Winning the Wilderness

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McCarter Margaret Hill. Winning the Wilderness

PART ONE. THE FATHER

CHAPTER I. The Blessing of Asher

CHAPTER II. The Sign of the Sunflower

CHAPTER III. The Will of the Wind

CHAPTER IV. Distress Signals

CHAPTER V. A Plainsman of the Old School

CHAPTER VI. When the Grasshopper Was a Burden

CHAPTER VII. The Last Bridge Burned

CHAPTER VIII. Anchored Hearthstones

CHAPTER IX. The Beginning of Service

CHAPTER X. The Coming of Love

CHAPTER XI. Lights and Shadows

CHAPTER XII. The Fat Years

PART TWO. THE SON

CHAPTER XIII. The Rollcall

CHAPTER XIV. The Second Generation

CHAPTER XV. The Coburn Book

CHAPTER XVI. The Humaneness of Champers

CHAPTER XVII. The Purple Notches

CHAPTER XVIII. Remembering the Maine

CHAPTER XIX. The “fighting Twentieth”

CHAPTER XX. The Crooked Trail

CHAPTER XXI. Jane Aydelot’s Will

CHAPTER XXII. The Farther Wilderness

CHAPTER XXIII. The End of the Wilderness

CHAPTER XXIV. The Call of the Sunflower

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A reach of level prairie bounded only by the edge of the world – misty ravelings of heliotrope and amber, covered only by the arch of heaven – blue, beautiful and pitiless in its far fathomless spaces. To the southwest a triple fold of deeper purple on the horizon line – mere hint of commanding headlands thitherward. Across the face of the prairie streams wandering through shallow clefts, aimlessly, somewhere toward the southeast; their course secured by gentle swells breaking into sheer low bluffs on the side next to the water, or by groups of cottonwood trees and wild plum bushes along their right of way. And farther off the brown indefinite shadowings of half-tamed sand dunes. Aside from these things, a featureless landscape – just grassy ground down here and blue cloud-splashed sky up there.

The last Indian trail had disappeared. The hoofprints of cavalry horses had faded away. The price had been paid for the prairie – the costly measure of death and daring. But the prairie itself, in its loneliness and loveliness, was still unsubdued. Through the fury of the winter’s blizzard, the glory of the springtime, the brown wastes of burning midsummer, the long autumn, with its soft sweet air, its opal skies, and the land a dream of splendor which the far mirage reflects and the wide horizon frames in a curtain of exquisite amethyst – through none of these was the prairie subdued. Only to the coming of that king whose scepter is the hoe, did soul of the soil awake to life and promise. To him the wilderness gave up everything except its beauty and the sweep of the freedom-breathing winds that still inspire it.

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“He’s not out of doors, and he isn’t sitting up in a chair. Tell me, now, Pilot, exactly where Jim is! Jim, mind you!”

The dog looked at him with watchful eyes.

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