Theodore Winthrop

“ Loneliness no longer lay heavy in the woods. It was shattered and trampled out where that little army had marched. Presently in their trail a ghostly object appeared, — not a ghost, but something tending fast toward the ghostly state; a poor, wasted, dreary white horse, standing in the trail, abandoned, too stiff to fall, too weary to stir. Every winged phlebotomizer of the Oregon woods seemed to have hastened hither to blacken that pale horse, soon to be Death’s, and, though he trembled feebly, he had not power to scatter the nipping insects with a convulsive shake. ”

“ Here, then against the unapproachable glory of an Oregon summer sky stood Tacoma, less dreamy, than when I floated over its shadow, but not less divine, — no divine thing dwindles as one with sparks of divineness in his mind approaches.
Yet I could not dally here to watch Tacoma bloom at sunset against a violet sky. Alas that life with an object cannot linger among its own sweet episodes! My camp was farther on, but the re-volutionary member of the party, Antipodes, hinted that we would do wisely to set up our tabernacle here. ”

“ There comes a time to horses when they cannot prance with the prancers, or plod with the plodders, or trail weary hoofs after the march of their comrades. Yet it was more chivalric for this worn-out estray to die here in the aromatic forest, than to lose life in the vile ooze of a Broadway. ”

“ The most godlike impersonality men know is the sun. To him the body should pay its matinal devotions, its ardent, worshipful greetings, when he comes, the joy of the world; then is the soul elated to loftier energies, and nerved to sustain its own visions of glories transcending the spheres where the sun reigns sublime. Tame and inarticulate is the harmony of a day that has not known the delicious preludes of dawn. For the sun, the godlike, does not come hastily blundering in upon the scene. ”

“ The youth received my refusal impassively; to ask for everything, and never be disappointed at getting nothing, is Indian manners. We left him standing among the ferns, gazing vacantly upon the world, and devouring a present of hard-tack I had given him, — he was ridding himself at once of that memorial of civilization, that, with bow and arrows in hand, he might relapse into barbarism, in pathless wilds along the flanks of Tacoma.
Soon the trail took a dip in the river, — a morning bath in S’Kamish. ”

“ First, up in the colorless ranges of night there is a feeling of quiver and life, broader than the narrow twinkle of stars, — a tender lucency, not light, but rather a sense of the departing of darkness. Then a gray glimmer, like the sheen of filed silver, trembles upward from the black horizon. Gray deepens to violet. Clouds flush and blaze. The sky grows azure. The pageant thickens. Beams dart up. The world shines golden. The sun comes forth to cheer, to bless, to vivify. ”

“ It was the first effort of an infant community to assert its individuality and emancipate itself from the tutelage of Oregon.
Very soon the Boston hooihut became apparent. An Indian’s trail came into competition with a civilized man’s rude beginnings of a road. Wood-choppers had passed through the forest, like a tornado, making a broad belt of confusion. Trim Boston neighborhoods would have scoffed at this rough-and-tumble cleft of the wild wood, and declined being responsible for its title. ”

“ Over the pines, the snow peak against the sky presented the quiet fraternal tricolor of nature, who always, where there is default of uppermost peaks to be white with clouds fallen in the form of snow, brings the clouds themselves, so changefully fair that we hardly wish them more sublimely permanent, and heaps them above the green against the blue. ”

“ There is really no such thing as a conservative. Joshua is the only one on record who ever accomplished anything, and he only kept things quiet for one day. We must either move forward with Hope and Faith, or backward to decay and death of the soul. But though no man, not even himself, has any real faith in a conservative, for this one occasion I was compelled to violate the law of my nature, — to identify myself with conservatism, and take the ancient trail instead of the modern highway. Stiff as the obstacles in the trail might be, the obstacles of the road were still stiffer ”

“ The Boston hooihut was a failure, a miserable muddle. Loolowcan leaped Gubbins over the first barricade and, pointing where Antipodes trotted to, the sound of rattling packs along the serpentine way, said calmly, and without too ungenerous scorn, “Closche ocook; beautiful this.”
Though I had abandoned their undone road, I was cheered to have met fresh traces of my countrymen. Their tree surgery was skilful. No clumsy, tremulous hand had done butchery here with haggling axe. The chopping was handiwork of artists, men worthy to be regicide headsmen of forest monarchs. ”

“ Not always had the ancient stem fallen to lie prone and hidden by younger growths, whose life was sucked from the corse of their ancestor. Sometimes, as the antiquated arbor-vitae, worn away at its base, swayed, bent, and went crashing downward, it had been arrested among the close ranks of upstart trunks, and hung there still, with long gray moss floating from it like the torn banners in a baronial chapel, — hung there until its heart should rot and crumble, and then, its shell of bark breaking, it should give way, and shower down in scales and dust. ”

