Various - Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools

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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 friendship?
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 friendship 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. Sexton
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 friendships, 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 Substitute (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 scholarship 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 leadership 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 latitude 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 circumstances 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 Massachusetts 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 passes 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 institutions
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 passed 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 passes 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 coarse 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 fashion, 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 masses 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 circumstances 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 spacious 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_!

Of course there was a deep change wrought, if not in these men, at any
rate in their children; and every generation saw the change deepen. It
must seem to every thoughtful man a notable thing how, while the change
was wrought, the simples of things complex were revealed in the clear
air of the New World: how all accidentals seemed to fall away from the
structure of government, and the simple first principles were laid bare
that abide always; how social distinctions were stripped off, shown to
be the mere cloaks and masks they were, and every man brought once again
to a clear realization of his actual relations to his fellows! It was as
if trained and sophisticated men had been rid of a sudden of their
sophistication and of all the theory of their life, and left with
nothing but their discipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered
instinct. And the fact that we kept always, for close upon three hundred
years, a like element in our life, a frontier people always in our van,
is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national history.
"East" and "West," an ever-changing line, but an unvarying experience
and a constant leaven of change working always within the body of our
folk. Our political, our economic, our social life has felt this potent
influence from the wild border all our history through. The "West" is
the great word of our history. The "Westerner" has been the type and
master of our American life. Now at length, as I have said, we have lost
our frontier; our front lies almost unbroken along all the great coast
line of the western sea. The Westerner, in some day soon to come, will
pass out of our life, as he so long ago passed out of the life of the
Old World. Then a new epoch will open for us. Perhaps it has opened
already. Slowly we shall grow old, compact our people, study the
delicate adjustments of an intricate society, and ponder the niceties,
as we have hitherto pondered the bulks and structural framework, of
government. Have we not, indeed, already come to these things? But the
past we know. We can "see it steady and see it whole"; and its central
movement and motive are gross and obvious to the eye.

Till the first century of the Constitution is rounded out we stand all
the while in the presence of that stupendous westward movement which has
filled the continent: so vast, so various, at times so tragical, so
swept by passion. Through all the long time there has been a line of
rude settlements along our front wherein the same tests of power and of
institutions were still being made that were made first upon the sloping
banks of the rivers of old Virginia and within the long sweep of the Bay
of Massachusetts. The new life of the West has reacted all the
while--who shall say how powerfully?--upon the older life of the East;
and yet the East has moulded the West as if she sent forward to it
through every decade of the long process the chosen impulses and
suggestions of history. The West has taken strength, thought, training,
selected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the East,--as if out of
a new Orient; while the East has itself been kept fresh, vital, alert,
originative by the West, her blood quickened all the while, her youth
through every age renewed. Who can say in a word, in a sentence, in a
volume, what destinies have been variously wrought, with what new
examples of growth and energy, while, upon this unexampled scale,
community has passed beyond community across the vast reaches of this
great continent!

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