In the Wilderness

by Charles Dudley Warner

If the appearance of Old Phelps attracts attention, his voice, when first heard, invariably startles the listener. A small, high-pitched, half-querulous voice, it easily rises into the shrillest falsetto; and it has a quality in it that makes it audible in all the tempests of the forest, or the roar of rapids, like the piping of a boatswain's whistle at sea in a gale. He has a way of letting it rise as his sentence goes on, or when he is opposed in argument, or wishes to mount above other voices in the conversation, until it dominates everything. Heard in the depths of the woods, quavering aloft, it is felt to be as much a part of nature, an original force, as the northwest wind or the scream of the hen-hawk. When he is pottering about the camp-fire, trying to light his pipe with a twig held in the flame, he is apt to begin some philosophical observation in a small, slow, stumbling voice, which seems about to end in defeat; when he puts on some unsuspected force, and the sentence ends in an insistent shriek. Horace Greeley had such a voice, and could regulate it in the same manner. But Phelps's voice is not seldom plaintive, as if touched by the dreamy sadness of the woods themselves.

When Old Mountain Phelps was discovered, he was, as the reader has already guessed, not understood by his contemporaries. His neighbors, farmers in the secluded valley, had many of them grown thrifty and prosperous, cultivating the fertile meadows, and vigorously attacking the timbered mountains; while Phelps, with not much more faculty of acquiring property than the roaming deer, had pursued the even tenor of the life in the forest on which he set out. They would have been surprised to be told that Old Phelps owned more of what makes the value of the Adirondacks than all of them put together, but it was true. This woodsman, this trapper, this hunter, this fisherman, this sitter on a log, and philosopher, was the real proprietor of the region over which he was ready to guide the stranger. It is true that he had not a monopoly of its geography or its topography (though his knowledge was superior in these respects); there were other trappers, and more deadly hunters, and as intrepid guides: but Old Phelps was the discoverer of the beauties and sublimities of the mountains; and, when city strangers broke into the region, he monopolized the appreciation of these delights and wonders of nature. I suppose that in all that country he alone had noticed the sunsets, and observed the delightful processes of the seasons, taken pleasure in the woods for themselves, and climbed mountains solely for the sake of the prospect. He alone understood what was meant by “scenery.” In the eyes of his neighbors, who did not know that he was a poet and a philosopher, I dare say he appeared to be a slack provider, a rather shiftless trapper and fisherman; and his passionate love of the forest and the mountains, if it was noticed, was accounted to him for idleness. When the appreciative tourist arrived, Phelps was ready, as guide, to open to him all the wonders of his possessions; he, for the first time, found an outlet for his enthusiasm, and a response to his own passion. It then became known what manner of man this was who had grown up here in the companionship of forests, mountains, and wild animals; that these scenes had highly developed in him the love of beauty, the aesthetic sense, delicacy of appreciation, refinement of feeling; and that, in his solitary wanderings and musings, the primitive man, self-taught, had evolved for himself a philosophy and a system of things. And it was a sufficient system, so long as it was not disturbed by external skepticism. When the outer world came to him, perhaps he had about as much to give to it as to receive from it; probably more, in his own estimation; for there is no conceit like that of isolation.

Phelps loved his mountains. He was the discoverer of Marcy, and caused the first trail to be cut to its summit, so that others could enjoy the noble views from its round and rocky top. To him it was, in noble symmetry and beauty, the chief mountain of the globe. To stand on it gave him, as he said, “a feeling of heaven up-h'istedness.” He heard with impatience that Mount Washington was a thousand feet higher, and he had a childlike incredulity about the surpassing sublimity of the Alps. Praise of any other elevation he seemed to consider a slight to Mount Marcy, and did not willingly hear it, any more than a lover hears the laudation of the beauty of another woman than the one he loves. When he showed us scenery he loved, it made him melancholy to have us speak of scenery elsewhere that was finer. And yet there was this delicacy about him, that he never over-praised what he brought us to see, any more than one would over-praise a friend of whom he was fond. I remember that when for the first time, after a toilsome journey through the forest, the splendors of the Lower Au Sable Pond broke upon our vision,—that low-lying silver lake, imprisoned by the precipices which it reflected in its bosom,—he made no outward response to our burst of admiration: only a quiet gleam of the eye showed the pleasure our appreciation gave him. As some one said, it was as if his friend had been admired—a friend about whom he was unwilling to say much himself, but well pleased to have others praise.

