John G. Neihardt

“ Dream back the rain of some old lunar June
And ache through all its craters to be green.
Little they know what life’s one love can mean,
Who shrine it in a bower of peace and bliss:
Pang dwelling in a puckered cicatrice
More truly figures this belated love.
Yet very precious was the hurt thereof,
Grievous to bear, too dear to cast away.
6Now Jamie went with Hugh; but who shall say
If ‘twas a warm heart or a wind of whim,
Love, or the rover’s teasing itch in him,
Moved Jamie? Howsoe’er, ‘twas good to see
Graybeard and Goldhair riding knee to knee,
One age in young adventure. ”

“ As though Spring-fire should waken out of snow—
5A wistful light across that mask of gray.
And once Hugh smiled his enigmatic way,
While poring long on Jamie’s face, and said:
“So with their sons are women brought to bed,
Sore wounded!”
Thus united were the two:
And some would dub the old man ‘Mother Hugh’;
While those in whom all living waters sank
To some dull inner pool that teemed and stank
With formless evil, into that morass
Gazed, and saw darkly there, as in a glass,
The foul shape of some weakly envied sin.
For each man builds a world and dwells therein. ”

“ And all men play the losing hand alone.
But when at noon he had not ceased to moan,
And fought still like the strong man he had been,
18There grew a vague mistrust that he might win,
And all this be a tale for wondering ears.
So Major Henry called for volunteers,
Two men among the eighty who would stay
To wait on Glass and keep the wolves away
Until he did whatever he should do.
All quite agreed ‘twas bitter bread for Hugh,
Yet none, save Jamie, felt in duty bound
To run the risk—until the hat went round,
And pity wakened, at the silver’s clink,
In Jules Le Bon. ”

“ The butte soared, like a soul serene and white
Because of the katharsis of the night.
All day Hugh fought with sleep and struggled on
Southeastward; for the heavy heat was gone
Despite the naked sun. The blank Northwest
Breathed coolly; and the crawler thought it best
To move while yet each little break and hollow
And shallow basin of the bison-wallow
Begrudged the earth and air its dwindling store. ”

“ Men school the dream to build the past anew,
So out of dream and fragment builded Hugh,
And came upon the reason of his plight:
The bear’s attack—the shot—and then the night
Wherein men talked as ghosts above a grave.
Some consciousness of will the memory gave:
He would get up. The painful effort spent
Made the wide heavens billow as a tent
Wind-struck, the shaken prairie sag and roll. ”

“ Conspirant with the overbending skies;
And lo, the one was blue as Jamie’s eyes,
The other of the color of his hair—
Twin hues of falseness merging to a stare,
As though such guilt, thus visibly immense,
Regarded its effect with insolence!
Alas for those who fondly place above
The act of loving, what they chance to love;
Who prize the goal more dearly than the way!
For time shall plunder them, and change betray,
And life shall find them vulnerable still.
A bitter-sweet narcotic to the will,
Hugh’s love increased the peril of his plight ”

“ Old Hugh stared long upon the pictured blaze,
And what he saw went upward in the smoke.
But once, as with an inner lightning stroke,
The veil was rent, and briefly men discerned
What pent-up fires of selfless passion burned
Beneath the still gray smoldering of him.
There was a rakehell lad, called Little Jim,
Jamie or Petit Jacques; for scarce began
The downy beard to mark him for a man. ”

“ In the hot hush Hugh heard his temples boom.
Thirst tortured. Motion was a languid pain.
Why seek some further nowhere on the plain?
Here might the kiotes feast as well as there.
So spoke some loose-lipped spirit of despair;
And still Hugh moved, volitionless—a weight
Submissive to that now unconscious hate,
As darkling water to the hidden moon.
Now when the night wore on in middle swoon,
The crawler, roused from stupor, was aware
Of some strange alteration in the air.
To breathe became an act of conscious will. ”

“ Of a small spring that bullberries stooped to scan,
A ragged heap that should have been a man,
A huddled, broken thing—and it was Hugh!
There was no need for any closer view.
As, on the instant of a lightning flash
Ere yet the split gloom closes with a crash,
A landscape stares with every circumstance
Of rock and shrub—just so the fatal chance
Of Hugh’s one shot, made futile with surprise,
Was clear to Jamie. Then before his eyes
The light whirled in a giddy dance of red ”

