"Frontiersman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glad when the old frontiersman changed the subject and began to talk of the settling of that country by the Spaniards, the legends of lost gold-mines handed down to the Mexicans, and strange stories of heroism and mystery and religion. The Mexicans had not advanced much in spite of the spread of civilization to the Southwest. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... am an admirer and student of Dickens. . . . Its perusal" (that of my second volume) "has recalled an incident which may interest you. Twelve or thirteen years ago I crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains as a Government surveyor under a famous frontiersman and civil engineer—Colonel Lander. We were too early by a month, and became snow-bound just on the very summit. Under these circumstances it was necessary to abandon the wagons for a time, and drive the stock (mules) down the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... a hot dusty, August day when they arrived, dusty, unshaven, and weather-beaten, and Samuel Clemens's life as a frontiersman began. Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a wooden town with an assorted population of two thousand souls. The mining excitement was at its height and had brought together ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... heart warm toward this hard-faced, genial frontiersman, who knew how to judge so well the timbre of a ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... Miss Mason went to increase Daylight's interest in her. Yet, much as he desired, he failed to get acquainted with her. He had thoughts of asking her to luncheon, but his was the innate chivalry of the frontiersman, and the thoughts never came to anything. He knew a self-respecting, square-dealing man was not supposed to take his stenographer to luncheon. Such things did happen, he knew, for he heard the chaffing gossip of the club; but he did not think much of such ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... sea," as I think Mr. Swinburne hath it. I was pretty nearly slain; my spirit lay down and kicked for three days; I was up at an Angora goat-ranche in the Santa Lucia Mountains, nursed by an old frontiersman, a mighty hunter of bears, and I scarcely slept, or ate, or thought for four days. Two nights I lay out under a tree in a sort of stupor, doing nothing but fetch water for myself and horse, light a fire and make coffee, and all night awake ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the eye of the frontiersman was, he could not have discerned that the procedure by which he executed the most formidable operation in surgery came so near perfection that it would successfully challenge improvement for ...
— Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky - A Sketch • David W. Yandell
... said, wondering a little what sort of being he would prove to be if one came to know him. He did not look as though he had ever lived the rough life he mentioned so glibly; certainly his hands were not the hands of a frontiersman. ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... and has become traditional, its pioneers become heroic and poetic. The Norman robber is then discovered to be a kind of blue-blooded gentleman, or at least the sturdy, aboriginal father of gentlemen. The rough and half-savage Boone is the ideal frontiersman, with a smack of Arden and the sylvan realm. And as for the coarse-toothed harrow—as my Lady Cavaliere sits upon the porch and sees the peacock unfolding his glory upon the soft, thick sward, do you see that my lady wears a delicate trinket around her swan neck, and lo! it is ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... he was bowling along on a seventy-mile ride to the ranch in the Laramie valley, hurried thither by the news that Birdsall's gang had run off many of his son's best horses and that Hal Folsom himself was missing. Loring galloped by the side of the ambulance several miles, conferring with the old frontiersman all the way, then turned back to resume his work at the depot. Eagerly he wired dispatches to the General, which were forwarded from Cheyenne to the Platte, telling of his important capture, smiling quietly as he wrote. Had he not promised to produce ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... for her utmost nerve. There was nothing she could do now but wait, and waiting was of all things the one most foreign to her impulsive temperament. She acknowledged too some fear of this quiet, soft-spoken frontiersman. All Arizona knew not only the daredevil spirit that fired his gentleness, but the competence with which he set about any task he assigned himself. She did not see how he could unravel this mystery. She had left no clues behind her, she felt sure of that, ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... command returned home victorious, and Jackson for his heroism and ability was made a major-general in the regular army, he then being forty-seven years of age. It was in this war that we first hear of the famous frontiersman Davy Crockett, and of Sam Houston, afterwards so unique a figure in the war for Texan independence. In this war, too, General Harrison gained his success at Tippecanoe, which was never forgotten; but his military genius was far inferior to that of Jackson. It is probable that had ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... "Pooh-Bah"—he was merely a pioneer. In the utter wilderness, far from any neighbors, surrounded by dense forests and a few savages, he had established his home. He was not an Indian potentate, but only a frontiersman, soft-spoken and energetic, an ingenious carpenter and mechanic, a modest ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... was a frontiersman, and by no means sentimentally inclined; but the tears stood in his eyes as he ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... neighbors. Yet, according to Daniel Green Burner, Berry and Lincoln's clerk—and the fact is mentioned merely as illustrating a universal custom among the pioneers—"John Cameron always kept a barrel of whiskey in the house." He was a powerful man physically, and a typical frontiersman. He was born in Kentucky in 1791, and, with his wife, moved to Illinois in 1815. He settled in Sangamon County in 1818, and in 1829 took up his abode in a cabin on a hill overlooking the Sangamon River, and, with James Rutledge, founded the town ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... shall I say what he was? To this day I can only surmise many things of him. He was a Scotchman born, and I know now that he had a slight Scotch accent. At the time of which I write, my early childhood, he was a frontiersman and hunter. I can see him now, with his hunting shirt and leggings and moccasins; his powder horn, engraved with wondrous scenes; his bullet pouch and tomahawk and hunting knife. He was a tall, lean man with a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... mislead. Some of his biographers, however, while shunning direct false statements, have used alleviating adjectives with literary skill, and have drawn fanciful pictures of a pious frugal household, of a gallant frontiersman endowed with a long catalogue of noble qualities, and of a mother like a Madonna in the wilderness.[17] Yet all the evidence that there is goes to show that this romantic coloring is purely illusive. Rough, coarse, low, ignorant, and poverty-stricken ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... a frontiersman and a soldier. Because he was a frontiersman he tended to be at once democratic in temper and despotic in action. In the rough and tumble of life in the back blocks a man must often act without careful inquiry into constitutional privileges, but he must always treat men as ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... "good English." However, when the reader has gone a little farther he will realize that Crockett shows his own character in his writings, and that his language is picturesque and entertaining. Moreover, it is language that was characteristic of the early settlers in the region where the frontiersman lived, and hence is of some historical interest ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... other class,—the backwoodsmen and pioneers, and all rude and simple persons. Then there are those in whom the two are united or merged,—the great poets and artists. In them the sentimentalist is corrected and cured, and the hairy and taciturn frontiersman has had experience to some purpose. The true poet knows more about Nature than the naturalist because he carries her open secrets in his heart. Eckermann could instruct Goethe in ornithology, but could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning and mystery of ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... the seashore and the Point—a dear old dad as ill at ease in Eastern circles as his daughter had been at first at school, until he found himself welcomed with open arms to the officers' mess-rooms at the Point, for John Folsom was as noted a frontiersman as ever trod the plains, a man old officers of the cavalry and infantry knew and honored as "a square trader" in the Indian country—a man whom the Indians themselves loved and trusted far and wide, and when a man has won the trust and faith of an Indian let him ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... been at the agreeable pains of reconstructing the verses as they were probably written, so that there are two more than the Nilghai sang. The whole is a very curious haunting ballad, leaving us with the desire to know much more of the lives of both men—Job Charnock the frontiersman, and Joseph Townsend, "skilful and industrious, a kind father and a useful friend," who could navigate not only the Ganges but the shifting Hooghli. Rarely can so much mixed autobiography and romance have been packed into six stanzas—and here too the adventurous ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... the staging of a scene in Dante Alighieri's tragic comedy, the looming mountains, the upper air graying on to dusk, and the solemn forest aisles full of lurking shadows, you are to picture the old frontiersman, bareheaded and on his knees, pouring forth his soul in all the sonorous phrase of Holy Writ, now in thanksgiving, and now in most terrible beseechings that all the vials of Heaven's wrath might be poured out ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... The Smoky Gorge Caught in a Storm Casting Lots to See Who Should Die A Hidden River The Delirium of Starvation Franklin Ward Graves His Dying Advice A Frontiersman's Plan The Camp of Death A Dread Resort A Sister's Agony The Indians Refuse to Eat Lewis and Salvador Flee for Their Lives Killing a Deer Tracks Marked by Blood ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... cowpony pick its way down the steep shale hill to the draw. He saddled without a waste motion, packed his supplies deftly, mounted, and was off. In the way he cut across the desert toward the moving herd was the certainty of the frontiersman. He did not hurry, but he wasted no time. His horse circled in and out among the sand dunes, now topped a hill, now followed a wash. Every foot of the devious trail was the most ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... criticism and objection, however, can be raised against all other modern subdivision of labor. It does not follow, for example, that the modern surgeon