The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London
THE LAW OF LIFE
OLD KOSKOOSH listened greedily.
Though his sight had long since faded, his hearing was still acute,
and the slightest sound penetrated to the glimmering intelligence
which yet abode behind the withered forehead, but which no longer
gazed forth upon the things of the world. Ah! that was
Sit-cum-to-ha, shrilly anathematizing the dogs as she cuffed and
beat them into the harnesses. Sit-cum-to-ha was his daughter's
daughter, but she was too busy to waste a thought upon her broken
grandfather, sitting alone there in the snow, forlorn and helpless.
Camp must be broken. The long trail waited while the short day
refused to linger. Life called her, and the duties of life, not
death. And he was very close to death now.
The thought made the old man panicky for the moment, and he
stretched forth a palsied hand which wandered tremblingly over the
small heap of dry wood beside him. Reassured that it was indeed
there, his hand returned to the shelter of his mangy furs, and he
again fell to listening. The sulky crackling of half-frozen hides
told him that the chief's moose-skin lodge had been struck, and
even then was being rammed and jammed into portable compass. The
chief was his son, stalwart and strong, head man of the tribesmen,
and a mighty hunter. As the women toiled with the camp luggage, his
voice rose, chiding them for their slowness. Old Koskoosh strained
his ears. It was the last time he would hear that voice. There went
Geehow's lodge! And Tusken's! Seven, eight, only the shaman's
could be still standing. There! They were at work upon it now. He
could hear the shaman grunt as he piled it on the sled. A child
whimpered, and a woman soothed it with soft, crooning gutturals.
Little Koo-tee, the old man thought, a fretful child, and not
overstrong. It would die soon, perhaps, and they would burn a hole
through the frozen tundra and pile rocks above to keep the
wolverines away. Well, what did it matter? A few years at best, and
as many an empty belly as a full one. And in the end, Death waited,
ever-hungry and hungriest of them all.
What was that? Oh, the men lashing the sleds and drawing tight
the thongs. He listened, who would listen no more. The whip-lashes
snarled and bit among the dogs. Hear them whine! How they hated the
work and the trail! They were off! Sled after sled churned slowly
away into the silence. They were gone. They had passed out of his
life, and he faced the last bitter hour alone. No. The snow
upon his head
a hand rested gently. His son was good to do this thing. He
remembered other old men whose sons had not waited after the tribe.
But his son had. He wandered away into the past, till the young
man's voice brought him back.
"Is it well with you?" he asked.
And the old man answered, "It is well."
"There be wood beside you," the younger man continued, "and the
fire burns bright. The morning is gray, and the cold has broken. It
will snow presently. Even now is it snowing."
“My voice is become like an old
woman's.”
"Ay, even now is it snowing."
"The tribesmen hurry. Their bales are heavy, and their bellies
flat with lack of feasting. The trail is long and they travel fast.
go now. It is well?"
"It is well. I am as a last year's leaf, clinging lightly to the
stem. The first breath that blows, and I fall. My voice is become
like an old woman's. My eyes no longer show me the way of my feet,
and my feet are heavy, and I am tired. It is well."
He bowed his head in content till the last noise of the
complaining snow had died away, and he knew his son was beyond
recall. Then his hand crept out in haste to the wood. It alone
stood between him and the eternity that yawned in upon him. At last
the measure of his life was a handful of fagots. One by one they
would go to feed the fire, and just so, step by step, death would
creep upon him. When the last stick had surrendered up its heat,
the frost would begin to gather strength. First his feet would
yield, and the numbness would travel, slowly, from
the extremities to the body. His head would fall forward upon his
knees, and he would rest. It was easy. All men must die.
He did not complain. It was the way of life, and it was just. He
had been born close to the earth, close to the earth had he lived,
and the law thereof was not new to him. It was the law of all
flesh. Nature was not kindly to the flesh. She had no concern for
that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the
species, the race. This was the deepest abstraction old Koskoosh's
barbaric mind was capable of, but he grasped it firmly. He saw it
exemplified in all life. The rise of the sap, the bursting
greenness of the willow bud, the fall of the yellow leaf -- in this
alone was told the whole history. But one task did Nature set the
individual. Did he not perform it, he died. Did he perform it, it
was all the same, he died. N there were plenty
who were obedient, and it was only the obedience in this matter,
not the obedient, which lived and lived always. The tribe of
Koskoosh was very old. The old men he had known when a boy, had
known old men before them. Therefore it was true that the tribe
lived, that it stood for the obedience of all its members, way down
into the forgotten past, whose very resting-places were
unremembered. T they were episodes. They had
passed away like clouds from a summer sky. He also was an episode,
and would pass away. Nature did not care. To life she set one task,
gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life, its law was
death. A maiden was a good creature to look upon, full-breasted and
strong, with spring to her step and light in her eyes. But her task
was yet before her. The light in her eyes brightened, her step
quickened, she was now bold with the young men, now timid, and she
gave them of her own unrest. And ever she grew fairer and yet
fairer to look upon, till some hunter, able no longer to withhold
himself, took her to his lodge to cook and toil for him and to
become the mother of his children. And with the coming of her
offspring her looks left her. Her limbs dragged and shuffled, her
eyes dimmed and bleared, and only the little children found joy
against the withered cheek of the old squaw by the fire. Her task
was done. But a little while, on the first pinch of famine or the
first long trail, and she would be left, even as he had been left,
in the snow, with a little pile of wood. Such was the law. He
placed a stick carefully upon the fire and resumed his meditations.
It was the same everywhere, with all things. The mosquitoes
vanished with the first frost. The little tree-squirrel crawled
away to die. When age settled upon the rabbit it became slow and
heavy, and could no longer outfoot its enemies. Even the big
bald-face grew clumsy and blind and quarrelsome, in the end to be
dragged down by a handful of yelping huskies. He remembered how he
had abandoned his own father on an upper reach of the Klondike one
winter, the winter before the missionary came with his talk-books
and his box of medicines. Many a time had Koskoosh smacked his lips
over the recollection of that box, though now his mouth refused to
moisten. The "painkiller" had been especially good. But the
missionary was a bother after all, for he brought no meat into the
camp, and he ate heartily, and the hunters grumbled. But he chilled
his lungs on the divide by the Mayo, and the dogs afterwards nosed
the stones away and fought over his bones.
“through the long darkness the children
wailed and died.”
