The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stepsons of Light, by Eugene Manlove Rhodes

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Title: Stepsons of Light

Author: Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Release Date: June 5, 2010 [EBook #32704]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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STEPSONS OF LIGHT

BY

EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES

_Author of "Good Men and True," "Bransford of Rainbow
Range," "The Desire of the Moth," "West is West," etc._

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1921

Copyright, 1920, by
THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Copyright, 1921, by
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

TO MY WIFE

STEPSONS OF LIGHT

There are two sorts of people--those who point with pride and those
who view with alarm. They are quite right. The world will not soon
forget Parkman "of Ours." Here was a man of learning, common sense,
judgment and wide sympathies. Yet once he stumbled; the paregorical
imperative, which impels each of us to utter ignominious nonsense,
urged Francis Parkman to the like unhappiness, drove him to father
and put forth this void and singular statement:

I have often perplexed myself to divine the various motives
that give impulse to this strange migration; but whatever
they may be, whether an insane hope of a better condition
of life, or a desire of shaking off the restraints of law
and society, or mere restlessness, certain it is that
multitudes bitterly repent the journey.

The year was 1846; the place, Independence, in Missouri; that strange
migration was the winning of the West. Mr. Parkman viewed it with
alarm. The passage quoted may yet be found in the first chapter of
"The Oregon Trail." We, wise after the event, now point with pride to
that strange migration of our fathers. The Great Trek has lasted three
hundred years. To-day we dimly perceive that the history of America is
the story of the pioneer; that