With deep reverence I inscribe these lines, my dear parents, to you. I
see you now, away beyond the seas, beyond the lands where the sun goes
down in the Pacific like some great ship of fire, resting still on the
green hills, watching your herds, waiting
"Where rolls the Oregon,
And hears no sound save its own dashing."
Nearly a quarter of a century ago you took me the long and lonesome
half-year's journey across the mighty continent, wild, and rent, and
broken up, and sown with sand and ashes, and crossed by tumbling,
wooded rivers that ran as if glad to get away, fresh and strange and
new as if but half-fashioned from the hand of God.
All the time as I tread this strange land I re-live those scenes, and
you are with me. How dark and deep, how sullen, strong, and lion-like
the mighty Missouri rolled between his walls of untracked wood and
cleft the unknown domain of the middle world before us!
Then the frail and buffeted rafts on the river, the women and children
huddled together, the shouts of the brawny men as they swam with the
bellowing cattle; the cows in the stormy stream, eddying, whirling,
spinning about, calling to their young, their bright horns shining in
the sun.... The wild men waiting on the other side, painted savages
leaning silent on their bows, despising our weakness, opening a way,
letting us pass on to the unknown distances, where they said the sun
and moon lay down together and brought forth the stars.... The long
and winding lines of wagons, the graves by the wayside, the women
weeping together as they passed on. Then hills, then plains, parched
lands like Syria, dust, and ashes, and alkali, cool streams with
woods, camps by night, great wood fires in circles, tents in the
centre like Cæsar's battle-camps, painted men that passed like
shadows, showers of arrows, the wild beasts howling from the hill....
You, my dear parents, will pardon the thread of fiction on which I
have strung these scenes and descriptions of a mighty land of mystery,
and wild and savage grandeur, for the world will have its way, and,
like a spoiled child, demands a tale.
"Yea,
We who toil and earn our bread
Still have our masters...."
A ragged and broken story it is, with long deserts, with alkali and
ashes, yet it may, like the land it deals of, have some green places,
and woods, and running waters, where you can rest....
Three times now I have ranged the great West in fancy, as I did in
fact for twenty years, and gathered unknown and unnamed blossoms from
mountain-top, from desert level, where man never ranged before, and
asked the world to receive my weeds, my grasses, and blue-eyed
blossoms. But here it ends. Good or bad, I have done enough of this
work on the border. The Orient promises a more grateful harvest.
I have been true to my West. She has been my only love. I have
remembered her greatness. I have done my work to show to the world her
vastness, her riches, her resources, her valor and her dignity, her
poetry and her grandeur. Yet while I was going on, working so in
silence, what were the things she said of me? But let that pass, my
dear parents. Others will come after us. Possibly I have blazed out
the trail for great minds over this field, as you did across the
deserts and plains for great men a quarter of a century ago.