The Monumental Saga of the Winning of America’s Far West
042510544X
Irving Stone
Notes
Yet on the frontier one perpetrated heroic fraud’s or none at all. The Far West was little concerned with a man’s past: he could become anything he could prove himself to be.
Each immigrant train has an individuality and life cycle comparable to that of a human being: conception, birth, youth, maturity, death, dissolution and immortality…bestowed by biographers.
…for the civilization of a country is made up not only of its mountains and deserts, fertile valleys, coastline and mineral resources; the character of a country is formed as much by the character of the men who come onto its terrain.
Brigham Young believed that for a people to remain happy they must be kept in constant labor: the symbol of the Mormon community was the beehive.
It is hard for a land to be born, Yet, once born, it is even harder to destroy.
“What have you got, Abe?” asked one of his comrades. “I got the hull state of Californy in this goddam pen, that’s what I got,” cried Lee.
“As benefitted the leader of the community, (Billy Raston) was a man of boundless charity.”
…only free men create an authentic civilization. Giants had stalked the land. They had opened it, developed it, ravished it. They had destroyed each other, and frequently themselves. But the land survived.
But the truth came out, as it always will.
This dismal view discouraged no one: when color is at stake there is no force that can dissuade men from pursuing it.
Charles Crocker
William Ralston
John Sutter
Adolph Sutro
H.A.W. Tabor
Brigham Young
John Marsh
John Fremont
Collis Huntington
Hubert Bancroft
Leland Stanford
Mark Hopkins
William Sharon