Thus far, we have considered Old Phelps as simply the product of the Adirondacks; not so much a self-made man (as the doubtful phrase has it) as a natural growth amid primal forces. But our study is interrupted by another influence, which complicates the problem, but increases its interest. No scientific observer, so far as we know, has ever been able to watch the development of the primitive man, played upon and fashioned by the hebdomadal iteration of “Greeley's Weekly Tri-bune.” Old Phelps educated by the woods is a fascinating study; educated by the woods and the Tri-bune, he is a phenomenon. No one at this day can reasonably conceive exactly what this newspaper was to such a mountain valley as Keene. If it was not a Providence, it was a Bible. It was no doubt owing to it that Democrats became as scarce as moose in the Adirondacks. But it is not of its political aspect that I speak. I suppose that the most cultivated and best informed portion of the earth's surface—the Western Reserve of Ohio, as free from conceit as it is from a suspicion that it lacks anything owes its pre-eminence solely to this comprehensive journal. It received from it everything except a collegiate and a classical education,—things not to be desired, since they interfere with the self-manufacture of man. If Greek had been in this curriculum, its best known dictum would have been translated, “Make thyself.” This journal carried to the community that fed on it not only a complete education in all departments of human practice and theorizing, but the more valuable and satisfying assurance that there was nothing more to be gleaned in the universe worth the attention of man. This panoplied its readers in completeness. Politics, literature, arts, sciences, universal brotherhood and sisterhood, nothing was omitted; neither the poetry of Tennyson, nor the philosophy of Margaret Fuller; neither the virtues of association, nor of unbolted wheat. The laws of political economy and trade were laid down as positively and clearly as the best way to bake beans, and the saving truth that the millennium would come, and come only when every foot of the earth was subsoiled.

I do not say that Orson Phelps was the product of nature and the Tri-bune: but he cannot be explained without considering these two factors. To him Greeley was the Tri-bune, and the Tri-bune was Greeley; and yet I think he conceived of Horace Greeley as something greater than his newspaper, and perhaps capable of producing another journal equal to it in another part of the universe. At any rate, so completely did Phelps absorb this paper and this personality that he was popularly known as “Greeley” in the region where he lived. Perhaps a fancied resemblance of the two men in the popular mind had something to do with this transfer of name. There is no doubt that Horace Greeley owed his vast influence in the country to his genius, nor much doubt that he owed his popularity in the rural districts to James Gordon Bennett; that is, to the personality of the man which the ingenious Bennett impressed upon the country. That he despised the conventionalities of society, and was a sloven in his toilet, was firmly believed; and the belief endeared him to the hearts of the people. To them “the old white coat”—an antique garment of unrenewed immortality—was as much a subject of idolatry as the redingote grise to the soldiers of the first Napoleon, who had seen it by the campfires on the Po and on the Borysthenes, and believed that he would come again in it to lead them against the enemies of France. The Greeley of the popular heart was clad as Bennett said he was clad. It was in vain, even pathetically in vain, that he published in his newspaper the full bill of his fashionable tailor (the fact that it was receipted may have excited the animosity of some of his contemporaries) to show that he wore the best broadcloth, and that the folds of his trousers followed the city fashion of falling outside his boots. If this revelation was believed, it made no sort of impression in the country. The rural readers were not to be wheedled out of their cherished conception of the personal appearance of the philosopher of the Tri-bune.

That the Tri-bune taught Old Phelps to be more Phelps than he would have been without it was part of the independence-teaching mission of Greeley's paper. The subscribers were an army, in which every man was a general. And I am not surprised to find Old Phelps lately rising to the audacity of criticising his exemplar. In some recently-published observations by Phelps upon the philosophy of reading is laid down this definition: “If I understand the necessity or use of reading, it is to reproduce again what has been said or proclaimed before. Hence, letters, characters, &c., are arranged in all the perfection they possibly can be, to show how certain language has been spoken by the original author. Now, to reproduce by reading, the reading should be so perfectly like the original that no one standing out of sight could tell the reading from the first time the language was spoken.”

