This is a tale of the adventurous and rugged pioneers, who,
unconquered by other foes, were ever at war with the ancient
wilderness, pushing the northern frontier of the white man farther
and farther to the west. Early in the last century they had
striped the wild waste of timber with roadways from Lake Champlain
to Lake Ontario, and spotted it with sown acres wide and fair; and
still, as they swung their axes with the mighty vigor of great
arms, the forest fell before them,
In a long valley south of the St. Lawrence, sequestered by river,
lake, and wilderness, they were slow to lose the simplicity, the
dialect, and the poverty of their fathers.
Some Frenchmen of wealth and title, having fled the Reign of
Terror, bought a tract of wild country there (six hundred and
thirty thousand acres) and began to fill it with fine homes. It
was said the great Napoleon himself would some day build a chateau
among them. A few men of leisure built manor-houses on the river
front, and so the Northern Yankee came to see something of the
splendor of the far world, with contempt, as we may well imagine,
for its waste of time and money.
Those days the North country was a theatre of interest and renown.
Its play was a tragedy; its setting the ancient wilderness; its
people of all conditions from king to farm hand. Chateau and
cabin, trail and forest road, soldier and civilian, lake and river,
now moonlit, now sunlit, now under ice and white with snow, were of
the shifting scenes in that play. Sometimes the stage was overrun
with cavalry and noisy with the clang of steel and the roar of the
carronade.
The most important episodes herein are of history,--so romantic was
the life of that time and region. The marriage is almost literally
a matter of record.
A good part of the author's life has been spent among the children
of those old raiders--Yankee and Canadian--of the north and south
shores of the big river. Many a tale of the camp and the night
ride he has heard in the firelight of a winter's evening; long
familiar to him are the ruins of a rustic life more splendid in its
day than any north of Virginia. So his color is not all of books,
but of inheritance and of memory as well.
The purpose of this tale is to extend acquaintance with the plain
people who sweat and bled and limped and died for this Republic of
ours. Darius, or "D'ri" as the woods folk called him, was a
pure-bred Yankee, quaint, rugged, wise, truthful; Ramon had the
hardy traits of a Puritan father, softened by the more romantic
temperament of a French mother. They had no more love of fighting
than they had need of it.