Perhaps this
ne'er-do-well father is to be classed as one of those rough coureurs de
bois who, in his ambassadorship from his ancestors to their frontier
posterity, forgot the conventions and manners of the ancestral life in the
temptations of the open country to a man without a slave. When he started
down the Ohio into Indiana with his family, his carpenter's tools, his
household goods, and a considerable quantity of whiskey, he was going to
treat, not as the coureurs de bois, with the Indians, the savage men of
the forests; he was going to treat with the savage forces of nature
themselves. And one must, as I have said of Nicolet and Perrot and Du
Lhut, judge charitably these men who made the reconciliations of the edges
of things. They made the paths to western cities; he, to a western
character; that only need be remembered.
Certain trees depend for the spread of their kind on seeds equipped with
spiral wings that when they fall they may reach the ground outside the
shadow of the parent tree and so have a chance to grow into wide-spreading
trees.
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