“ Rapid, turbulent, and deep was the S’Kamish, white with powder of the boulders it had been churning above, and so turbid that boulders here were invisible. We must ford with our noses pointing up stream, lest the urgent water, bearing against the broadsides of our unsteady horses, should dowse, if not drown us. Klale, floundering sometimes, but always recovering himself, took me over stoutly. My moccasins and scarlet leggins were wet, but I had not become dazed in the whirr and fallen, as it is easy to do. Lubberly Antipodes flinched. ”

“ No daylight is long enough for its possible work, as no life is long enough for its possible development in wisdom and love. In the beautiful, fresh hours of early day vigorous influences are about. The sun is doing his uphill work easily, climbing without a thought of toil to the breathing-spot of high noon. Every flower of the world is boldly open ”

“ He who strikes the first blow merits all thanks. May my descendants be as grateful to these Boston men as I am now to the Boston men of two centuries ago. And may they remember ancestral perils and difficulties kindly, as I now recall how godly Puritans once brandished ruder axes and bill-hooks, opening paths of future peace on the shores of Massachusetts.
Our ascent was steady, along the gorge of the S’Kamish, ever in this same dense forest. We had, however escaped from the monotony of the bare fir-trunks. ”

“ Unlike the pillars of human architecture, chipped and chiselled in bustling, dusty quarries, and hoisted to their site by sweat of brow and creak of pulley, these rose to fairest proportion by the life that was in them, and blossomed into foliated capitals three hundred feet overhead. ”

“ A great bliss, or a sublime object, or a giant aspiration of our souls, lifts first upon our horizon, and swelling fills our sphere, and stoops forward with winsome condescension. And taking our clew, we approach through the labyrinths. ”

“ So the unenlightened generally deem, when they inspect the destruction that precedes reconstruction. This was a transition period. In the Cascades, Klickatat institutions were toppling, Boston notions coming in. It was the fulness of time. Owhhigh and his piratical band, slaves of Time and Space, might go dodging with lazy detours about downcast trunks, about tangles of shrubs and brambles, about zones of morass; but Boston clans were now, in the latter day, on the march, intending to be masters of Time and Space, and straightforwardness was to be the law of motion here. ”

“ Unworthy the cook that does not feel the poetry of his trade!
The two Klickatats, whether brothers or fellow-clansmen, feasted enormously. Rasher after rasher of the fried, block after block of the roasted, flake after flake of the toasted salmon vanished. I should have supposed that the Doctor was suffering with a bulimy, after short commons in his worship of Tamanoüs, the mountain demon, had not the appetite of Loolowcan, although well fed at three meals in my service, been equal or greater. ”

“ But when new-fallen trunks of the sylvan giants, or great mossy mounds, built barricades across the path, tall as the quadruped whose duty it was to leap over them — how in such case Klale the sprightly? how here Antipodes the flounderer? how Gubbins, stiff in the joints?
Thus, by act answered Klale, — thus; by a leap, by a scramble, by a jerking plunge, by a somerset; like a cat, like a squirrel, like a monkey, like an acrobat, like a mustang. To overpass these obstacles is my business ”

“ This plan failed; a horse, cannot balance on his fore legs and take hasty bites of long, luxurious fodder, while he brandishes his hind legs in the air. Some sweeter morsel will divert his mind from self-defence; his assailants will get within his guard. Penance follows, and Antipodes must again hammer elephantine along the trail. ”

“ Much beautiful labor of love is done by earth and sky, preparing a pageant where their Lord shall enter. Slowly, like the growth of any feeling grand, deep, masterful, and abiding, nature’s power of comprehending the coming blessing develops. ”

“ But men must pay their footing by labor, and we urged on, with horses educated to their task, often fording the S’Kamish, and careless now of wetting, clambering up ridges black with sunless woods, and penetrating steadily on through imperviousness. Indian trails aim at the open hill-sides and avoid the thickset valleys; but in this most primeval of forests the obstacles on the rugged buttresses of the Cascade chain were impracticable as the dense growth below.
“Ancoti nesika nanitch Boston hooihut; presently we see the Boston road,” said Loolowcan. ”

“ With an axe, a man of muscle might succeed in smiting off a flake or a chip, but his slight fibres seemed naught to battle, with any chance of victory, with the time-hardened sinews of these Goliaths. ”

“ The point of civilization’s entering wedge into barbarism is easily knocked off. These squatters were knocked off, as some of the earliest victims of the Indian war three summers after my visit. It is odd how much more interest I take in these two settlers since I heard that they were scalped. More fair prairies strung themselves along the trail, possibly less fair in seeming to me then, could I have known that murder would soon disfigure them ”

“ Potatoes, too, roasted beneath aromatic ashes by the side of roasting blocks of salmon, — potatoes hardened their crusts against too ardent heat, that slowly ripeness might penetrate to their heart of hearts. ”