e artist, generation after generation.
What is lost is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given
historical epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has typified
to millions of American boys the great period of the Plains, with
its Indian fighting, its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of
stage-coaches, its superb riders etched against the sky. But the Wild
West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.
The West of the cowboys, as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it
and wrote of it in the eighties and nineties, has disappeared, though it
lives on in fiction and on the screen.

Jack London, born in California in 1876, was forced to find his West in
Alaska--and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to call
the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the "Call of the Wild,"
"living life naked and tensely." In his talk Jack London was simple and
boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles.
His books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut
page. If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at
bottom, a sentimentalist, Jack London's formula was that at bottom every
man is a brute. Each theory gave provender enough for a short-story
writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate, by itself, for a
very long voyage over human life.

"Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was born in 1841 and died in
1918, had even less of a formula for the West than Jack London. He was a
word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its surfaces. Cradled "in
a covered wagon pointing West," mingling with wild frontier life from
Alaska to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur in London and
Washington, then hermit again in California, the author of "Songs of the
Sierras" at least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored and imitated,
could have invented nothing more romantic than Joaquin's life; but
though Joaquin inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the close
mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of his humor. Vast stretches
of his poetry are empty; some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet
somehow artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at certain
times.

John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached California in 1868, had
far more stuff in him than Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology,
botany, and chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, and then for
years turned explo