Koskoosh placed another stick on the fire and harked back deeper
into the past. There was the time of the Great Famine, when the old
men crouched empty-bellied to the fire, and let fall from their
lips dim traditions of the ancient day when the Yukon ran wide open
for three winters, and then lay frozen for three summers. He had
lost his mother in that famine. In the summer the salmon run had
failed, and the tribe looked forward to the winter and the coming
of the caribou. Then the winter came, but with it there were no
caribou. Never had the like been known, not even in the lives of
the old men. But the caribou did not come, and it was the seventh
year, and the rabbits had not replenished, and the dogs were naught
but bundles of bones. And through the long darkness the children
wailed and died, and the women, and not one in ten
of the tribe lived to meet the sun when it came back in the spring.
That was a famine!
But he had seen times of plenty, too, when the meat spoiled on
their hands, and the dogs were fat and worthless with overeating --
times when they let the game go unkilled, and the women were
fertile, and the lodges were cluttered with sprawling men-children
and women-children. Then it was the men became high-stomached, and
revived ancient quarrels, and crossed the divides to the south to
kill the Pellys, and to the west that they might sit by the dead
fires of the Tananas. He remembered, when a boy, during a time of
plenty, when he saw a moose pulled down by the wolves. Zing-ha lay
with him in the snow and watched --Zing-ha, who later became the
craftiest of hunters, and who, in the end, fell through an air-hole
on the Yukon. They found him, a month afterward, just as he had
crawled halfway out and frozen stiff to the ice.
But the moose. Zing-ha and he had gone out that day to play at
hunting after the manner of their fathers. On the bed of the creek
they struck the fresh track of a moose, and with it the tracks of
many wolves. "An old one," Zing-ha, who was quicker at reading the
sign, said -- "an old one who cannot keep up with the herd. The
wolves have cut him out from his brothers, and they will never
leave him." And it was so. It was their way. By day and by night,
never resting, snarling on his heels, snapping at his nose, they
would stay by him to the end. How Zing-ha and he felt the
blood-lust quicken! The finish would be a sight to see!
Eager-footed, they took the trail, and even he, Koskoosh, slow
of sight and an unversed tracker, could have followed it blind, it
was so wide. Hot were they on the heels of the chase, reading the
grim tragedy, fresh-written, at every step. Now they came to where
the moose had made a stand. Thrice the length of a grown man's
body, in every direction, had the snow been stamped about and
uptossed. In the midst were the deep impressions of the
splay-hoofed game, and all about, everywhere, were the lighter
footmarks of the wolves. Some, while their brothers harried the
kill, had lain to one side and rested. The full-stretched impress
of their bodies in the snow was as perfect as though made the
moment before. One wolf had been caught in a wild lunge of the
maddened victim and trampled to death. A few bones, well picked,
bore witness.
Again, they ceased the uplift of their snowshoes at a second
stand. Here the great animal had fought desperately. Twice had he
been dragged down, as the snow attested, and twice had he shaken
his assailants clear and gained footing once more. He had done his
task long since, but none the less was life dear to him. Zing-ha
said it was a strange thing, a moose once do
but this one certainly had. The shaman would see signs and wonders
in this when they told him.
And yet again, they come to where the moose had made to mount
the bank and gain the timber. But his foes had laid on from behind,
till he reared and fell back upon them, crushing two deep into the
snow. It was plain the kill was at hand, for their brothers had
left them untouched. Two more stands were hurried past, brief in
time-length and very close together. The trail was red now, and the
clean stride of the great beast had grown short and slovenly. Then
they heard the first sounds of the battle -- not the full-throated
chorus of the chase, but the short, snappy bark which spoke of
close quarters and teeth to flesh. Crawling up the wind, Zing-ha
bellied it through the snow, and with him crept he, Koskoosh, who
was to be chief of the tribesmen in the years to come. Together
they shoved aside the under branches of a young spruce and peered
forth. It was the end they saw.
The picture, like all of youth's impressions, was still strong
with him, and his dim eyes watched the end played out as vividly as
in that far-off time. Koskoosh marvelled at this, for in the days
which followed, when he was a leader of men and a head of
councillors, he had done great deeds and made his name a curse in
the mouths of the Pellys, to say naught of the strange white man he
had killed, knife to knife, in open fight.
For long he pondered on the days of his youth, till the fire
died down and the frost bit deeper. He replenished it with two
sticks this time, and gauged his grip on life by what remained. If
Sit-cum-to-ha had only remembered her grandfather, and gathered a
larger armful, his hours would have been longer. It would have been
easy. But she was ever a careless child, and honored not her
ancestors from the time the Beaver, son of the son of Zing-ha,
first cast eyes upon her. Well, what mattered it? Had he not done
likewise in his own quick youth? For a while he listened to the
silence. Perhaps the heart of his son might soften, and he would
come back with the dogs to take his old father on with the tribe to
where the caribou ran thick and the fat hung heavy upon them.
He strained his ears, his restless brain for the moment stilled.
Not a stir, nothing. He alone took breath in the midst of the great
silence. It was very lonely. Hark! What was that? A chill passed
over his body. The familiar, long-drawn howl broke the void, and it
was close at hand. Then on his darkened eyes was projected the
vision of the moose -- the old bull moose -- the torn flanks and
bloody sides, the riddled mane, and the great branching horns, down
low and tossing to the last. He saw the flashing forms of gray, the
gleaming eyes, the lolling tongues, the slavered fangs. And he saw
the inexorable circle close in till it became a dark point in the
midst of the stamped snow.
A cold muzzle thrust against his cheek, and at its touch his
soul leaped back to the present. His hand shot into the fire and
dragged out a burning faggot. Overcome for the nonce by his
hereditary fear of man, the brute retreated, raising a prolonged
and greedily they answered, till a ring of
crouching, jaw-slobbered gray was stretched round about. The old
man listened to the drawing in of this circle. He waved his brand
wildly, and sni but the panting brutes refused
to scatter. Now one wormed his chest forward, dragging his haunches
after, now a second, but never a one drew back. Why
should he cling to life? he asked, and dropped the blazing stick
into the snow. It sizzled and went out. The circle grunted
uneasily, but held its own. Again he saw the last stand of the old
bull moose, and Koskoosh dropped his head wearily upon his knees.
What did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?
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TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />
“Why this longing for life?
It is a game which no man wins.”
Part VIII of a Series
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TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />"Nature was not kindly to the flesh," London wrote in
"The Law of Life"
(McClure's Magazine, March, 1900). "She had no concern for
that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the
species, the race. . . .But one task did Nature set the individual.
Did he not perform it, he died. Did he perform it, it was all the
same, he died. N there were plenty who were
obedient, and it was only the obedience in this matter, not the
obedient, which lived and lived always. . . .Nature did not care.
To life she set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task
of life, its law was death."
