The Project Gutenberg EBook of The U.P. Trail, by Zane Grey

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Title: The U.P. Trail

Author: Zane Grey

Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4684]
Posting Date: February 15, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE U. P. TRAIL

By Zane Grey

...When I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered
wilderness and haunt of savage tribes; how at each stage of the
construction roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death,
sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in
the desert; how in these uncouth places Chinese pirates worked side
by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, gambling,
drinking, quarreling, and murdering like wolves; and then when I go on
to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in
frock-coats, with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune
and a subsequent visit to Paris--it seems to me as if this railway
were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it
brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the
degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest,
the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary
work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we
require, what was Troy to this?

--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
In ACROSS THE PLAINS

1

In the early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling
yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and
miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the
undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding lines
of cottonwoods, to a slow, vast heave of rising ground--Wyoming--where
the herds of buffalo grazed and the wolf was lord and the camp-fire
of the trapper sent up its curling blue smoke from beside some lonely
stream; on and on over the barren lands of eternal monotony, all so gray
and wide and solemn and silent under the endless sky;