A Tramp Across the Continent

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ... PREFACE I Would have this unpretentious book taken only for what it is -- the wayside notes of a happy vagabondizing. It was written in hurried moments by the coal-oil lamps of country hotels, the tallow dips of section-house or ranch, the smoky pineknots of the cowboy's or the hunter's cabin, the crackling fogon of a Mexican adobe, or the snapping greasewood of my lonely campfire upon the plains; and from that vagrant body and spirit I have not tried to over-civilize it. A prim chronicle of such a trip would be no chronicle at all. Nor have I desired to make it either an atlas or an encyclopaedia of the country. Economic and geographic essays do not belong within its scope. It is merely a truthful record of some of the experiences and impressions of a walk across the continent -- the diary of a man who got outside the fences of civilization and was glad of it. It is the simple story of joy on legs. I THE START AND THE REASONS Good-bye to Malaria.--A Walk for Fun.--Amateur Robbers and the Great Professional.--Personally-Conducted Fishing.-- The Beginnings of "Woolliness."--Joy on Legs. But why tramp? Are there not railroads and Pullmans enough, that you must walk? That is what a great many of my friends said when they learned of my determination to travel from Ohio to California on foot; and very likely it is the question that will first come to your mind in reading of the longest walk for pure pleasure that is on record. But railroads and Pullmans were invented to help us hurry through life and miss most of the pleasure of it -- and most of the profit, too, except of that jingling, only half-satisfying sort which can be footed up in the ledger. I was after neither time nor money, but life -- not life in the pathetic meaning of