This is illustrated by the highest authority at hand: I have heard as good readers read, and as poor readers, as almost any one in this region. If I have not heard as many, I have had a chance to hear nearly the extreme in variety. Horace Greeley ought to have been a good reader. Certainly but few, if any, ever knew every word of the English language at a glance more readily than he did, or knew the meaning of every mark of punctuation more clearly; but he could not read proper. 'But how do you know?' says one. From the fact I heard him in the same lecture deliver or produce remarks in his own particular way, that, if they had been published properly in print, a proper reader would have reproduced them again the same way. In the midst of those remarks Mr. Greeley took up a paper, to reproduce by reading part of a speech that some one else had made; and his reading did not sound much more like the man that first read or made the speech than the clatter of a nail factory sounds like a well-delivered speech. Now, the fault was not because Mr. Greeley did not know how to read as well as almost any man that ever lived, if not quite: but in his youth he learned to read wrong; and, as it is ten times harder to unlearn anything than it is to learn it, he, like thousands of others, could never stop to unlearn it, but carried it on through his whole life.

Whether a reader would be thanked for reproducing one of Horace Greeley's lectures as he delivered it is a question that cannot detain us here; but the teaching that he ought to do so, I think, would please Mr. Greeley.

The first driblets of professional tourists and summer boarders who arrived among the Adirondack Mountains a few years ago found Old Phelps the chief and best guide of the region. Those who were eager to throw off the usages of civilization, and tramp and camp in the wilderness, could not but be well satisfied with the aboriginal appearance of this guide; and when he led off into the woods, axe in hand, and a huge canvas sack upon his shoulders, they seemed to be following the Wandering Jew. The contents—of this sack would have furnished a modern industrial exhibition, provisions cooked and raw, blankets, maple-sugar, tinware, clothing, pork, Indian meal, flour, coffee, tea, &c. Phelps was the ideal guide: he knew every foot of the pathless forest; he knew all woodcraft, all the signs of the weather, or, what is the same thing, how to make a Delphic prediction about it. He was fisherman and hunter, and had been the comrade of sportsmen and explorers; and his enthusiasm for the beauty and sublimity of the region, and for its untamable wildness, amounted to a passion. He loved his profession; and yet it very soon appeared that he exercised it with reluctance for those who had neither ideality, nor love for the woods. Their presence was a profanation amid the scenery he loved. To guide into his private and secret haunts a party that had no appreciation of their loveliness disgusted him. It was a waste of his time to conduct flippant young men and giddy girls who made a noisy and irreverent lark of the expedition. And, for their part, they did not appreciate the benefit of being accompanied by a poet and a philosopher. They neither understood nor valued his special knowledge and his shrewd observations: they didn't even like his shrill voice; his quaint talk bored them. It was true that, at this period, Phelps had lost something of the activity of his youth; and the habit of contemplative sitting on a log and talking increased with the infirmities induced by the hard life of the woodsman. Perhaps he would rather talk, either about the woods-life or the various problems of existence, than cut wood, or busy himself in the drudgery of the camp. His critics went so far as to say, “Old Phelps is a fraud.” They would have said the same of Socrates. Xantippe, who never appreciated the world in which Socrates lived, thought he was lazy. Probably Socrates could cook no better than Old Phelps, and no doubt went “gumming” about Athens with very little care of what was in the pot for dinner.

If the summer visitors measured Old Phelps, he also measured them by his own standards. He used to write out what he called “short-faced descriptions” of his comrades in the woods, which were never so flattering as true. It was curious to see how the various qualities which are esteemed in society appeared in his eyes, looked at merely in their relation to the limited world he knew, and judged by their adaptation to the primitive life. It was a much subtler comparison than that of the ordinary guide, who rates his traveler by his ability to endure on a march, to carry a pack, use an oar, hit a mark, or sing a song. Phelps brought his people to a test of their naturalness and sincerity, tried by contact with the verities of the woods. If a person failed to appreciate the woods, Phelps had no opinion of him or his culture; and yet, although he was perfectly satisfied with his own philosophy of life, worked out by close observation of nature and study of the Tri-bune, he was always eager for converse with superior minds, with those who had the advantage of travel and much reading, and, above all, with those who had any original “speckerlation.” Of all the society he was ever permitted to enjoy, I think he prized most that of Dr. Bushnell. The doctor enjoyed the quaint and first-hand observations of the old woodsman, and Phelps found new worlds open to him in the wide ranges of the doctor's mind. They talked by the hour upon all sorts of themes, the growth of the tree, the habits of wild animals, the migration of seeds, the succession of oak and pine, not to mention theology, and the mysteries of the supernatural.