270 FOREST OUTINGS 



Pioneer restlessness, pioneer excessiveness, along with the pioneers' hope "to 

 rear their lives to an unheard of height" remain surgingly alive on this 

 land, and in its cities. 



"An April restlessness," Bernard DeVoto called it, in 1932, writing 

 Mark Twain's America. DeVoto is more concerned in displaying the pio- 

 neers as human than in depicting them as persons of special virtue. The 

 despoiled resource he most deplores is space, and stillness. The early pioneer, 

 he writes, "knew solitude and was not frightened by it. Always a mile would 

 take one into the quiet." And, nobly, in closing, DeVoto describes the great 

 body of our mainland: . . . "the beauty of the land across which the 

 journey passed. Whatever else the word 'frontier' means, it has also meant 

 water flowing in clear rivers, a countryside under clean sun or snow, woods, 

 prairies, and mountains of simple loveliness. It is not necessary to think the 

 literature of America a very noble literature in order to recognize the fact 

 that one of its principal occupations has been the celebration of that beauty. 

 Layer after layer of experience or frustration may come between but at the 

 very base of the American mind an undespoiled country lies open in the sun." 



To anyone deeply concerned in conserving or restoring that basic 

 resource, it seems that the most hopeful change thus far has been expressed 

 less in action than in words. Among historians and economists, Frederick 

 Jackson Turner, Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, and the Beards, Charles 

 and Mary, had called the turn by the dawn of this century. This list is far 

 from complete; it omits many who have done or are doing yeoman writing. 

 Among the poets, Robert Frost and more lately Archibald MacLeish and 

 Pare Lorentz, proclaim the wickedness of wounding land, and the human 

 consequences. 



"Build soil !" sings Frost. 2 Assembling photographs of washed-out Ameri- 

 cans, adrift, homeless on land which but a few decades ago seemed wide, 

 rich, endless, MacLeish makes you hear the people dispossessed murmur- 

 ing, wondering, all but despairing; "We wonder . . . We don't know . . . 

 We're asking." 3 Lorentz's film, The River (1938), has been mentioned. His 

 picture, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), was as noteworthy. 



2 See: A Further Range, Bibliography, p. 285, Appendix. 



3 See: Land of the Free, Bibliography, p. 285, Appendix. 



