BOOKS AND READING
BY HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE
A PIONEER PALACE CAR.
THE STORY OF THE PATH-MAKERS
Wherever in this broad land you may have spent the summer and autumn, you have got there with comparative ease. Trains have rolled you over the vast plains or through the mountains, have brought you to the open door of the forest or the shores of lake or sea. If you went into the wilderness, you passed through sweet and flourishing farm districts and lively villages, and even though you crossed the prairies that roll up to the foot of the Rockies, you have seen the irrigated land turned green and gold with growing corn and hay.
But a little time ago, even as we human beings count time, none of this was so. There were the mountains and the plains, the forest and the wilderness, and no way of getting across them except by foot or on horseback, a perilous way, fit only for the strongest and the most daring.
Thinking of these things as my train whirled on its eastward journey, I remembered two books that tell in graphic style the story of the change—the wonderful change from the wild times of the path-finders and path-makers to the present day, with its Pullman cars flashing over the iron roads, going farther in a day than it was possible to go in a month when the wilderness was at home all over the continent.
These two books are written by men who were among the pioneers and adventurers who rode the long and dangerous trails from East to West, and who saw the whole great drama played out, helping a deal in the playing—or, rather, the fighting, for there was a considerable amount of the latter and precious little of the former in the whole big business from beginning to end.
These men are Colonel Henry Inman, U. S. A., and Colonel Cody, or “Buffalo Bill,” whom you have probably heard of before; and the books are “The Old Santa Fé Trail” and “The Old Salt Lake Trail.” The Salt Lake book has been written by the two in collaboration, while the other book is by Inman alone, with an introduction by Buffalo Bill. They are big, fat books with many illustrations, and they tell a tale as amazing and exciting as it is true. Now, as you know well that truth is stranger than fiction, you can form some notion of just how stirring these volumes are.
Here are told the great hardships, the high endeavor, the noble endurance, and the wild enchantment of that western life, a life so recently passed away that its memory is distinct in the minds of living men, and yet so utterly vanished that it seems to have belonged to another age than ours, or to be a romantic story told at twilight when the fancy plays.
Yet here are the pages written by the very men who tramped and rode the desperate miles92
