(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Adventures With Indians and Game: Or Twenty Years in the Rocky Mountains (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Adventures With Indians and Game: Or Twenty ...)
Excerpt from Adventures With Indians and Game: Or Twenty Years in the Rocky Mountains
In the locality of the historic last battleground of the gallant General Custer, they remained three days, which they profitably passed in a careful study of the grounds, tracing accurately the various movements of the contesting foes um til they ended at the pile of bones that showed where the last white survivors met their death. Here the party divided, one part going to the Crow agency, another by Pryor's Pass, Sage Creek and Stinking Water crossing to Wind River, the others, with Doctor Allen, going to Camp Brown and to Bozeman, the end Of their journey.
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(Ours is a little town in that part of the country called ...)
Ours is a little town in that part of the country called the West by those who live east of the Alleghanies, and referred to lovingly as "back East" by those who dwell west of the Rockies. It is a country town where, as the song goes, "you know everybody and they all know you," and the country newspaper office is the social clearing-house. When a man has published a paper in a country community for many years, he knows his town and its people, their strength and their weakness, their joys and their sorrows, their failings and their prosperity—or if he does not know these things, he is on the road to failure, for this knowledge must be the spirit of his paper. The country editor and his reporters sooner or later pass upon everything that interests their town.
(Lovely deep green boards have gold gilt title and spine. ...)
Lovely deep green boards have gold gilt title and spine. Well read copy has scuffing at edges. Pages are clean, gutter broken at back. FFE has former owner inscription in neat script, complete with seal (wax-stamp) in gold. LISTEDBY(KAD)
William Allen White was an American newspaper editor, politician, author, and leader of the Progressive movement.
Background
William Allen White was born on February 10, 1868 in Emporia, Kans. , which in the course of his lifetime he saw pass from the frontier into the modern age. Save for a younger brother who died in infancy, he was an only child. His father, Allen White, traced his descent from Nicholas White, an English emigrant who settled in Massachusetts in 1639. Born near Norwalk, Ohio, Allen White had gone west in 1859 to Kansas, where he practiced medicine and ran a general store, and later a drugstore. His first, childless marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, Mary Ann Hatton, had been born in the wilderness of Quebec to Irish Catholic parents who soon afterward moved to Oswego, New York. Orphaned at sixteen, she was taken by Congregational foster parents to Galesburg, Ill. , where she attended Knox College in the late 1850's and became an evangelical Protestant and an ardent abolitionist. Following the Civil War, she went to Kansas to teach school.
Will's father was an easygoing freethinker and a loyal Democrat, his mother stern, humorless, and a radical Republican, yet they agreed in favoring woman suffrage and prohibition. Freckle-faced, red-haired "Willie" grew up in Eldorado, Kans. , to which Dr. White moved his family in 1869. The eager, curious youth heard public issues debated at home and so learned a lifelong rule of tolerance for contrary views.
Education
Taught to revere the Puritan conscience, he attended Sunday schools and camp meetings as part of family life. However, he was an adult before he joined the Congregational Church. His father's death came in the midst of financial reverses when Will was in high school. To send him to the College of Emporia for two years (1884 - 86) his mother conducted a boardinghouse. Alternating between newspaper printshops and classes, he attended the University of Kansas, 1886-90, and absorbed laissez-faire economics, but did not graduate.
Career
White's first job after college was running the Eldorado Republican. Over the next five years he worked for newspapers in Topeka, Kans. , and Kansas City, Mo. For three valuable, shaping years (1892 - 95) he wrote editorials on the Kansas City Star, advancing the community causes of publisher William R. Nelson. Then White borrowed $3, 000 and, on June 1, 1895, bought the daily Emporia Gazette. With fewer than 500 subscribers, it was not a promising venture. White's moving editorial tribute to her (May 17, 1921) was widely reprinted. At first Emporians did not take the affable, boyish editor seriously, and some even ridiculed his efforts at local betterment. But his lively, conversational editorial style soon made him the most celebrated person in town.
On August 15, 1896, the stubby, rotund publisher printed an impulsive, furiously bitter attack on the Populist movement, entitled "What's the Matter with Kansas?" The editorial, which mirrored White's unadulterated straight-line Republicanism, made him famous. Republican editors in Chicago and New York reprinted it, and in the heat of the campaign against William Jennings Bryan and free silver, the Republican national chairman, Marcus A. Hanna, distributed more than a million copies over the country. White later was ashamed of the editorial's narrowness and intemperance, though at the time it helped him launch his first book of fiction, The Real Issue (1896), a collection of stories of Kansas life inspired by James Whitcomb Riley. The book was well reviewed, and Eastern magazines began soliciting his work. For McClure's he wrote a series of boyhood stories later collected as The Court of Boyville (1899).