In this story, London practically defined naturalism, a term
later applied by literary scholars to some of his fiction. In
essence, states Harry Shaw in his Concise Dictionary of Literary
Terms (1972), naturalism in literature is "an attempt to
achieve fidelity to nature by rejecting idealized portrayals of
life. . . . Naturalistic writers hold that man's existence is
shaped by heredity and environment, over which he has no control
and about which he can exercise little if any choice." In novels
and plays (and presumably short fiction) in this "movement," Shaw
states, the emphasis is given to "the animal nature of man," and
the portrayal of "characters engrossed in a brutal struggle for
survival."
(While mention of Darwin or Darwinian principles are unstated in
Shaw's definition of naturalism, London's naturalism is a lingering
echo of his readings into Darwin and his adherence to Darwin's
theories.)
“Koskoosh, of The
Law of Life, is London's naturalistic exemplar.”
Among American naturalistic writers — Stephen Crane, Theodore
Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner —
London may be the truest specimen. Like the others, only a portion
of his work bore the naturalistic stamp, but a good argument could
be made that his best work was thus stamped.
Koskoosh, of "The Law of Life," is London's naturalistic
He was a chief of his people and now sits alone in the snow with
a small pile of firewood as his people's lodges are packed and
readied to move to a new camp. His son, now chief, comes for
farewell and Koskoosh says, "It is well. I am as a last year's
leaf, clinging lightly to the stem. The first breath that blows,
and I fall. My voice is become like an old woman'. My eyes no
longer show me the way of my feet, and my feet are heavy, and I am
tired. It is well."
Koskoosh had abandoned his own father on an upper reaches of the
K he had seen the Great Famine, and times of
plenty and of war. He ponders the days of his youth, feeding his
dwindling fire, thinking of an old moose with torn flanks and
bloodied sides, tossing his horns to the last as the circle of
wolves close in.
Now the wo he drops the blazing sticks in
the snow, drops is head wearily upon his knees. "What did it matter
after all? Was it not the law of life?"
Franklin Walker, in his Jack London and the Klondike
(1966), makes an important observation about this story in stating,
". . .London continued to dramatize his interpretation of Darwin,
feeling that here the biological theory of survival of the fittest
applied to the extinction of the moose and the old man just as in
"The League of the Old Men" it applied to the success of the
virile, imaginative races like the Anglo-Saxons, the 'salt of the
earth,' as he liked to call them."
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TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />(McClure's Magazine, a literary and
political periodical, was founded by Samuel McClure in June 1893,
and was best known for publishing the work of such leading popular
writers as Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle, and
for the "muckraking" journalism of Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens,
and Ray Stannard Baker. The last issue of McClure's appeared
in March 1929.)
No such weighty matters as naturalism are to be found in "Dutch
Courage" (Youth's Companion, November 29, 1900) but London
may have been giving some thought to the amount of liquor he was
imbibing when he wrote it. The two friends, Gus Lafee and Hazard
Van Dorn, hiking and horseback riding in Yosemite Valley, see a
distress signal atop the High Dome formation and decide to ascend
to rescue the person above. Hazard has a flask of whiskey — "Dutch
courage. . .We'll need all our nerve in this undertaking," he
"How they had ever come possessed of this erroneous idea, it
would be hard to discover," London says, "but they were young yet,
and there remained for them many uncut pages of life. Believers,
also, in the efficacy of whiskey as a remedy for snake bite, they
had brought with them a fair supply of medicine-chest liquor. As
yet they had not touched it."
They forego "the touch of the Dutch courage en route, depending
on their gameness instead," and rescue a man whose rope had slipped
down the mountainside and who had spent a cold night on the Dome.
He declines the drink offered him and the two friends, when they
reach the ground, conclude that "there isn't very much in Dutch
courage, after all." Hazard says, "Look at what we've done without
it," and he tosses the flask away.
<img STYLE="FLoAT: MArGin-LeFT: 10px" HEIGHT="161" ALT="" src="/blog7style/images/common/sg_trans.gif" real_src ="http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/shortFiction/youths_compan104161.jpg" WIDTH="104"
TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />(The Youth's Companion was published between
1892 and 1929, and had a circulation of over 500,000 in 1900.
London's first story in the magazine was "Pluck and Pertinacity" in
the September 22, 1899, issue.)
The title, "Grit of
Women" (McClure's, August, 1900), describes
a familiar theme in London's fiction — the woman as superior,
certainly equal, to the man in strength of character. Sitka Charley
tells this story in &68 weather, in camp with Bettles, Prince,
Louis Savoy, and a young cheechako.
Charley reminisces on the time when he traveled with a man named
Long Jeff and a Chilcat woman named Passuk to deliver government
mail 700 miles to whale-ships on the ice-rim of the Bering Sea.
Passuk was needed to feed the dogs and "lift a paddle" and Long
Jeff, a big, young, muscular Yankee, turned out to be "big of talk
and a mighty traveler whose big talk betokened a streak of
Famine and scurv Long Jeff cries like a
baby and Charley has to bea Passuk does not
complain: she cooks, lashes the dogs to the sled, breaks trail in
snowshoes. They lose their dogs in a break in the ice and divide
the grub, but Passuk says it is wrong to waste good food on a baby,
and, Charley recalls, "she snatched the pistol from my belt, quick,
and. . .Long Jeff went to the bosom of Abraham before his
As Passuk loses her strength and dies of starvation, she tells
him, "You are my man, Charley, and I have been a good woman to you.
. . .you were kind to me, Charley, as a good man is kind to his
dog." Charley find that she has starved herself to save enough food
to allow Charley to go on to the mission, 80 miles distant, and
save himself.
"Why this longing for life?" is an important glimpse into the
philosophical influences swarming in the mind of young Jack
Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To
live is to toil hard, and to suffer sore, till Old Age creeps
heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the old man gasps
his last, and all his days are full o yet he
goes down to the open arms of Death, stumbling, falling, with head
turned backward, fighting to the last. And Death is kind. It is
only Life, and the things of Life that hurt. Yet we love Life, and
we hate Death. It is very strange.
Unrepentant" (Outing, August 1900), is an
unremarkable $25 tale set in Nome, Alaska in '97 & "the Nome of
golden beaches and ruby sands" — and deals with a German miner,
"Jan," about to be hanged for killing one John Gordon in an
A berserker rage, a "madness," has overcome Jan, and while he
escapes momentarily from his executioners, he has no place to run,
and thus faces Judge Lynch, who requires only three things to
fulfill the ancient admonition, "'Vengeance is mine,' saith the
lord" — a man, a rope, and something to tie the rope to. The later
item seems impossible to find in a treeless place of low hills and
snow until a miner named Lawson comes up with the idea of making a
tripod of oars, lashings and guyropes — a "shears" (or shear-legs)
in sailor lingo — to swing Jan off to his reward.
