I confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving: every man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso names him...according as he is called by friend or enemy...No other fashion, I think, Set so well with the various natures that inhabit in us...and does not originate in the poor human desire for perpetuity xxxv
the County of Los Borders 3
One hopes the land my breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to "try," but to do. 5
It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured...Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls. 10
I suppose the dumb creatures know nearly as much of death as do their betters, who have only the more imagination. 20
hawks came trooping like small boys to a street fight...Nothing happens in the deep wood that the blue jays are not all agog to tell. 22
Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise...the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor. 24
There are many strange sorts of humans bred in a mining country, each sort despising the queernesses of the other 27
they behavior as history and judge it by facts, untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense 45
names that smacked of the soil 46
there is a certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the pot,—it wants the German to coin a work for that...It is pure Greek in that it represents the courage to sheer off what is not what whole...Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at 47
Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. 62
To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year. 65
The homesickness of an Indian is often unto death, since he gets no relief from it; neither wine nor weed nor sky-line, nor any aspect of the hills of a strange land sufficiently like his own. 68
But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness. They are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the noble plan which they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned. 78
That was the Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition. Twelve years later one of the CLarks, holding Greenfields, not so very green by now, shot one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that also might become classic, but the jury found for manslaughter. 87
The Indian never concerns himself, as the botanist and the poet, with the plant's appearances and relations, but what it can do for him. 89
The music goes before, the folk fall in two and two, singing. They sing everything, America, the Marseillaise, for the sake of the French shepherds hereabout, the hymn of Cuba, and the Chilian national air to comfort two families of that land. 107
I am persuaded only a complex soul can get any good of a plain religion. Your earthborn is a poet and symbolist. We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other people's way of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same roof that house their God. 108
the way they count relationship everybody is more or less akin. 108
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