sure George Thario must have been a great cross to his father
although the general never spoke of him save in the most affectionate
terms. Living like a tramp--he sent a snapshot once showing him with a
long starveling beard, dressed in careless overalls, his arm over the
shoulder of a slovenly looking girl--he stayed always on the edge of the
advancing weed, moving eastward only when forced. He wrote from Galena:

"Eagle forgotten. The rejected accepted, for yesterday's eagle is
today's, the hero is man and man his own hero. I was with him when he
died and when he died again and a hundred miles to the south is another
eagle forgotten and all the prairies, green once more, will be as they
were before men insulted them. O eagle forgotten. O stained prairie, O
gallows, thirsty mob, knife, torch, revolver. Contumely, parochialism,
the shortvision forever gone; and the long vision too, the eagle
forgotten is the national bird, the great merging with the greater, so
gained too late a vision and saw the hope that was despair.

"I named the catalogue of states and the great syllables rolled from my
tongue to echo silence. My sister, my bride. Gone and gone; the
Conestoga wagons have no more faint ruts to follow, the Little Big Horn
is a combination of letters, the marking sunflowers exist no more. We
destroyed, we preempted; we are destroyed and we have been thrust out.
Illinois admitted to the Union on suchandsuch a date, the Little Giant
rubbed stubby fingers through pompous hair heavy with beargrease, the
Honorable Abe in Springfield's most expensive broadcloth, necktie in the
latest mode but pulled aside to free an eager adamsapple; the drunken
tanner, punctual with the small man's virtues, betrayed and dying
painfully with so much blood upon his hands; and the eagle himself,
forgotten and now again forgotten.

"I move once more. Step by step I give it up, the land we took and the
land we made. Each foot I resign leaves the rest more precious. O
precious land, O dear and fruitful soil. Its clods are me, I eat them,
give them back; the bond is indissoluble. Even the land gone is still
mine, my bones rest in it, I have eaten of its fruits and laid my mark
on it...."

All of which was a longwinded way of saying the Grass was overrunning
Illinois. In contrast I cannot forbear to quote Le ffacase, though his
faults, at the opposite end of the scale, were just as glaring: "It is
in Kentucky now, birthstate of Abraham Lincoln,