But just as they are about to hang Jan in the shears in the
gathering twilight, a specter, flapping ghostly arms "titubated
toward them drunkenly." It is John Gordon. Jan's bullet just
creased his skull and now he wants to fight Jan to make him
apologize, but Jan says, thickly (London had not learned — nor
would he — how to handle dialect), "I tank not. Shust tie me loose
und you see. . . .Und after as I lick you, I take der rest of der
noddleheads, von after der odder, altogedder!"
One interesting tit-bit about this story is London's use of the
word "titubate." It is a rare pathological word for the staggering
gait of people afflicted with equilibrium problems and nervous
disorders. London discovered the word and used it (as a drunken
stagger) more often than any writer of his time or later. See
Jerry of the Islands, chap. VI; "First Aid to Rising
Authors," Michael, Brother of Jerry, chap. 3; Burning
Daylight, Part 1, chap. 3, "The Passing of Marcus O'Brien," and
here, in "Jan, the Unrepentant".
(Outing was a sporting magazine which began publication
in 1882 as the Wheelman and had four title changes before
ceasing publication in 1923. The greatest triumph of the magazine
was its serial publication of London's White Fang,
May-October, 1906.)
Another tale set in Nome as well as in the Y.T. is "Which Make Men Remember" (as "Uri
Bram's God," San Francisco Examiner, June 24, 1900). Here, a
gambler with the fortuitous gambler name of Fortune La Perle has
killed a man named John Randolph and is rescued from a mob by a
stranger, Uri Bram, who takes La Perle to a shack to hide until the
mob quiets and forgets their errand.
Bram has "the face of one who communed much with himself, a man
of shut lips that no man might know. . . .He
and La Perle, his own humanity broad and shallow, could make
nothing of him."
After several weeks the heat is off and the two men load a sled,
harness the dogs and take the trail to a claim Bram has at Eagle,
near where the British flag waved over the barracks at Fort Cudahy.
There, in camp, Bram asks La Perle if he ever heard of the Dead
Horse Trail and proceeds to tell the story of that nightmarish
place. "Sometimes there are meetings under circumstances which make
men remember," he says portentously.
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TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />They were freighting an outfit over White Pass in
'97, Bram relates, where horses died like mosquitos in the first
frost and from Skagway to Bennett rotted in heaps. He tells of
encountering a man on the trail with whom he became "blood brothers
in starving misery," a man "with the heart of a Christ and the
patience," who cared for his horses, bought expensive fodder, used
his bedding to blanket their raw backs, and spent his last dollar
on nails to shoe their raw and bleeding feet. This exemplary
gentleman was John Randolph, the man Fortune La Perle has
At the end of the trail, Bram says, when he and Randolph were
broke and ruined, a man, who had killed 50 horses on the trail out
of callousness, offered $5,000 for their animals. But, while the
man with the money cursed them till his throat cracked, the two
miners divided the string and shot them to the last one.
Bram says, "I have had faith in God all the days of my life. I
believe He loves justice. I believe He is looking down upon us now,
choosing between us. I believe He waits to work His will through my
own right arm. And such is my belief, that we will take equal
chance and let Him speak His own judgment." They have but one gun
and La Perle wins a hand of cards to get the first shot. "Where is
your God now?" he taunts as they pace off like duelists. But Bram
whirls as the bullet strikes him and Fortune knows the wound is not
Now La Perle faces the pistol, certain that "Chance would not
desert him now," but Uri Bram's shot is true: "Fortune did not
whirl, but gay San Francisco dimmed and faded, and as the
sun-bright snow turned black and blacker, he breathed his last
malediction on the chance he had misplayed."
This story, sold to a penny-a-word newspaper for $40, is notable
for its heartrending description of the infamous Dead Horse
They died at the Rocks, they were poisoned at the Summit, and
they starved at the L they fell off the trail, what there was
in the river they drowned under
their loads, or were smashed to pieces
snapped their legs in the crevices and broke their backs falling
backwa in the sloughs they sank from sight or
smothered in the slime, and they were disemboweled in the bogs
where corduroy logs turn men shot them, worked
them to death, and when they were gone, went back to the beach and
bought more. Some did not bother to shoot them,--stripping the
saddles off and the shoes and leaving them where they fell. Their
hearts turned to stone--those which did not break--and they became
beasts, the men on the Dead Horse Trail.
(The San Francisco Examiner has been published
continuously since 1865. London's association with the paper
occurred during its ownership by William Randolph Hearst who took
over the struggling paper in 1887.)
"A Relic of the
Pliocene" (Collier's Weekly, January 12,
1901) and "A Hyperborean
Brew" (Metropolitan Magazine, July 14, 1901)
are near twins: submitted to the magazines on the same day,
published six months apart, each a Northland tall tale involving
the adventures of the mighty hunter Thomas Stevens, "a homely,
freckle-faced, blue-eyed man" who can be found "anywhere between 53
north latitude and the Pole, and, on the other hand, the likeliest
hunting grounds that lie between the east coast of Siberia and
farthermost Labrador.
Stevens wanders into the Yukon camp of a fellow nimrod, makes
room for himself by the fire, and begins talking of his
animal-slaughtering triumphs. He tells how he killed Siberian wolf
in westernmost Alaska and chamois in the Rockies, how he knew where
the last buffalo roamed and how he had slept in the Great Barrens
on the musk ox's trail.
While his camp companion (narrator of the tale) tells the
amusing, unbloody tale of the bear that hugs the slopes of St.
Elias, a bear who has legs on one side a foot longer than the
other. [See "Bald-Face," The High School Aegis, September 6,
1901, in Part VI of this series]. Stevens sniffs and shows Narrator
his footgear. It is a mucluc of Innuit pattern made of a coarse,
dirty, black hide with long tufts of hair — which, Stevens says,
came from a mammoth.
He and his great dog Klooch were in camp, Stevens says, when a
"hairy mountain of flesh" crashed into the place, stomped and
killed the dog and her litter of seven pups, and ruined his rifle
as well. The beast was 30 foot long and 20 high. The adventurer,
armed only with a hand-ax, trails the beast and traps it in a small
valley like a hippodrome, perhaps five miles around, and runs the
beast for two months, not allowing it to eat, drink or sleep, until
it "fell to whimpering and crying like a baby."
