They Of The High Trails (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

Romance clings to the high country where the Grub-Staker wanders the hills with hopeful patience, walking the perilous ledges of the cliffs in endless search of gold.

Excerpt:
As I run over the stories in They of the High Trails I am carried into far places. The "Outlaw" takes me back to the stern peaks of the upper Green River in Wyoming. I am crossing the divide twelve thousand feet above sea level in precisely such a storm as I describe in this tale. "The Prospector" transports me to Fort Washakie and the Shushonnies. "The Grubstaker" leads me up the western slopes of Sierra Blanca, loveliest of Colorado mountains, while "The Forest Ranger" and "The Tourist" regain for me some part of the splendor of the Big Horn Range. In short, this volume is a synthesis - so far as I could make it - of the life of the High Country.
In all that I have written of the Mountain West I have kept to the possible and for the most part to the probable: The realities were sufficiently romantic for me. I know the mountains and their inhabitants too well to permit of extravagant romance. These ranges are not the painted back drops of melodrama, gloomy, fuliginous, hell-litten. On the contrary, they are very real, very sunlit, and habitable. The men and women I met there were the sons and daughters of the men and women I had known on the plains and prairies of the Mississippi Valley. Even the bad men with guns were commonplace in origin.
Like Main Travelled Roads, this volume presents a group of stories united by a web of design. Each tale emphasizes a certain type of mountaineer.