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The end of the trail

Chapter 5: THE END OF THE TRAIL
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About This Book

A travel narrative tracing a motor journey across the western frontier from New Mexico toward British Columbia, blending vivid landscape description, encounters with frontier communities and Native pueblos, and practical observations on routes, road conditions, agriculture, mining, and local industries. The author intersperses personal adventure anecdotes with guidebook-style information about climates, land values, and resources, and portrays the continuing presence of pioneer livelihoods—pack trains, ranching, prospecting—alongside emerging coastal development and orchards. Chapters alternate regional sketches, cultural notes, and travel advice, offering both evocative scenes and factual material for prospective settlers and adventurous motorists.

THE END OF THE TRAIL

I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND

“The song of the deed in the doing, of the work still hot from the hand;
Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land.
While your merchandise is weighing, we will bit and bridle and rein
The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain;
And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired from that mighty race,
Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place;
And out of that subtle union, desert and mountain-flood,
Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no homes else had stood.”