The prehistoric creature, his spirit broken, Stevens says
proudly and with the sensitivity of a stone, is rendered a
"whimpering jelly-mountain of misery" and that it "lay down,
broken-winded, broken-hearted, hungry and thirsty," whereupon our
noble adventurer fell upon the mammoth, hamstrung it, killed it,
and ate parts of him, attesting that the four mammoth feet, roasted
whole, would have lasted a man a twelvemonth.
Stevens gives his camp friend the mammoth muclucs for a supply
of tobacco and in the end Narrator bids the skeptical reader to
visit the Smithsonian Institution and ask for Prof. Dolvidson who
will attest they were made from the hide of a mammoth.
<img STYLE="FLoAT: MArGin-riGHT: 10px" HEIGHT="155" ALT="" src="/blog7style/images/common/sg_trans.gif" real_src ="http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/shortFiction/colliers_110155.jpg" WIDTH="110"
TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />(Collier's Weekly was founded in 1888 and
advertised as a magazine of "fiction, fact, sensation, wit, humour,
news." By 1892 it had a circulation of over 250,000 and was one of
largest selling magazines in the United States. Norman Hapgood, who
became editor of Collier's in 1903, developed a reputation
of employing the country's leading writers and in May, 1906,
commissioned Jack London to report on the San Francisco earthquake
and fire. Like McClure's, Collier's published such
important muckraking writers Ida Tarbell Samuel Hopkins Adams, and
Ray Stannard Baker. The magazine reached its zenith in circulation
— 2,500,000 weekly — during WW2 and closed down in January,
London's anti-hero, the reprehensible Thomas Stevens, returns in
"A Hyperborean Brew,"
"The story of a scheming white man among the strange people who
live on the rim of the Arctic Sea." This traveler of countless
trails from a Labrador factory, Dutch Harbor, the outer Aleutians,
the mouth of the Mackenzie, this time tells his tale at John
O'Brien's Dawson saloon wreathed in fifty-cent cigar smoke. ("His
quest for tobacco was perennial and untiring.")
He tells of "a little brew I had up Tattarat way," this being on
the rim of the Arctic Sea, when he and "his Indian" Moosu, a
Chippewayan, lost their dogs and outfits crossing a divide in a
blizzard. Starving, they crawled into a native village and there
Stevens began scheming to improve his lot, particularly to get
better food, and tobacco, known to be hidden in the village.
Our hero makes a still and mulcts from the chief shaman and
others molasses, flour, a kerosene can and other implements to make
a "hooch" (presumably from berries), invites the villagers in and
gets them drunk.
The mammoth killer gets his tobacco and food and also teaches a
lesson to Moosu, who has set himself up as a shaman. Stevens
exposes Moosu, then, when the villagers are about to fall on the
fake shaman, Stevens arranges to have Moosu rescued and brought to
him, gives him a whipping, and extracts a promise that the
Chippewayan will be faithful ever after.
(Metropolitan Magazine first appeared in 1895 as a
sophisticated monthly aimed at New York City theater-goers, evolved
into a political-literary periodical in the WW1 era, and in the
1920s was sold to entrepreneur Bernarr McFadden who changed the
title, unfortunately, to McFadden's Fiction-Lovers
Magazine.)
“...London revives
a favored theme: the Kiplingesque conflict...”
In "Where the Trail
Forks" (Outing, December, 1900), London
revives a favored theme: the Kiplingesque conflict between between
Anglo-Saxon mores and Indian religions and folkways. Four white men
in a camp near an Indian village in the Yukon face a dilemma. The
the famine, so says the shaman, due to the
advent of these uninvited strangers. To appease the tribal gods,
Sipsu, the chief's daughter, is chosen to be sacrificed and while
three of the four men chose not to interfere, one of them, named
Hitchcock ("there was a certain chivalric thrill of warm blood in
him, despite his Yankee ancestry and New England upbringing"),
determines that he will not to let Sipsu die.
He packs his gear, takes his quarter share of grub and four dogs
and leaves the camp, saying nothing of his plans. He returns,
crawling through the snow to the chief's lodge where he rescues
Sipsu. As they escape, yelping dogs wake the Indian village.
Hitchcock takes his rifle butt to one attacker and Sipsu fetches
the shaman a blow with her whip: "Thus is was when this primitive
theologian got back to the chief's lodge, that his wisdom had been
increased in so far as concerns the efficacy of the white man's
fist. . ."
Hitchcock's three partners are killed in the melee and the
shaman is honored for his wisdom.
NOTE: The end of this story contains a passage that seems to
anticipate the denouement of another, immortal, story, published in
. . .the shepherd dog crept back to the deserted camp, and all
night long and a day it wailed the dead. After that it disappeared,
though the years were not many before the Indian hunters noted a
change in the breed of timber wolves, and there were dashes of
bright color and variegated markings, such as no wolf bore
A story of far greater racial implications — racism, at least as
seen in the 21st century — is "The Great
Interrogation" (Ainslee's Magazine, December
6, 1900), telling of the advent in the Yukon country of Karen
Sayther who arrived in the spring with dog sleds and voyageurs,
"blazed gloriously for a brief month, and departed up the river as
soon as it was free of ice."
She was pretty, charming, the widow of Col. Sayther, great
mining man, and was received wide-armed by Eldorado Kings although
none could figure why she would come to the northland. One of her
boatmen, Pierre Fontaine, tells of taking her to an island below
the Stuart River where a man named David Payne had a cabin. Payne
(now prospecting on Henderson Creek) and Karen, as it happens, once
had a "relationship," but she elected to marry Col. Sayther, a man
Payne says was "A great, gross, material creature, deaf to song,
blind to beauty, dead to the spirit. He was fat with laziness, and
flabby-cheeked. . ." These somewhat uncharming traits
notwithstanding, Karen married him, perhaps enticed by the
Colonel's proven talent for making huge sums of money.
Payne marries a Koyokuk Indian girl named Winapie, a creature
London describes lustily (. . .her close-fitting blouse of moose
skin, fantastically beaded, outlined faithfully the well-rounded
lines of her body. . .). While Karen has written to David,
apparently hoping to rekindle their romance,
indeed has read her letters to Winapie "to impress upon her the
wickedness of her white sisters."
When she learns of Winapie, Karen insists that the girl is but
"a marriage of the country," that Winapie was born savage and will
die such: "But we — you and I — the dominant, evolved race — the
salt of the earth and the masters thereof!. . . You cannot escape
the generations behind you. . . .The race is mightier than
Payne is moved by this rhetoric. His bleak life rises before him
— "the vain struggle
the dreary years of
the harsh and jarring contact with elemental
the aching void which mere animal existence could not fill.