When in 1906 Steffens, Baker, Ida M. Tarbell and others took over the American magazine, White joined them as an Emporia-based editorial associate. His articles for the American and Collier's now expounded progressive ideas. In Kansas he worked to build up a reform-minded antirailroad wing of the Republican party. He embodied his new faith in a popular novel, A Certain Rich Man (1909), the story of a "malefactor of great wealth. " White helped found the National Progressive Republican League in 1911 and was an early supporter of Robert M. La Follette for president. The next year he followed Roosevelt into the Progressive party. After the Progressive spell broke, White returned, disheartened, to the Republican fold. He found courage and wisdom but also arrogance in Woodrow Wilson. He praised Wilson's progressivism in 1913, and during the war years he backed the government's control of prices, wages, and the railroads and vigorously supported the League of Nations. A mission to inspect Red Cross services took him overseas in 1917, and in 1919 he reported the Paris Peace Conference. The materialism of the 1920's tested White's optimism. As a member of the platform committee of the Republican national conventions of 1920 and 1928 he sought, with little success, to commit the party to more progressive policies. He admired Hoover and worked for his nomination as early as 1920, when he reluctantly accepted Harding. Coolidge intrigued him as an authentic product of small-town America, but he looked with disfavor on the Vermonter's subservience to business values. White supported the unions in the 1922 railroad strike, during which he was briefly under arrest for displaying a prounion poster in the window of the Gazette office.
When in 1924 he could not persuade either candidate for governor of Kansas to oppose the Klan, he ran as an independent, delighting in the opportunity to speak out against intolerance. White shared a small-town dislike of the cities and their way of life that, together with his strong prohibitionism, led him to attack Alfred E. Smith, in the campaign of 1928, with a severity that distressed even members of his family. White's attitude toward the New Deal was ambivalent. He did not wholly trust Franklin D. Roosevelt and criticized many of his specific proposals. Still, he could write of the program as a whole, in June 1934: "Much of it is necessary. All of it is human. And most of it is past due. " There was considerable truth in Roosevelt's statement in 1936 that he had White's support "for three and a half years out of every four. " White's efforts to liberalize the Republican platform in 1936 were again unsuccessful, and his backing of his fellow Kansan Alfred M. Landon was less than enthusiastic. After the outbreak of World War II he became a leading advocate of supplying Britain and France with arms and war materials. His chairmanship of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, organized in 1940, lent special prestige to the cause, since it came from so respected a figure of the traditionally noninterventionist Middle West. He was, nevertheless, "strictly a 'short-of-war' man", and when influential members of the Committee moved beyond this position, White was in effect eased out (January 2, 1941). For years the Sage of Emporia had enjoyed a rich and rewarding mixture of grass roots journalism, state and national politics, literary pursuits, and intimate association with high and low, plus no little travel and public speaking. He produced most of the Gazette's editorials and contributed each year a score or more of articles and reviews to magazines.
As he turned down Eastern editorships, White also resisted the appeal of public office. He did serve as a regent of the University of Kansas (1903 - 13) and as a trustee of the Rockefeller and Woodrow Wilson foundations. Beginning in 1926, he was one of the judges of the Book-of-the-Month Club, a responsibility he took seriously because of its implications for large masses of readers. Many honors came to him, including degrees from eight colleges and universities and the presidency in 1938 of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. His modest home in Emporia was visited by noted people over the years, and this was true also of his rustic summer abode in the Colorado Rockies, where he did as much writing as he could. In October 1943 White became ill with inoperable cancer. He died at his Emporia home shortly before reaching the age of seventy-six. He was buried in Maplewood Cemetery, Emporia.
He was an uncompromising foe of the Ku Klux Klan. White was most consistent in his endorsement of Roosevelt's foreign policies, including the reciprocal trade agreement program and the Good Neighbor approach toward Latin America. The latter interest developed from a study of conditions in Haiti he had made for Hoover in 1930.
A group of fictionalized articles on politics for Scribner's Magazine, published in 1901 as Stratagems and Spoils, reflected his Republican conservatism. Yet by 1901 his political outlook had begun to change. On his first trip east, in 1897, he met Theodore Roosevelt, and the two took to each other at once. Under the influence of Roosevelt, who quickly became his political hero, White began to see a need for government regulation of business and such reforms as the direct primary. He also met the editor S. S. McClure and formed friendships with two of McClure's writers, Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker. Although White did not join these two in the periodical literature of exposure known as muckraking, the sketches he wrote for McClure's of such politicians as Senator Thomas C. Platt, the New York boss, had a similar political realism.
Views
Quotations:
"The boys who died just went out and died. To their own souls' glory of course - but what else? . .. Yet the next war will see the same hurrah and the same bowwow of the big dogs to get the little dogs to go out and follow the blood scent and get their entrails tangled in the barbed wire. "
"A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn. "
Personality
With his round, cherubic face and puckish humor, White was sometimes called the "Peter Pan of the Prairies. "
Quotes from others about the person
President Roosevelt expressed the opinion of many when he said that Will White "as a writer of . .. forcible and vigorous prose . .. was unsurpassed. " Two decades earlier Silas Bent had called him "the most distinguished figure in the American daily press. "
A classic example of White's terse, unmistakable editorial comment was his appraisal, on December 23, 1925, of Frank A. Munsey. In its entirety, it read: "Frank Munsey, the great publisher, is dead. Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manners of an undertaker. He and his kind have about succeeded in transforming a once-noble profession into an eight per cent security. May he rest in trust!"
Connections
He had married, on April 27, 1893, Sallie Lindsay, a schoolteacher in Kansas City, Kansas, who from the outset was a major help in his many-sided and overly full career. They had two children, William Lindsay and Mary Katherine.