Chapter One: Orphaned and Alone in Manhattan Edward was an orphan at age ten, and he was now living with relative guardians who treated him with disdain. They certainly did not need another mouth to feed. Chapter Two: Edward Joined McAllisters Battery and went camping. The one who attacks now will be victorious, and the enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me. Ulysses S. Giant Chapter Three: Shiloh, Nothing Would Ever Be the Same Again. On my fall visit to Shiloh in 2006, the leaves were changing their uniforms for those of bright new fall shades, browns, oranges and reds, some so red they were almost purple. This contrasted to the green leaves and blood red earth that appeared on the ground those two deadly days in April, 1862. Chapter Four: Vicksburg The President then laid out the concerns and questions he had held about Grants movements and plans for capturing the city and concluded: I now wish to make the Personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong. A. Lincoln Chapter Five: Chattanooga On, On I must go, to meet a soldiers fate .... William T. Sherman With the opening of the cracker line, the besieged army was eating better than the investing army. Chapter Six: Atlanta At this critical moment a subordinate officer pulled out a pocket handkerchief and tied it to a ramrod, and was in the act of raising it in a token of surrender. Captain Cooper struck it down with his sword, explaining Never! As long as there is a man left. They had kept track of the guns by the sound, having come to know it as it were, their voices. Chapter Seven: Railroads, Trains, Indians, Cow Chips, and Chaps One day as Mr. Murphy & myself was baleing hay we heard someone crossing the Creek, Mike said there were Indians and told me to go to the cabin and get the guns. I started when a big Indian said hold up. I stopped and by then there was another one between me and the cabin so it was all off.
An homage to the West and to two great writers who set the standard for all who celebrate and defend it. Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West. These two great westerners had very different ideas about what it meant to love the land and try to care for it, and they did so in distinctly different styles. Boozy, lustful, and irascible, Abbey was best known as the author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (and also of the classic nature memoir Desert Solitaire), famous for spawning the idea of guerrilla actions—known to admirers as "monkeywrenching" and to law enforcement as domestic terrorism—to disrupt commercial exploitation of western lands. By contrast, Stegner, a buttoned-down, disciplined, faithful family man and devoted professor of creative writing, dedicated himself to working through the system to protect western sites such as Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. In a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling, and by an ever-growing population that seems to be in the process of loving the West to death, Gessner asks: how might these two farseeing environmental thinkers have responded to the crisis? Gessner takes us on an inspiring, entertaining journey as he renews his own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild, confronting American overconsumption, and fighting environmental injustice—all while reawakening the thrill of the words of his two great heroes.
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