And there, seduction by his side, whispering of brighter, warmer
lands, of music, light, and joy. . ."
Even so, he remembers Winapie in the forest when a crippled
grizzly attacks and kills their dogs, thinks of "Winapie, at the
last, in the thick of the frightful muddle, hair flying, eyes
flashing, fury incarnate, passing the long hunting knife again and
again. . ."
Karen sees that David will not leave and orders her voyageurs to
Dyea where she will depart for the Outside and "the men, like a row
of ghosts in the dim starlight, bent their b
the steering oar cut the black current sharply, and the boat swept
out into the night."
<img STYLE="FLoAT: MArGin-LeFT: 10px" HEIGHT="155" ALT="" src="/blog7style/images/common/sg_trans.gif" real_src ="http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/shortFiction/ainslee_110155.jpg" WIDTH="110"
TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />(Ainslee's Magazine, launched in 1898, was
originally a general monthly magazine but adopted an all-fiction
policy in 1902 and published many important authors — including
Bret Harte, Anthony Hope, Stephen Crane, Jack London, O. Henry, and
Albert Payson Terhune. It survived until 1926.)
"Thanksgiving on Slav
Creek" (Harper's Bazar, November 24, 1900)
is a Klondike trifle concerning Nella and George Tichborne who join
a stampede to Slav Creek in &65 degree weather, arriving there on
Thanksgiving Day (thus enabling the title of the story!) while many
of the other stampeders have mistakenly gone to Swede Creek.
Nella falls down in exhaustion and has dreams of their old home
down in the States and the mortgage that is due. She laughs and
babbles in the cold, faint with hunger.
George find a place to stake a claim and takes a pan of gravel
from the creek bed and finds gold streaks the black sand at the
bottom of the pan. "We've struck it at last, Nella," he cries. "The
home is safe!"
(Harper's Bazar made its debut in 1867 as America's first
fashion magazine. In 1929 its title was changed to Harper's
Bazaar, and it remains a successful magazine in publication
There seems to be no explanation why "A Northland Miracle" (Youth's
Companion, November 4, 1926) was not published until ten years
after London's death. He originally submitted it to Youth's
Companion in October, 1900, and received $50 for it a month later.
The fate of the manscript appears to be its gathering dust in the
editorial offices in Boston.
"A Northland Miracle," the author says, is about the "eternal
core of goodness in the hearts of all men." (The story is also
notable for its introduction of John Thornton, a character London
immortalized in The Call of the Wild.)
Bertram Cornell, a thoughtless, uncaring, and callous man,
departs his home in England, "leaving behind a disgrace on his own
name for his people to bear," serves as a sailor on many seas, a
sheepherder in Australia, a cowboy in Dakota, and a private in the
Mounted Police of the Northwest Territory, from which, with the
gold discovery in the Klondike, he deserts with two other men and a
pack train of horses, he journeys to an unexplored country near the
headwaters of the Tanana and White rivers, and in a sheltered
valley, the party is joined by miner John Thornton. The four men
mine more gold than they can carry and cache all of it save five
pounds for each man then begin a terrible journey to the Klondike
After ten days, food is rationed, they abandon their blankets
and Cornell steals and eats a chunk of bacon, intended to be saved
for the last when the need would be greatest. When the theft is
discovered, John Thornton is blamed but Cornell intervenes and
prevents the others from killing Thornton.
At an Indian village the starving little party is attacked and
as they escape to the river, Thornton is speared in the hips and
Cornell forces the others to take the wounded partner to the canoes
while he holds the Indians at bay.
Bertram Cornell, the indurate, cold-blooded Englishman, is
struck by many arrows but remains upright and still as a statue as
his comrades make their way to safety.
"Though he lived without honor, thus he died, like a man, brave
and repentant, and rectifying evil," the author says, and tells
that the Indians buried Cornell with honor as a warrior and "were
wont to speak of him as the seasons passed, as 'the strange god who
came down out of the sky to die.'"
London's 1894 voyage before the mast on the Sophia
Sutherland is the source for "Chris
Farrington: Able Seaman" (Youth's Companion,
May 23, 1901) and to some degree may be considered autobiographical
The "Sophie" Sutherland, a newly-built, three-masted,
full-rigged schooner, out of San Francisco, is hunting seals along
the Japanese coast north to the Bering Sea and Chris Farrington and
a Swedish boat-puller named Emil Johansen, argue over protocol. The
older man, with 20 years at sea, says youngsters like Chris need to
show proper respect. The Swedes, Norwegians and Danes aboard side
with E the Brits, Canadians and Americans siding with young
Chris does a man's work but hopes for a chance to show the
Scandinavians he is also an able seaman. The opportunity arrives
when a typhoon strikes while the boats and crew are away and Chris
must reefs sails and take the wheel when the ship rears in gigantic
waves and the sailing master is injured, the Chinese cook washed
overboard.
"So, a boy of one hundred and forty pounds, he clung to his
herculean task of guiding the two hundred straining tons of fabric
amid the chaos of the great storm forces."
By noon the storm is spent and Chris is able to lash the wheel
and on the third day a Canadian schooner on her maiden voyage hoves
to, the Sophie's crew aboard and Emil Johansen comes forward
to say in his barely understandable Swedish accent, "Chris, I gif
in. You vas yoost so good a sailorman as I. You vas a bully boy und
able seaman, und I pe proud of you!" He tells Chris "From dis time
always you call me 'Emil' mitout der 'Mister!'"
NOTE: a line in this story, "After interminable hours of toil,
day broke cold and gray," presages the opening of London's most
famous Northland tale.
The Law of Life
Program, AMERICAN STORIES.
Our story today is called “The Law of Life.” It was written by
Jack London. Here is Shep O’Neal with the story.
SHEP O’NEAL: The old Indian was sitting on the snow. It was
Koskoosh, former chief of his tribe. Now, all he could do was sit
and listen to the others. His eyes were old. He could not see, but
his ears were wide open to every sound.<img HEIGHT="150" ALT="" src="/blog7style/images/common/sg_trans.gif" real_src ="/ting/.jpg" WIDTH="150" ALIGN="right" BORDER="0"
TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />
“Aha.” That was the sound of his daughter, Sit-cum-to-ha. She
was beating the dogs, trying to make them stand in front of the
snow sleds. He was forgotten by her, and by the others, too. They
had to look for new hunting grounds. The long, snowy ride waited.
The days of the northlands were growing short. The tribe could not
wait for death. Koskoosh was dying.