“ Was it Hugh or Death?
The old man breathed with faintly fluttering breath,
Nor did his body shudder as before.
Jules triumphed sadly. ‘It would soon be o’er;
So men grew quiet when they lost their grip
And did not care. At sundown he would slip
Into the deeper silence.’
Jamie wept,
Unwitting how a furtive gladness crept
Into his heart that gained a stronger beat.
So cities, long beleaguered, take defeat—
Unto themselves half traitors.
Jules began
To dig a hole that might conceal a man ”

“ Than Hugh now, pouncing on a trader’s knife
Worn hollow in the use of bounteous days!
And now behold a rich man by the blaze
Of his own hearth—a lord of steel and fire!
87Not having, but the measure of desire
Determines wealth. Who gaining more, seek most,
Are ever the pursuers of a ghost
And lend their fleetness to the fugitive.
For Hugh, long goaded by the wish to live,
What gage of mastery in fire and tool!—
That twain wherewith Time put the brute to school,
Evolving Man, the maker and the seer. ”

“ Saddle up! We’ve got to get away!”
Small wit had Jamie left to ferret guile,
But fumblingly obeyed Le Bon; the while
Jules knelt beside the man who could not flee:
For big hearts lack not time for charity
However thick the blows of fate may fall.
Yet, in that Jules Le Bon was practical,
He could not quite ignore a hunting knife,
A flint, a gun, a blanket—gear of life
Scarce suited to the customs of the dead!
And Hugh slept soundly in his ample bed,
Star-canopied and blanketed with night,
Unwitting how Venality and Fright
Made hot the westward trail of Henry’s men. ”

“ The sick one tells the story of old Hugh
To him whose face, averted from the glow,
Still lurks in gloom. The winds of battle blow
Once more along the steep. Again one sees
The rescue from the fury of the Rees,
The graybeard’s fondness for the gay lad; then
The westward march with Major Henry’s men
With all that happened there upon the Grand.
“And so we hit the trail of Henry’s band,”
The youth continues; “for we feared to die:
And dread of shame was ready with the lie
We carried to our comrades. Hugh was dead
And buried there beside the Grand, we said. ”

“ They sniff the clean bones of the bison cow,
Howl to the skies; and now with manes a-rough
They nose the man-smell leading to the bluff;
Pause puzzled at the base and sweep the height
With questioning yelps. Aloft, crouched low in fright,
Already Hugh can hear the braves’ guffaws
At their scorned foeman yielded to the squaws’
Inverted mercy and a slow-won grave.
Since Earth’s first mother scolded from a cave
And that dear riddle of her love began,
No man has wrought a weapon against man
To match the deadly venom brewed above
The lean, blue, blinding heart-fires of her love. ”

“ The crunch of panic feet along the snow;
And someone stammered huskily and low:
“My God! I saw the Old Man’s ghost out there!”
‘Twas spoken as one speaks who feels his hair
Prickle the scalp. And then another said—
It seemed like Henry’s voice—“The dead are dead:
What talk is this, Le Bon? You saw him die!
Who’s there?”
Hugh strove to shout, to give the lie
To those within; but could not fetch a sound.
Just so he dreamed of lying under ground
Beside the Grand and hearing overhead
The talk of men. ”

“ When Lewis and Clark were descending the Missouri River in the summer of 1806 on their return from the mouth of the Columbia, they met bands of traders pushing on toward the country from whence the explorers had just come. These were the vanguard of the real history makers of the Early West. It was such men as these who, during the next generation, as Chittenden says, “first explored and established the routes of travel which are now and always will be the avenues of commerce in that region.” ”

“ Nevertheless, it remains true that the story of the West during the first four decades of the nineteenth century is the story of the wandering bands of trappers and traders who explored the wilderness in search of furs from the British boundary to Mexico and from the Missouri to the Pacific. History, as written in the past, has been too much a chronological record of official governmental acts, too little an intimate account of the lives of the people themselves. ”

“ For no young eye could trace so dim a trail,
Or line the rifle sights with speed so true.
Nor might the wistful Jamie go with Hugh;
“For,” so Hugh chaffed, “my trick of getting game
Might teach young eyes to put old eyes to shame.
An old dog never risks his only bone.” ”

