ite with the belief that the immortal
gods are looking over his shoulder.

We no longer prostrate ourselves before the immortal gods. We have long
since discovered the divinity within ourselves, and so we have flung
across the continents and the seas the visible epics of will.

The history of the American fur trade alone makes the Trojan War look
like a Punch and Judy show! and the Missouri River was the path of the
conquerors. We have the facts--but we have not Homer.

An epic story in its essence is the story of heroic men battling, aided
or frustrated by the superhuman. And in the fur trade era there was no
dearth of battling men, and the elements left no lack of superhuman
obstacles.

I am more thrilled by the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition than
by the tale of Jason. John Colter, wandering three years in the
wilderness and discovering the Yellowstone Park, is infinitely more
heroic to me that Theseus. Alexander Harvey makes AEneas look like a
degenerate. It was Harvey, you know, who fell out with the powers at
Fort Union, with the result that he was ordered to report at the
American Fur Company's office at St. Louis before he could be reinstated
in the service. This was at Christmas time--Christmas of a Western
winter. The distance was seventeen hundred miles, as the crow flies.
"Give me a dog to carry my blankets," said he, "and by God I'll report
before the ice goes out!" He started afoot through the hostile tribes
and blizzards. He reported at St. Louis early in March, returning to
Union by the first boat out that year. And when he arrived at the Fort,
he called out the man who was responsible for the trouble, and quietly
killed him. That is the stern human stuff with which you build realms.
What could not Homer do with such a man? And when one follows him
through his recorded career, even Achilles seems a bit ladylike beside
him!

The killing of Carpenter by his treacherous friend, Mike Fink, would
easily make a whole book of hexameters--with a nice assortment of gods
and goddesses thrown in. There was a woman in the case--a half-breed.
Well, this half-breed woman fascinates me quite as much as she whose
face "launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium"!
In ancient times the immortal gods scourged nations for impieties; and,
as we read, we feel the black shadow of inexorable fate moving through
the terrific gloom of things. But the smallpox scourge that broke out at
Fort Uni