THE SANTA FE TRAIL
This way walked Fate; and as she went flung far the line of destinyThat bound an untracked continent to brotherhood from sea to sea;That long gray trail of dream and hope, marked mile by mile with graves that keepOn every barren hill and slope some stout heart lost in dreamless sleep.Patience and faith and fortitude were willed to it and justified;Stern, homely virtues, plain and rude; eternal as the sky, and wide.Nor ever sea king dared the sea in braver mood than those who wentStrong-armed to wrest from Mystery their birth-right, half a continent.Gay, hawk-eyed, brown-faced voyageurs, tired of the river’s muddy tide,Or drawn by whispered, golden lures, or beckoned by the prairies wide;These first, and lightly down the wind their songs float backward as they pass;—So light they go they leave behind scarce one dim footprint on the grass.And after them, lean, rugged, grim,—one marked untrodden heights to scan;The gray peak looking down on him knew something kindred in the man:Prophetic his keen eyes could trace in those lone wastes that seemed to wait,The larger promise of his race, the germ of many an unborn State.Then Fremont, leading Empire’s way; beside him, silent, dim, unguessed,Unheralded to claim her own, the Soul of the Awakening West:Behind above the thundering flight of fear-swept bison vaguely beatA murmur dominant with might, the trample of a million feet.That long gray trail! That path of fate! For gain or loss, for life or death,Driven by greed or hope or hate, it drew them to the latest breath;It broke them to its giant mold; it seared their weakness to the bone;It stripped them stark to sun and cold and mocked at whimperer and drone.And they were Men that bore its mark; and they were Men its service made—Strong-souled to face the utter dark, and watch with Fear still unafraid;Stern school of heroes unconfessed; unweighed for meed of right or wrong;By glib late-comers dispossessed of honors that to them belong;As in the fire-tried furnace hour strange, warring elements will fuseTo purpose, unity, and power; to truer strength and nobler use—Unconscious, save that here was life a man might live as manhood meant,They wrought a nation from their strife and shaped it with their discontent.No pulseless, still-born hope was theirs; each man a later Argonaut,Who from great dreams and ceaseless cares outwove the golden fleece he sought;And single-handed out of need made potent opportunity;Nor shamed the hour with laggard deed; nor quailed at naked Destiny:They touched the Wilderness to flower; they gave the unvoiced solitudeA tongue that spoke with master power the message of its iron mood:—But ah! the coast! The hands that bled! The toll of heart-aches and of tears!The stern, white faces of the dead that paved that highway through the years!The long grass hides the rutted trail where tracked those mighty caravansWhose far-lit camp fires low and pale, elude, howe’er the vision scansThat lost horizon, shrunk to fit the little roads that come and go,By easy ways of greatness quit, that any chance-drawn foot may know;Light trails and traffic o’er the dust of them that were a braver breed;Forgotten in the careless lust for larger gain and lesser deed.—Mother of all the Roads that hold that power o’er men that makes or mars!These lead to cities, lands, and gold—this led to the eternal stars!