“ Doubtless, the democratic spirit that now seems to be sweeping the world will, if it continues to spread, revolutionize our whole conception of history, bringing us to realize that the glory of the race is not the glory of a chosen few, but that it radiates from the precious heroic stuff of common human lives. ”

“ So Jules ran on, while, ready for the start,
The pawing horses nickered and the men,
Impatient in their saddles, yawned. And then,
With brief advice, a round of bluff good-byes
19And some few reassuring backward cries,
The troop rode up the valley with the day.
Intent upon his friend, with naught to say,
Sat Jamie; while Le Bon discussed at length
The reasonable limits of man’s strength—
A self-conducted dialectic strife
That made absurd all argument for life
And granted but a fresh-dug hole for Hugh. ”

“ What does matter, is the fact that the muster roll of the two parties of Ashley and Henry, then united at the mouth of the Grand, contained nearly all of the great names in the history of the West from the time of Lewis and Clark to the coming of the settlers. ”

“ Nine times, ere yet the vengeance of the Ree
Should make their foe the haunter of a tale.
Midway to safety on the northern trail
The scoriac region of a hell burned black
Forbade the crawler. And for all his lack,
Hugh had no heart to journey with the suns:
No suppliant unto those faithless ones
Should bid for pity at the Big Horn’s mouth.
The greater odds for safety in the South
Allured him; so he felt the midday sun
Blaze down the coulee of a little run
38That dwindled upward to the watershed
Whereon the feeders of the Moreau head—
Scarce more than deep-carved runes of vernal rain. ”

“ The tremendous mood of heroism that was developed in our American West during that period is properly a part of your racial inheritance; and certainly no less important a part than the memory of ancient heroes. Indeed, it can be shown that those men—Kentuckians, Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Ohioans—were direct descendants, in the epic line, of all the heroes of our Aryan race that have been celebrated by the poets of the Past ”

“ Of trappers out of Henry’s Post, to bear
Dispatches down to Atkinson, and there
To furnish out a keelboat for the Horn.
And four went lightly, but the fifth seemed worn
As with a heavy heart; for that was he
Who should have died but did not.
110Silently
He heard the careless parley of his men,
And thought of how the Spring should come again,
That garish strumpet with her world-old lure,
To waken hope where nothing may endure,
To quicken love where loving is betrayed.
Yet now and then some dream of Jamie made
Slow music in him for a little while ”

“ Indian fighters had a special horror of falling into the hands of the squaws.
Hate and love are opposite sides of the same shield. In proportion as woman loves her children and the protectors of them she hates anybody and anything that menaces them. ”

“ So speaks the second comer of the twain—
A white man by his voice. And he who lies
Beside the wall, with empty, groping eyes
Turned to the speaker: “There can be no peace
For me, good Father, till this gnawing cease—
The gnawing of a great wrong I have done.”
The big man leans above the youth: “My son—”
(Grown husky with the word, the deep voice breaks,
And for a little spell the whole man shakes
As with the clinging cold) “—have faith and hope!
‘Tis often nearest dawn when most we grope. ”

“ As of a surf upon a shipwreck shore,
102Plunged high above him from the sheer bluff’s verge;
And, like the backward sucking of the surge,
Far fled the sobbing of the wild snow-spray.
Black blindness grew white blindness—and ‘twas day. ”

“ Thinkers are just beginning to realize something of the hypnotic power of habit and custom in the individual and in society. The loss of the accustomed may disintegrate the life. Our author shows keen understanding when he likens the effect upon Hugh of the loss of fire to that of the loss of a dear one by death. ”

“ Again the sense of loneliness, of betrayal, of a conspiracy to destroy him appears everywhere in Hugh’s experience. The monotony of the journey appears in its slowness, which is indicated in many ways.
Before describing the Crawl, Neihardt first found out what vegetable growths would be found on the trail, the character of the soil, how the streams would erode, etc. The poet is true to all nature, even natural science. ”

“ The manifestations of nature become Hugh’s audience and he falls into the throes of composition. Most of our thinking is in words uttered to persons present, absent, or imagined.
11. So wrought the old evangel of high daring, etc.
The true philosophy of life, to be a “victor in the moment.”
23. That day the wild geese flew
What is the effect of their cries? Describe the appearance of the sky.
Define: recks, travail, evangel.
PAGE 59 Present, past and fancy are all mingled in Hugh’s experiences this day, showing his weakened condition, and the feeling for Jamie obsesses him. ”