The stiff, crackling noises of frozen animal skins told him that
the chief’s tent was being torn down. The chief was a mighty
hunter. He was his son, the son of Koskoosh. Koskoosh was being
left to die.
As the women worked, old Koskoosh could hear his son’s voice
drive them to work faster. He listened harder. It was the last time
he would hear that voice. A child cried, and a woman sang softly to
quiet it. The child was Koo-tee, the old man thought, a sickly
child. It would die soon, and they would burn a hole in the frozen
ground to bury it. They would cover its small body with stones to
keep the wolves away.
“Well, what of it? A few years, and in the end, death. Death
waited ever hungry. Death had the hungriest stomach of all.”
Koskoosh listened to other sounds he would hear no more: the men
tying strong leather rope around the sleds to hold their
the sharp sounds of leather whips, ordering the dogs to
move and pull the sleds.
“Listen to the dogs cry. How they hated the work.”
They were off. Sled after sled moved slowly away into the
silence. They had passed out of his life. He must meet his last
hour alone.
“But what was that?” The snow packed down hard under someone’s
shoes. A man stood beside him, and placed a hand gently on his old
head. His son was good to do this. He remembered other old men
whose sons had not done this, who had left without a goodbye.
His mind traveled into the past until his son’s voice brought
him back. “It is well with you?” his son asked. And the old man
answered, “It is well.”
“There is wood next to you and the fire burns bright,” the son
said. “The morning is gray and the cold is here. It will snow soon.
Even now it is snowing. Ahh, even now it is snowing.
“The tribesmen hurry. Their loads are heavy and their stomachs
flat from little food. The way is long and they travel fast. I go
now. All is well?”
“It is well. I am as last year’s leaf that sticks to the tree.
The first breath that blows will knock me to the ground. My voice
is like an old woman’s. My eyes no longer show me the way my feet
go. I am tired and all is well.”
He lowered his head to his chest and listened to the snow as his
son rode away. He felt the sticks of wood next to him again. One by
one, the fire would eat them. And step by step, death would cover
him. When the last stick was gone, the cold would come. First, his
feet would freeze. Then, his hands. The cold would travel slowly
from the outside to the inside of him, and he would rest. It was
easy…all men must die.
He felt sorrow, but he did not think of his sorrow. It was the
way of life. He had lived close to the earth, and the law was not
new to him. It was the law of the body. Nature was not kind to the
body. She was not thoughtful of the person alone. She was
interested only in the group, the race, the species.
This was a deep thought for old Koskoosh. He had seen examples
of it in all his life. The tree the new-born
green leaf, so the fall of the yellowed, dry
leaf. In this alone was all history.
He placed another stick on the fire and began to remember his
past. He had been a great chief, too. He had seen days of much food
fat stomachs when food was l
times when they left animals alone, days when women had
many children. And he had seen days of no food and empty stomachs,
days when the fish did not come, and the animals were hard to
For seven years the animals did not come. Then, he remembered
when as a small boy how he watched the wolves kill a moose. He was
with his friend Zing-ha, who was killed later in the Yukon
Ah, but the moose. Zing-ha and he had gone out to play that day.
Down by the river they saw fresh steps of a big, heavy moose. “He’s
an old one,” Zing-ha had said. “He cannot run like the others. He
has fallen behind. The wolves have separated him from the others.
They will never leave him.”
And so it was. By day and night, never stopping, biting at his
nose, biting at his feet, the wolves stayed with him until the
Zing-ha and he had felt the blood quicken in their bodies. The
end would be a sight to see.
They had followed the steps of the moose and the wolves. Each
step told a different story. They could see the tragedy as it
happened: here was the place the moose stopped to fight. The snow
was packed down for many feet. One wolf had been caught by the
heavy feet of the moose and kicked to death. Further on, they saw
how the moose had struggled to escape up a hill. But the wolves had
attacked from behind. The moose had fallen down and crushed two
wolves. Yet, it was clear the end was near.
The snow was red ahead of them. Then they heard the sounds of
battle. He and Zing-ha moved closer, on their stomachs, so the
wolves would not see them. They saw the end. The picture was so
strong it had stayed with him all his life. His dull, blind eyes
saw the end again as they had in the far off past.
For long, his mind saw his past. The fire began to die out, and
the cold entered his body. He placed two more sticks on it, just
two more left. This would be how long he would live.
It was very lonely. He placed one of the last pieces of wood on
the fire. Listen, what a strange noise for wood to make in the
fire. No, it wasn’t wood. His body shook as he recognized the
sound…wolves.
The cry of a wolf brought the picture of the old moose back to
him again. He saw the body torn to pieces, with fresh blood running
on the snow. He saw the clean bones lying gray against the frozen
blood. He saw the rushing forms of the gray wolves, their shinning
eyes, their long wet tongues and sharp teeth. And he saw them form
a circle and move ever slowly closer and closer.
A cold, wet nose touched his face. At the touch, his soul jumped
forward to awaken him. His hand went to the fire and he pulled a
burning stick from it. The wolf saw the fire, but was not afraid.
It turned and howled into the air to his brother wolves. They
answered with hunger in their throats, and came running.
The old Indian listened to the hungry wolves. He heard them form
a circle around him and his small fire. He waved his burning stick
at them, but they did not move away. Now, one of them moved closer,
slowly, as if to test the old man’s strength. Another and another
followed. The circle grew smaller and smaller. Not one wolf stayed
Why should he fight? Why cling to life? And he dropped his stick
with the fire on the end of it. It fell in the snow and the light
The circle of wolves moved closer. Once again the old Indian saw
the picture of the moose as it struggled before the end came. He
dropped his head to his knees. What did it matter after all? Isn’t
this the law of life?
FAITH LAPIDUS: You have just heard the American story “The Law
of Life.” It was written by Jack London. Your storyteller was Shep
O’Neal. Listen again next week for another American story in V.O.A.
. I’m Faith Lapidus.
American History:Gold, Land Drive Settlers
FAITH LAPIDUS:? Welcome to
Soon after the Civil War ended in eighteen sixty-five, thousands
of Americans began to move west to settle the land. The great
movement of settlers continued for almost forty years. The great
empty West, in time, became fully settled. The discovery of gold
had already started a great movement to California.
This week in our series, Robert Bostic and Leo Scully tell about
the gold rush and the important part cowboys played in settling the
West.<img ALT="" src="/blog7style/images/common/sg_trans.gif" real_src ="/ting/.jpg" ALIGN="right"
TITLE="The&Law&of&Life&by&Jack&London" />
ROBERT BOSTIC:? Men had rushed to the gold fields with hopes of
becoming rich. A few found gold. The others found only hard work
and high prices.
