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Post by julio1fer on Jan 30, 2011 17:10:28 GMT -5
I have never visited the American West, but have been reading Mark Twain's "Roughing it" these days. It begins with a trip in diligence from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Nevada; to me it looks that he went close or even through the area of your picture. I'd have to Google Earth his trip someday. Sometimes his diligence would be overtaken by the Pony Express!
Besides the fun that you would expect from the guy, there are lots of nice descriptions of landscapes and people of the West, along with silver mining in Nevada.
FWIW, the book is available free, on-line, at Project Gutenberg's site.
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daveh
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Post by daveh on Jan 30, 2011 17:41:11 GMT -5
Twain certainly got around: one of those people who seemed larger than life.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 30, 2011 22:26:03 GMT -5
Twain would have passed a few miles south of the spot where the photo was taken. Right now I'm re-reading Twain's "The Innocents Abroad" about a trip he took with some other Americans to Europe and the Holy Land. One of my favorite writers and probably the first "True" American writer"--at least that's what Hemingway said.
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PeterW
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Post by PeterW on Jan 31, 2011 8:18:35 GMT -5
Did Mark Twain ever publish anything under his real name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens? I enjoy reading his books.
Another American writer from the same period that I "discovered" some years ago is Bret Harte.
I know Twain and Harte didn't see eye to eye, but I enjoy reading both.
PeterW
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Doug T.
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Post by Doug T. on Jan 31, 2011 10:24:38 GMT -5
Mark Twains' wife was from Elmira, NY , and he spent many years there. It's still possible to visit the study where he did a lot of his writing. Now it seems that the forces of "political correctness" are trying to revise Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer to fit their idea of what's right. Very sad. Doug
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Post by julio1fer on Jan 31, 2011 20:08:50 GMT -5
Peter, in Chapter 59 of Roughing It, Twain wrote that he was employed to contribute to a literary weekly in which Bret Harte was editor. Some pair there.
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Post by renobart on Dec 28, 2011 14:17:43 GMT -5
I'm in total agreement here. I moved from Chicago to Reno, Nevada 5 years ago, one of the most desolate states in the lower 48. What you are talking about is EXACTLY why I love it here. And you are right, I post photos on some blogs and journals on the net and people from Europe are always fascinated by the large sweeping landscapes.
And you are also right about those poor Americans who have never been west of the Mississippi. I have had people from our Chicago office call me and ask if I could take a ride over to the Vegas office to fix something. They are shocked when I remind them that Reno is at least a 7 hour drive from Vegas. LOL.
Bart
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Post by nikonbob on Dec 28, 2011 20:35:03 GMT -5
Bart
That happens north of the border too. I live in Ontario and a lot of the people that live in the heavily populated areas of the province have little idea of idea of how big it is. They have a very European outlook on distances. I met a fellow who drove his daughter to attend university in my town and he asked me if I knew it was a 2 day drive from Toronto? This is from a man who has lived in this province all his life and was at least 50 years old. Funny, that is a fact of life that we grow up with here. There have been too many similar incidents.
Personally I like and feel quite at home in the US and Canadian west with the long distances and sparse population. I can only take large cities for a few days at a time, too closed in for me.
Bob
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daveh
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Post by daveh on Dec 28, 2011 21:44:15 GMT -5
Bob,
In the end it's all an attitude of mind. To some wilderness and mountains mean freedom: others feel hemmed in by the openness. At the other extreme, what to some is claustrophobic others find liberating. I know someone who goes climbing and I know someone who used to go caving. Each thinks that the other is mad. (The climber, unfortunately, suffers from altitude sickness. Twice he has failed by a whisker to reach summits, Mount McKinley and Everest, because of it. Fortunately he also has common sense and has not pushed on regardless.)
Distance, while not meaningless, is not an exact science. Being stuck in a traffic queue for a couple of hours is infinitely more tiring than travelling for a much longer time on roads that are running freely.
The 'love' of distances that some have works the other way too. I recall being told (by someone who had met them the evening before) about a family from the States who thought that because of the 'small distances' they could do Britain in two days. One day in London, and the next day was going to be lunch in York and tea in Chester. They were doing the whole of Europe in a week, so it was probably thought two days in Britain was about right.
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Post by nikonbob on Dec 28, 2011 22:56:39 GMT -5
Dave
So true about the attitude of mind, but I still find it funny that someone can live most of their life in one province and have no grasp of it's size. Never mind the rest of the country. Oddly enough one attitude is as "provincial" in outlook as the other.
I once had the pleasure to meet a young Canadian university student from a densely populated area of Canada while traveling in Europe. He was puzzled as to why he could not see the Eiffel Tower from London. He also had little clue about the history of places we passed through by train on the way to Paris. I mean fairly recent history as in WWII. Needless to say I was not too impressed with what our education system turns out these days. So, yes I can well understand the "if this is Wednesday afternoon we must be in....." syndrome.
Bob
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mickeyobe
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Post by mickeyobe on Dec 28, 2011 23:58:49 GMT -5
I have lived in Toronto all my life. The most densely populated area of Canada. I have driven to both the west and, this October, to the east coasts twice each. Canada is BIG. To go from coast to coast with little time for sightseeing would take me three to four weeks. As for spaciousness the Canadian prairies allow one to view the landscape and see until there is nothing left to look at - a true awe inspiring, uninterrupted, haze free horizon. It gives one (well, this one) a grand feeling of freedom that is difficult to explain.
Mickey
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Post by grenouille on Mar 27, 2012 8:01:02 GMT -5
Its awesome to see big open spaces especially for one who has lived in a little Island. When I stand on the mountain at Ariége-Pyrénées and look down into the valley, its mind boggling to realise that this valley is bigger, much bigger than from the island where I came from.
Hye
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Post by Randy on Mar 27, 2012 11:29:37 GMT -5
It's funny, I have lived on the shores of Lake Erie for all of my 60+ years. Being a former coast to coast truck driver, the wanderlust has left me.
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kennb
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Post by kennb on Apr 27, 2012 18:07:31 GMT -5
The vastness is hard to comprehend. In 1973 I was going accross the Great Salt Lake pulling a trailer, when I got passed by a TBird like I was standing still. I looked at the speedometer and it was buried past 120, so I have no clue how fast I was going. You can go 120 miles an hour for hours on that stretch of road like a lot of others out there, miles of flat nothing. You dont feel speed at all when all you see is emptry space all around.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2012 18:28:53 GMT -5
I've been across Wyoming via South Pass. There are areas on the freeway where you can look down the highway where it drops down into a valley and then goes up the other side miles in the distance. You might see a point onthe far side of the depression that will take more than 30 minutes to reach driving at freeway speeds. The wagon trains passing through the region would sometimes have to travel several days to reach a point they could see in the distance.
Driving from the southern to norther border of our state (Idaho) is about the same distance as from London to Nuremberg. The nearest major cities to Boise, Idaho's Capitol, are Portland, Oregon, about 400 miles, Reno 400, Seattle, 500 and Salt Lake City, 350 miles. The second largest county in Idaho is the size of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
A lot of people on the U.S. East coast cannot comprehend the distances out here.
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