Heroes of To-Day

by Mary Rosetta Parkman

This is the story of one of the greatest discoverers of our day—the story of a man who found a new world in the North Woods of New York. But like the other discoverers, he searched for one thing and found another, and he spent many years of patient work in trying to understand and use in the best way what he had found.

Edward Livingston Trudeau was born with a love of the woods and the life of the open. In his father, Dr. James Trudeau, the call of the wild was so strong that again and again he would leave the city and his work to lose himself in the great forests of the West far from the world of men. He used to say that it was only when he could lose himself in this way that he seemed to find himself. Once he lived for two years with the Osage Indians, learning their woodcraft and their skill in riding and hunting. In 1841 he went with Frémont, the explorer, on his great expedition to the Rocky Mountains. And it was never hard for his friend Audubon, the famous naturalist, to persuade him to shut up his office and fare forth with him into the wilds. He was always restless and ill at ease within walls; only when out under the open sky did he feel fully alive.

Of course, this uncertain, wandering life ruined his chances of success in his profession. He gave up his office in New York, and, leaving his children with their grandfather, returned to his earlier home in New Orleans, thinking that perhaps it would be easier to settle down there to a more regular and ordered life. But he was never able to resist for long at a time the craving for the freedom of the great outdoors.

Edward Trudeau’s childhood was spent in large cities—New York first, and then Paris; he never knew his father, and yet he shared his strong love for a wild, outdoor life. He used often to say that it was strange how the trait which in his father had wrecked his career as a physician saved the life of his son, at a time when he was so ill that he could live only in the open air, and really led to his success as a doctor by showing him that fresh air and sunshine are often a sure cure where medicines fail.

Did you know that only a very few years ago many people were afraid to open their windows? That was the time when so many were dying of tuberculosis that it was called “the great white plague.” It was as mysterious and terrible as the Black Death, which, we read, once carried off half the people of England, because this “white plague” was an enemy that never withdrew. No one knew what caused the trouble, but they thought it must be due to a chill of some kind, so they carefully shut out the fresh air. Every child to-day knows that they were shutting out the one thing that could cure them. But do you know that it was Edward Trudeau who taught us that? He was really the discoverer of the importance of fresh air as a cure for many ills, and, still better, as a means of keeping well. Besides this, he lived the life of a true hero. Listen to his story and see if you will not say with me that his was as brave a fight as that of any hero of battle. And his victory was one in which the whole world has a share.

Though Edward Trudeau was born with his father’s love of the open, most of his early life, as we have said, was spent in big cities. When he was a child of three, his grandfather, Dr. Berger, a French physician who had earned renown not only in his own country but also in New York, took him and his older brother to Paris, where they lived for fifteen years. Here he was like a wood-bird in a cage, looking at a strange life and strange people through the bars.

Sometimes the bits of life he saw were very gay and fascinating, for this was the time of the Second Empire, when the capital was always a-flutter over some occasion of royal pomp or brilliant celebration. Napoleon III (whom Victor Hugo wittily dubbed “Napoleon the Little” in contrast with his uncle, Napoleon the Great) tried to make the splendor and glitter of extravagant display take the place of the true glory of great deeds. One of his “big brass generals,” who was always quite dazzling in gold lace and gleaming decorations, lived on the first floor, immediately below Dr. Berger’s apartment, and Edward Trudeau felt, as he watched from the window this ideal figure of military power dash up to the porte-cochère on his spirited horse, all splendid, too, in gold trappings, that here truly was one of the great race of heroes. He trembled with delight when the great man took notice of his small, hero-worshiping self, and they became friends after a fashion. But General Bazaine was, as events proved, much more within his capabilities when sitting tall on a prancing, gold-caparisoned horse at a royal review of the troops than when leading the forces of France against the German army. When the Franco-Prussian War came in 1870 it was largely through his tactical blunders, and cowardly treachery, perhaps, that Sedan was surrounded and the French army obliged to surrender to the victorious Germans. When Edward Trudeau read in the papers the news of the French defeat his heart was sad over the fall of his boyish idol, but the truth entered his soul that the real victors of real battles are not always those magnificent ones who look most unconquerable.

Another vivid memory of his childhood days in Paris brought home the same truth. One day, as he watched at the window, he was thrilled to see a gorgeous equerry from the Palais Royal ride up in state to his door and hand a parcel to the butler. This package, he learned, contained the Cross of the Legion of Honor which the emperor had sent to his grandfather. Afterward, he noticed that his grandfather always wore a little red ribbon in his buttonhole. But when the small boy questioned him in regard to the reason for his wearing the decoration, he only smiled quizzically and said, “Pour faire parler les curieux, mon enfant” (“To give the curious a chance to talk, my child”). As for himself, this modest French physician preferred to let his deeds alone speak of what he had done.

The small boy who could scarcely remember the time when he did not live in France and whose relatives were all French did not forget for a moment that he was an American. The toy boats which he sailed in the fountains of the Tuileries all bore the Stars and Stripes. And his favorite playmates at the Lycée Bonaparte, where he went to school, were hardy American boys whose parents were living in Paris.

During the years at the French school the vague, inner yearning for a freer, more natural life, found vent in many pranks and covert rebellion not only against the class routine, but also, more openly, against the established order of things on the playground. Here some of the delicately aristocratic French boys were much disconcerted by the blunt and wholly effectual way in which Edward Trudeau and his chums, the Livingston lads, settled questions by argument straight from the shoulder.