The Blazed Trail

Episode 1

Chapter I

When history has granted him the justice of perspective, we shall know the American Pioneer as one of the most picturesque of her many figures.Resourceful, self-reliant, bold; adapting himself with fluidity to diverse circumstances and conditions;meeting with equal cheerfulness of confidence and completeness of capability both unknown dangers and the perils by which he has been educated; seizing the useful in the lives of the beasts and men nearest him, and assimilating it with marvellous rapidity; he presents to the world a picture of complete adequacy which it would be difficult to match in any other walk of life.He is a strong man, with a strong man's virtues and a strong man's vices.In him the passions are elemental, the dramas epic, for he lives in the age when men are close to nature, and draw from her their forces.He satisfies his needs direct from the earth.Stripped of all the towns can give him, he merely resorts to a facile substitution.

It becomes an affair of rawhide for leather, buckskin for cloth, venison for canned tomatoes.We feel that his steps are planted on solid earth, for civilizations may crumble without disturbing his magnificent self-poise.In him we perceive dimly his environment.

He has something about him which other men do not possess--a frank clearness of the eye, a swing of the shoulder, a carriage of the hips, a tilt of the hat, an air of muscular well-being which marks him as belonging to the advance guard, whether he wears buckskin, mackinaw, sombrero, or broadcloth.The woods are there, the plains, the rivers.Snow is there, and the line of the prairie.Mountain peaks and still pine forests have impressed themselves subtly; so that when we turn to admire his unconsciously graceful swing, we seem to hear the ax biting the pine, or the prospector's pick tapping the rock.And in his eye is the capability of quiet humor, which is just the quality that the surmounting of many difficulties will give a man.

Like the nature he has fought until he understands, his disposition is at once kindly and terrible.Outside the subtleties of his calling, he sees only red.Relieved of the strenuousness of his occupation, he turns all the force of the wonderful energies that have carried him far where other men would have halted, to channels in which a gentle current makes flood enough.It is the mountain torrent and the canal.Instead of pleasure, he seeks orgies.He runs to wild excesses of drinking, fighting, and carousing--which would frighten most men to sobriety--with a happy, reckless spirit that carries him beyond the limits of even his extraordinary forces.

This is not the moment to judge him.And yet one cannot help admiring the magnificently picturesque spectacle of such energies running riot.The power is still in evidence, though beyond its proper application.

Chapter II

In the network of streams draining the eastern portion of Michigan and known as the Saginaw waters, the great firm of Morrison & Daly had for many years carried on extensive logging operations in the wilderness.The number of their camps was legion, of their employees a multitude.Each spring they had gathered in their capacious booms from thirty to fifty million feet of pine logs.

Now at last, in the early eighties, they reached the end of their holdings.Another winter would finish the cut.Two summers would see the great mills at Beeson Lake dismantled or sold, while Mr.

Daly, the "woods partner" of the combination, would flit away to the scenes of new and perhaps more extensive operations.At this juncture Mr.Daly called to him John Radway, a man whom he knew to possess extensive experience, a little capital, and a desire for more of both.

"Radway," said he, when the two found themselves alone in the mill office, "we expect to cut this year some fifty millions, which will finish our pine holdings in the Saginaw waters.Most of this timber lies over in the Crooked Lake district, and that we expect to put in ourselves.We own, however, five million on the Cass Branch which we would like to log on contract.Would you care to take the job?""How much a thousand do you give?" asked Radway.

"Four dollars," replied the lumberman.

"I'll look at it," replied the jobber.

So Radway got the "descriptions" and a little map divided into townships, sections, and quarter sections; and went out to look at it.He searched until he found a "blaze" on a tree, the marking on which indicated it as the corner of a section.From this corner the boundary lines were blazed at right angles in either direction.

Radway followed the blazed lines.Thus he was able accurately to locate isolated "forties" (forty acres), "eighties," quarter sections, and sections in a primeval wilderness.The feat, however, required considerable woodcraft, an exact sense of direction, and a pocket compass.

These resources were still further drawn upon for the next task.

Radway tramped the woods, hills, and valleys to determine the most practical route over which to build a logging road from the standing timber to the shores of Cass Branch.He found it to be an affair of some puzzlement.The pines stood on a country rolling with hills, deep with pot-holes.It became necessary to dodge in and out, here and there, between the knolls, around or through the swamps, still keeping, however, the same general direction, and preserving always the requisite level or down grade.Radway had no vantage point from which to survey the country.A city man would promptly have lost himself in the tangle; but the woodsman emerged at last on the banks of the stream, leaving behind him a meandering trail of clipped trees that wound, twisted, doubled, and turned, but kept ever to a country without steep hills.From the main road he purposed arteries to tap the most distant parts.