Perhaps my niece and the college boy of the interview are right.
About the time that Dana was escaping from Boston, a young man by the name of Henry David Thoreau tried to escape from Concord, of the same State. He had no deep-sea wharf, no brig like the Pilgrim, but, as one must seize such things as are at hand in an escape, Thoreau took a rowboat and the near-by river and started off. He rowed and rowed for a week, and came to Concord, New Hampshire. Here he took to his diary and wrote that there were no frontiers this way any longer. “This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. We cannot have the pleasure of erecting the last house; that was long ago set up in the suburbs of Astoria City, and our boundaries have literally been run to the South Sea.”
Born in 1817, more than a hundred years ago, and still born fatally late! How late, then, was I born? and you, my son? and you, my pretty niece?
“The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose,
but you and I have missed the early glory that hath passed forever from the morning earth,” she makes reply.
But I would say to her: It was ten years later, ten whole years after Thoreau’s tame adventure on the Merrimac, that gold was discovered in California. Here was a magical chance as late as the year ’Forty-Nine, and Life offered it to a young man of Providence and Brooklyn by the name of Bret Harte. He took it. There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional round of these cities allowed no place in their scheme. He went into the gold-fields and brought out “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” another piece of the Literature of Escape. Then my students answer: “Yes, but there are no more outcasts in Poker Flat, and whom are we to write about?”
Alas, ’tis true, they’re in their graves, that gentle race of gamblers. With the wind-flower and the violet they perished long ago, as literary material. Eighteen-Forty-Nine will be having its hundredth anniversary soon. But, some fifty years later, gold was struck again—this time on the Yukon. Here was another magical chance. And there was a young fellow walking the streets of Boston along with me, literally begging bread with me from editorial door to editorial door, by the name of Jack London. Life came up to us and offered us this magical chance, and Jack took it, bringing out of the Yukon a story called “Building a Fire” which is surely a part of the immortal Literature of Escape.
“Well, what would he write about now?” they ask. “What has happened since?”
“Peary has found the North Pole,” I reply.