THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS. 17 



and animal life, no less than in the physical 

 features of the land, are sufficiently marked 

 to give the American wilderness a character 

 distinctly its own. Some of the most charac- 

 teristic of the woodland animals, some of 

 those which have most vividly impressed 

 themselves on the imagination of the hunters 

 and pioneer settlers, are the very ones which 

 have no Old-World representatives. The 

 wild turkey is in every way the king of 

 American game birds. Among the small 

 beasts the coon and the possum are those 

 which have left the deepest traces in the 

 humbler lore of the frontier ; exactly as the 

 cougar usually under the name of panther 

 or mountain lion is a favorite figure in the 

 wilder hunting tales. Nowhere else is there 

 anything to match the wealth of the eastern 

 hardwood forests, in number, variety, and 

 beauty of trees ; nowhere else is it possible 

 to find conifers approaching in size the giant 

 redwoods and sequoias of the Pacific slope. 

 Nature here is generally on a larger scale 

 than in the Old- World home of our race. The 

 lakes are like inland seas, the rivers, like 

 arms of the sea. Among stupendous moun- 

 tain chains there are valleys and canyons of 

 fathomless depth and incredible beauty and 

 majesty. There are tropical swamps, and 

 sad, frozen marshes ; deserts and Death Val- 

 leys, weird and evil, and the strange wonder- 

 land of the Wyoming geyser region.. The 

 waterfalls are rivers rushing over precipices ; 

 the prairies seem without limit, and the forest 

 never ending. 



At the time when we first became a nation, 