When their money was gone, they gave up the search for gold. But
they stayed in California to become farmers or businessmen or
Some never gave up the search for riches. They moved back toward
the east, searching for gold and silver in the wild country between
California and the Mississippi river. Men found gold and silver in
Nevada, and then in the Idaho and Montana territories. Other gold
strikes were made in the Arizona territory, in Colorado and in the
Dakota territory.
LEO SCULLY:? Each new gold rush brought more people from the
east. Mining camps quickly grew into towns with stores, hotels,
even newspapers. Most of these towns, however, lived only as long
as gold was easy to find. Then they began to die.
In some of the gold centers, big mining companies bought up all
the land from those who first claimed it. These companies brought
in mining machines that could dig out the gold from deep
underground and separate it from the rock that held it.
These companies needed equipment and other supplies.
Transportation companies were formed. They carried supplies to the
mining camps in huge wagon trains pulled by slow-moving oxen. Roads
were built, and in some places, railroads.
ROBERT BOSTIC:? The great wealth taken from the gold and silver
mines was usually invested in other businesses: shipping,
railroads, factories, stores, land companies. More jobs were
created in the West. And living conditions got better. More and
more people decided to leave the crowded East for a new life in the
But the big eastern cities continued to grow. New factories and
industrial centers were built. People moved from the farms to find
work in the cities.
LEO SCULLY:? The growth of these industrial centers created a
big demand for food, especially meat. Chicago quickly became the
heart of the meat industry. Railroads brought animals to Chicago,
where packing companies killed them and prepared the meat for
eastern markets.
Special railroad cars kept the meat cold, so it would remain
fresh until sold. As the meat industry grew, the demand for fresh
meat increased. More and more cattle were needed.
ROBERT BOSTIC:? There were millions of cattle in Texas, but no
way to get them to the eastern markets. The closest point on the
railroad was Sedalia, Missouri, more than one thousand kilometers
away. Some cattlemen believed it might be possible to walk cattle
to the railroad, letting them feed on the open grassland along the
Early in eighteen sixty-six, a group of Texas cattlemen decided
to try this. They put together a huge herd of more than two hundred
sixty-thousand cattle and set out for Sedalia.
LEO SCULLY:? There were many problems on that first cattle
drive. T grass and water sometimes hard to
find. Bandits and Indians followed the herd trying to steal cattle.
Farmers had put up fences in some areas, blocking the way.
Most of the great herd was lost along the way. But the cattlemen
believed they had proved that cattle could be walked long distances
to the railroad. They believed a better way to the railroad could
be found, with plenty of grass and water.
archives.govUnion Pacific Railroad officials
have their picture taken in Nebraska Territory, 1866, during
railway construction
ROBERT BOSTIC:? The cattlemen got the Kansas Pacific Railroad to
extend its line west to Abilene, Kansas. There was a good trail
from Texas to Abilene. Cattlemen began moving their herds up this
trail across the Oklahoma territory and into Kansas. At Abilene,
the cattle were put on trains and carried to Chicago.
In the next four years, more than one-and-a-half-million cattle
were moved north over the Chisholm trail to Kansas. Other trails
were found as the railroad moved farther west.
LEO SCULLY:? Trail drives usually began with the spring
"round-up."Cattlemen would send out cowboys to search the open
grasslands for their animals.
As the cattle were brought in, the young animals were branded --
marked to show who owned them. Then they were released with their
mothers to spend another year in the open country.
The other cattle were put together for the long drive to Kansas.
Usually, they were moved in groups of twenty-five hundred to five
thousand animals. Twelve to twenty cowboys took them up the
ROBERT BOSTIC:? The cowboys worked hard on a trail drive. They
had to keep the herd together day and night and protect it from bad
men and Indians. They had to keep the cattle from moving too fast
or running away. If they moved too fast, they would lose weight,
and their owner would not get as much money for them.
The cowboys would walk the cattle only twenty to thirty
kilometers a day. The cattle could feed all night and part of the
morning before starting each day. If the grass was good, and the
herd moved slowly, the cattle would get heavier and bring more
LEO SCULLY:? In the early eighteen eighties, the price of cattle
rose to fifty dollars each, and many cattlemen became rich.
Business was so good that a five thousand dollar investment in the
cattle industry could make forty-five thousand dollars in four
More and more people began raising cattle. And early cattlemen
greatly increased the size of their herds. Within a few years,
there was not enough grass for all the cattle, especially along the
trails. There was so much meat that the price began to fall.
ROBERT BOSTIC:? There were two severe winters that killed
hundreds of thousands of cattle. An extremely dry summer killed the
grass, and thousands more died of hunger. The cattle industry
itself almost died.
Cattlemen also had problems with farmers and sheepmen. Farmers
coming west would claim grassland used by the cattle growers. They
would put up fences and plow up the land to plant crops. Other
settlers brought huge herds of sheep to compete with cattle for the
grass, and the sheep always won. Cattle would not eat grass where
sheep had eaten.
Violence broke out. Cattle growers fought the farmers and
sheepmen for control of the land. The cattlemen finally had to
settle land of their own, putting up fences and cutting the size of
their herds. They no longer could let their cattle run free on
public lands.
LEO SCULLY:? By the late eighteen hundreds, the years of the
cowboys were ending. But the story of the cowboy and his difficult
life would not be forgotten. Even today, the cowboy lives in
movies, on television, and in books.
When one thinks of the "Wild West" of America, he does not think
of the miners who opened the way to the West. Nor does he think of
the men who struggled to build the first railroads across the wild
land. And one does not think of the farmers who pushed slowly
westward to fence, plow, and plant the land.
ROBERT BOSTIC:? The words "Wild West" bring to mind just one
character: the cowboy. His difficult fight to protect his cattle on
the long trail was an exciting story. It has been told by many
writers. Perhaps the best-known was a young easterner, Owen Wister.
He worked as a cattleman for several years, then wrote about the
heroic life of the cowboy in a book called "The Virginian."
Another easterner who came west to learn about the cowboy was
the artist Frederick Remington. Remington was a cowboy for only two
years. But he spent the rest of his life painting pictures of the
west and writing about it. His exciting works made the west and the
cowboy come to life for millions who never saw a real cowboy.
LEO SCULLY:? The cowboy has also lived in music. He had his own
kind of songs that told of his problems, his hopes, and his
feelings. That will be our story next week.
FAITH LAPIDUS:? Our program was written by Frank Beardsley. The
narrators were Robert Bostic and Leo Scully. Transcripts, MP3s and
podcasts of our programs, along with historical images, are at
. You can also follow us on Twitter at
Learning English.
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