-slips furnish, at any rate, a foil to the grandeur of the central range and the luxuriance of the west. It is, indeed, not easy to believe that such glaciers and passes, such lakes and sea-gulfs, lie beyond the stern barrier, and the enjoyment, when wonderland is penetrated, is all the greater. ”

“ On the other hand, trustworthy guides may be engaged, and colonial hospitality may vary the rigours of camp life. Then, too, may be counted the delights of a mountain life, the scenery of which excels Scotland, while the freshness of the upland air is brilliant and exhilarating in a fashion that Britons can scarcely imagine. And to counterbalance loneliness, the hunter has the sensation of undisturbed independence and freedom from the trammels of convention, as he looks round him in a true wilderness which the hand of man has not yet gashed or fouled. ”

“ In one way the south-western is the most enjoyable division of picturesque New Zealand. There is little here to regret or fear for. Unlike the beauty of the northern forests, here is a grandeur that will not pass away. Even in the thermal zone you are haunted by the memory of the lost terraces; but among the alps and fiords of the south-west Nature sits very strongly entrenched. From the Buller Gorge to Puysegur Point, and from Lake Menzies to Lake Hau-roto, both the climate and the lie of the land combine to keep man’s destructiveness at bay. ”

“ Deer-stalking in New Zealand can scarcely be recommended as an easy diversion for rich and elderly London gentlemen. It is not sport for the fat and scant-of-breath who may be suffering from sedentary living and a plethora of public banquets. New Zealand hills are steep, new Zealand forests and scrubs are dense or matted. Even the open country of the mountains requires lungs of leather and sinews of wire. The hunter when unlucky cannot solace his evenings with gay human society or with the best cookery to be found in a luxurious, civilised country. ”

“ It seems to be agreed that civilization is kept up only by a constant effort: Nature claims its own speedily when the effort is relaxed. If you clear a patch of fertile ground in the forest, uproot the stumps, and plant it, year after year, in potatoes and maize, you say you have subdued it. But, if you leave it for a season or two, a kind of barbarism seems to steal out upon it from the circling woods; coarse grass and brambles cover it; bushes spring up in a wild tangle; the raspberry and the blackberry flower and fruit; and the humorous bear feeds upon them. ”

“ The struggle for life has still to be sustained in New Zealand. It is easier than of yore, however; and the continued prosperity of the last twelve or thirteen years has enabled settlers to bestow thought and money on the lighter and pleasanter side. Homesteads are brighter places than they were: they may not be artistic, but even the most remote are nearly always comfortable. More than comfort the working settler does not ask for. ”

“ It is the wildness and grandeur of the enclosing mountain scenery, and still more the curious, beautiful, wonderful and stupendous natural phenomena which characterize the region, that have raised it to sudden fame, and caused it to be set apart by our national government as a grand national play-ground and museum of unparalleled, indeed incomparable, marvels, free to all men for all time.
Evidences of ancient volcanic action on the grandest scale are so abundant and striking throughout the lake basin, that it has been looked upon as the remains of a mammoth crater, forty miles across. ”

“ Nobody admits much sleep; but everybody is refreshed, and declares it delightful. It is the fresh air all night that invigorates; or maybe it is the tea, or the slap-jacks. The guides have erected a table of spruce bark, with benches at the sides; so that breakfast is taken in form. It is served on tin plates and oak chips. After breakfast begins the day's work. It may be a mountain-climbing expedition, or rowing and angling in the lake, or fishing for trout in some stream two or three miles distant. Nobody can stir far from camp without a guide. ”

“ The spot for a shanty is selected. This side shall be its opening, towards the lake; and in front of it the fire, so that the smoke shall drift into the hut, and discourage the mosquitoes; yonder shall be the cook's fire and the path to the spring. The whole colony bestir themselves in the foundation of a new home,—an enterprise that has all the fascination, and none of the danger, of a veritable new settlement in the wilderness. The axes of the guides resound in the echoing spaces; great trunks fall with a crash; vistas are opened towards the lake and the mountains. ”

“ Probably it is not so much the desire of the congregation to escape from the preacher, or of the preacher to escape from himself, that drives sophisticated people into the wilderness, as it is the unconquered craving for primitive simplicity, the revolt against the everlasting dress-parade of our civilization. From this monstrous pomposity even the artificial rusticity of a Petit Trianon is a relief. It was only human nature that the jaded Frenchman of the regency should run away to the New World, and live in a forest-hut with an Indian squaw ”

“ I am not at all sure whether this desire to camp outside of civilization is creditable to human nature, or otherwise. We hear sometimes that the Turk has been merely camping for four centuries in Europe. I suspect that many of us are, after all, really camping temporarily in civilized conditions; and that going into the wilderness is an escape, longed for, into our natural and preferred state. ”

“ The instinct of barbarism that leads people periodically to throw aside the habits of civilization, and seek the freedom and discomfort of the woods, is explicable enough; but it is not so easy to understand why this passion should be strongest in those who are most refined, and most trained in intellectual and social fastidiousness. Philistinism and shoddy do not like the woods, unless it becomes fashionable to do so; and then, as speedily as possible, they introduce their artificial luxuries, and reduce the life in the wilderness to the vulgarity of a well-fed picnic. ”

“ Hilarious poets who have never fired a gun write hunting-songs,—Ti-ra-la: and good bishops write war-songs,—Ave the Czar!
The hunted doe went down the “open,” clearing the fences splendidly, flying along the stony path. It was a beautiful sight. But consider what a shot it was! If the deer, now, could only have been caught I No doubt there were tenderhearted people in the valley who would have spared her life, shut her up in a stable, and petted her. Was there one who would have let her go back to her waiting-fawn? It is the business of civilization to tame or kill. ”

“ If civilization owes a debt of gratitude to the self-sacrificing sportsmen who have cleared the Adirondack regions of catamounts and savage trout, what shall be said of the army which has so nobly relieved them of the terror of the deer? The deer-slayers have somewhat celebrated their exploits in print; but I think that justice has never been done them.
The American deer in the wilderness, left to himself, leads a comparatively harmless but rather stupid life, with only such excitement as his own timid fancy raises. ”