is any more narrow or wooden a man than the early settler of this country. The frontiersman, however, had to be not only a surgeon, but also an architect, house-builder, lumberman, farmer, soldier, and doctor, and he had to settle his law cases with a gun. You would hardly say that the life of the modern surgeon is any more narrowing, or ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... Trinidad Joe's cabin. That worthy proprietor himself—a long, lank man, with even more than the ordinary rural Western characteristics of ill health, ill feeding, and melancholy—met him on the bank, clothed in a manner and costume that was a singular combination of the frontiersman and the sailor. When North had again related the story of his finding ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... The frontiersman never despairs; and, although it was difficult to figure out the basis of much hope in the present case, yet Sut held on, and determined to do so to the end. He made several cautious tests of his bonds, but the lariat of buffalo-hide was wound around his arms so continuously, and tied so well, ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... The irregular warfare of the border, from fifty-four on, while it may, to military history as a whole, be as unimportant as the quarrels of kites and crows, was yet a big part of the life of the frontiersman and frightful in its possibilities. Sherman's march to the sea or through the Carolinas, disgraceful to modern civilization as each undeniably was, lacked the sickening phase, guerrilla atrocities, that made the Civil War in the West, to those at least ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Murphy! I have the drop!" The voice was low, but stern, and the old frontiersman obeyed mechanically, although his seamed face ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... Windsor, a frontiersman, had slipped to the very verge of the rock, where he lay face down with right arm and leg completely over the precipice, his left hand vainly grabbing empty air for grip of anything that would hold him back. Captain Lewis was horrified, but kept his presence of mind; for the ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... Obed away down in Mexico. We were prisoners together in the submarine dungeon of San Juan de Ulua. I'd never have escaped without him. And I'd never have escaped a lot more things without him, either. Then we met the Panther. He's the greatest frontiersman in all the southwest, and we three ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with that steely look in them which snaps like lightning when any thing strikes fire from the heart. He was very tall and straight, and had a lofty carriage and an air of command. His dress was that of an ordinary frontiersman, and he wore no arms of any kind, yet any one would have said, with the invincible assurance of a sudden presentiment, "The man is ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... His ideas, however, underwent a marked change as the years rolled on and he became more familiar with the attributes of the noble red man. He was with Kit Carson in the Blackfeet country many years before the Taos massacre, when his convictions were thus modified, and it was from the famous frontiersman himself I learned the ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... stairs had, after some discussion, decided on bullet. This was out of consideration for Billy's standing as a frontiersman. Besides, he had stolen no horses. In order not to delay matters, the execution was fixed for the present time and place. Billy stood with his back to the logs of his own hotel, his hands and feet bound, but his ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... routes of travel along the canyons present excellent opportunities for defense and ambuscade. But under the leadership and by the advice of Kit Carson these Indians were ultimately conquered. This wily but brave frontiersman recommended a new method of warfare, which was to destroy the herds and flocks of the Navajos; and this course was pursued. Regular troops with volunteers from California and New Mexico went into the Navajo country and shot down their herds of half-wild horses, killed hundreds of thousands of sheep, ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... this side of the Atlantic," wrote Edmund Randolph. Yet this style of familiar talk to the crowd had been used seventy years earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it was to be employed again by a gaunt American frontiersman who was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's death. "The Crisis," a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first was issued in December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion that the "American cause owed ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... muscular, somewhat awkward in repose, with cool, bright gray eyes, deep set under shaggy eyebrows, and having immense reach of arm—his was an imposing figure. Mr. Butler was a born Puritan; Col. May was a born frontiersman. [7] Mr. Butler opposed slavery on moral grounds, and because he hated injustice or wrong in any form. Col. May hated slavery, and fought it, because he believed the institution was detrimental to his own race. Born in Kentucky and reared in Missouri, he had seen ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... Ange was yielding Fort Chartres to the English and crossing the Mississippi, I am able to show that my own ancestral sympathies while dwelling on the frontiers were not with the French. But I quote it chiefly because he was a typical forerunner, a first frontiersman. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... rank, with more than competency at their disposal, not infrequently had few neighbors other than the humble but independent frontiersman who left for new fields when a dog barked within fifty miles of his cabin. There were neighbors within half that distance of Tallwoods, settlers nestled here or there in these enfolding hills and forests; but of neighbors in importance equal to that of the owner of Tallwoods ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... civilized order. This passage must have stirred the Greek emigrant to leave his stony Hellas and seek in the West, a new home; it suggests the great Hellenic movement for the colonization of Italy and Sicily from the 6th to the 9th century B.C. The poet has plainly been with the frontiersman, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the battle." Everything depends on a good start and the right road. To retrace one's steps is to lose not only time but confidence. "Be sure you are right then go ahead" was the motto of the famous frontiersman, Davy Crockett, and it is one that every young man can adopt ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... the Jackson Administration, made much of David Crockett, of Tennessee, who was a thorn in the sides of the Democrats, and they succeeded in having him defeated for one Congress, but he was successful at the next election. He was a true frontiersman, with a small dash of civilization and a great deal of shrewdness transplanted in political life. He was neither grammatical nor graceful, but no rudeness of language can disguise strong sense and shrewdness, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... it is just as I should have expected; but I shall not become your debtor for such a purpose. I have been a frontiersman too long to be bullied ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... strip off this shell* I'll lam the stuffin' outer ye, afore the stranger.' With that Bill just danced with rage, but dassent fire, for HE knew, and I knew, that if he'd plugged me he'd been a dead frontiersman afore ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... students develop an architectural blueprint for restoring an 18th Century home, including grounds of the gentry, planter, or frontiersman. ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... The hardy frontiersman lay for months hovering between life and death, but finally recovered, and was once more in the thick ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... the warm compliments of Deerfoot on his coolness, bravery and skill in the presence of the three Winnebagos. You will agree that it was a daring exploit indeed, which would have done credit to a veteran frontiersman. It could not have been otherwise to draw such warm praise ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... the Lincoln family in Illinois, they had the few tools which would be considered almost necessary to every frontiersman: namely, a common ax, broad-ax, hand-saw, whip-saw. The mauls and wedges were of wood and were made by each workman for himself. To this stock of tools may also be added a small supply of nails brought from Indiana, for at that period nails were very expensive and used with the strictest economy. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... bee in his bonnet. He was not a bad-hearted fellow. Many a right good young man, before him and since, has loved an Adrienne and been dazzled by an Alice. A violet is sweet, but a rose is the garden's queen. The poor youthful frontiersman ought to have been stronger; but he was not, and what ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... although often the folds of the shirt, full and ample above the belt, were the depository for food and ammunition. A broad-brimmed felt hat, or a cap of fox-skin or squirrel-skin, with the tail dangling behind, crowned the often tall and always sinewy frontiersman. His constant companion was his home-made flint-lock rifle—a clumsy, heavy weapon, so long that it reached to the chin of the tallest man, but unerring in the hands of an expert marksman, such as was each of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a frontiersman, had had his home destroyed, and his wife and child slain by the Indians. While the parley was going on, John discovered the Indian who had slain his wife and child, and, recognizing their scalps hanging ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... slums by a charity organization. She had presumably been scrubbed and curried and taught household duties before being shipped in a famous colony to Canada. The colony went to pieces in a deplorable failure on facing its first year of difficulties, but she had married a Canadian frontiersman and remained. She wore all the slum marks—bad teeth, loose-feeble-will in the mouth, furtive whining eyes. She was clean personally and paraded her religion in unctuous phrase; but I need only to tell a Canadian that she ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... fond of hunting, he was the happiest of men. A few hours' labor threw up a rude hut which was all the home he desired. His rifle furnished him with food, and with the skins of animals for bed and bedding. Every frontiersman knew how to dress the skin of deer for moccasins and other garments. With a sharpened stick he punched holes through the rank sod, and planted corn, in soil so rich that it ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... camp-followers who frequently make traveling shows the scapegoat for their misdoings. We propose to have our show efficiently and honestly policed, to give the people the worth of their money, and to give an entertainment that will show the frontiersman of my early ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger |
