Phil Thurston was born on the range where the trails are dim and silent under the big sky. It was the place his father loved, the place he had to be. After the death of his father when he was five, his mother brought him back to the city, where he grew up and became a writer. To revive his stale writing, he returns to the West, and may just find what he is really missing.

Imagine a young, twenty-something woman in 1860, reared “in the indolent life of the ordinary Southern girl” (which means she has never learned to cook); married to a professional man who knows “nothing of manual labor;” who is mother to a young son; and who has just found out she is pregnant with their second child. Imagine that this couple has become “embarrassed financially” by “imprudent speculations,” and that they are discussing what to do. They decide to buy a wagon and three yoke of unbroke oxen and head overland to California...

Elbert Hubbard is best known as the author of the "Little Journeys To The Homes of Famous People". These 11 short stores show the side of him that celebrated caring, friendship love among humans. The first describes how 5 frightened orphan children from a foreign country were cared for on a railroad journey of a thousand miles; all by strangers without any planning and without a word of English being spoken or needed. He observed caring human men and women of all ages doing whatever was necessary to see they reached their destination in whatever comfort could be provided...

LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREATBY Elbert HubbardGEORGE ELIOTMay I reach That purest heaven, be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty-- Be the good presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense. So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world. Warwickshire gave to the world William Shakespeare. It also gave Mary Ann Evans. No one will question that...

LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF AMERICAN STATESMENBy ELBERT HUBBARDBERT HUBBARD A little more patience, a little more charity for all, a little more devotion, a little more love; with less bowing down to the past, and a silent ignoring of pretended authority; a brave looking forward to the future with more faith in our fellows, and the race will be ripe for a great burst of light and life. --Elbert Hubbard It was not built with the idea of ever becoming a place in history: simply a boys' cabin in the woods...

In this selection... the aim has been to bring within moderate compass a collection of these songs of the people which should fairly represent the range, the descriptive felicity, the dramatic power, and the genuine poetic feeling of a body of verse which is still, it is to be feared, unfamiliar to a large number of those to whom it would bring refreshment and delight.