"Backwoodsman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there, the man half-kneeling on the low bed, and stroking the fur very gently. It could scarcely be thought that such pride should be spent on a little pelt by a mere backwoodsman and his nine-year-old son. One has seen a woman fingering a splendid necklace, her eyes fascinated by the bunch of warm, deep jewels—a light not of mere vanity, or hunger, or avarice in her face—only the love of the beautiful thing. But this was an animal's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... needed everything, and had nothing. He had no furniture, no cabin, no land, no money. And he had a wife to support. His only property consisted of a cheap horse. He did not even own a rifle, an article at that time so indispensable to the backwoodsman. ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... surgeon, the chisel of the sculptor, the steel plate on which the engraver practises his art, the cutting tools employed in the various processes of skilled handicraft, down to the common saw or the axe used by the backwoodsman in levelling the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... boats, I entered the tall pine forest, and after walking a mile came upon the clearing of the backwoodsman. His two daughters, young women, were working in the field; but the sight of a stranger was so unusual to them, that, heedless of my remonstrances and gentle assurances of goodwill, they took to their heels and ran so fast that it was impossible to overtake them until they arrived ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... Boone is a conspicuous one in the annals of our country. And yet there are but few who are familiar with the events of his wonderful career, or who have formed a correct estimate of the character of the man. Many suppose that he was a rough, coarse backwoodsman, almost as savage as the bears he pursued in the chase, or the Indians whose terrors he so perseveringly braved. Instead of this, he was one of the most mild and unboastful of men; feminine as ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... estanciero, or owner of square leagues of cattle, in common with the savage herdsman whom he employs,—to Generals and Dictators, as well as to the most ragged Pampa- Cossack in their pay. Our language is incapable of expressing the idea conveyed by this term; and the Western qualification "backwoodsman" is perhaps the nearest approach to a synonyme ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... Mr. Bartlett. We confess, we looked for something racier and of a more puckery flavor. One hears such now and then, mostly from the West,—like "Mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog"; "I take my tea bar-foot," the answer of a backwoodsman, when asked if he would have cream and sugar. Some are unmistakably Eastern; as, "All deacons are good,—but there's odds in deacons"; "He's a whole team and the dog under the wagon"; "That's first-rate and a half"; "Handy as a pocket in a shirt" (ironical). Almost every county has some good die ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... backwoodsman of twenty, whose life had been as obscure as that of a domestic animal. He was rough of manner and slow of speech, and just now, owing to a combination of physical confinement and mental torture altogether unlovely ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... in a settlement called Cold Water, which is in St. Ferdinand township. About the year 1808 or 1809, her father took his family to the St. Charles district, and settled only a few miles from the home of the veteran backwoodsman, Daniel Boone. ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... know him fairly well, I fished for an invitation to visit his home. I wanted to see where this gentlemanly backwoodsman spent the days which were ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Aihen-loh, 'the glade of oaks;' and at night-fall he heard the plash of water, and knew not whether man or wild beast made it. And not daring to call out, he tapped a tree-trunk with his axe (some backwoodsman's sign of those days, we may presume), and he was answered. And a forester came to him, leading his lord's horse; a man from the Wetterau, who knew the woods far and wide, and told him all that he wanted to know. And they slept side by side that night; and in the morning ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... that ye are, in all ways, exceedingly pious." He recognized their worship as passing beyond the idols, to the true God. He did not profess that he came to revolutionize their religion, but to reform it. He does not proceed like the backwoodsman, who fells the forest and takes out the stumps in order to plant a wholly different crop; but like the nurseryman, who grafts a native stock with a better fruit. They were already ignorantly worshipping the true God. What the apostle proposed ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... then that we quickly discovered the peculiarities of our four attendants, whom I had expected to be examples of stern hardihood, that would represent the fabled reputation of the backwoodsman. ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... himself, the young man pounded vigorously on the puncheon door. No one came to open to him. Loudly he called in the hearty manner of the backwoodsman: ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... of the spirits and watched her revive. He warmed her hands and chafed her feet before the fire which the backwoodsman had made. As she came back to consciousness, Charlton happened to think that he had no dry clothes for her. He would have gone immediately back to the buggy, where there was a portmanteau carefully stowed under the seat, ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... His thoughts were on the author, the scholar, the genius, whose book had so compelled his respect and admiration. This tall fellow, with the athletic shoulders and deeply tanned face, who was dressed in the rude garb of the backwoodsman, with his coat over his arm, his ax on his shoulder, and his dinner-pail in his hand,—who was he? And why was Betty Jo so familiar with this stranger,—Betty Jo, who was usually so reserved, with her air of competent self-possession? Homer T. ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... habit, nearly akin to sadness, at least in those who frequented the wilderness; it was the expression of the influence of the vast, desolate, and lonely nature amid which they passed their lives. It is true that Lincoln was never a backwoodsman, and never roved alone for long periods among the shadowy forests and the limit-less prairies, so that their powerful and weird influences, though not altogether remote, never bore upon him in full force; yet their effect ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... the expert in the psychological wilderness. This is like one of those Red-skin stories where the noble savages carry off a girl and the honest backwoodsman with his incomparable knowledge follows the track and reads the signs of her fate in a footprint here, a broken twig there, a trinket dropped by the way. I have always liked ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... independent mind, wedded to a character of so much strength, singleness, and purity, pursued its own path of self-improvement for more than half a century, part gymnosophist, part backwoodsman; and thus did it come twice, though in a subaltern attitude, into the field ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... merrily, over the quaint reminiscence of my old friend and the quainter way he had of telling it. The rude dialect of the backwoodsman might have seemed oddly out of place, there, but for the quiet, unassuming manner and the fine old face of Uncle Eb in which the dullest eye might see the soul ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... wolf. Some of the flint-locks were enormously long; many of them would have seemed extremely old-fashioned to an ordnance officer. But every gun was like an additional limb to those practised marksmen, who knew little of firing in platoons, but everything of the patient accuracy which gives the backwoodsman his unerring aim. The assailants carried the latest weapons approved of by the War Office, and manipulated them with the faultless unison and unswerving harmony that would have compelled the compliments of a commander-in-chief at a review. At the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... truth, Phineas had been a hearty, two-fisted backwoodsman, a vigorous hunter, and a dead shot at a buck; but, having wooed a pretty Quakeress, had been moved by the power of her charms to join the society in his neighborhood; and though he was an honest, sober, and efficient member, and nothing particular could ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... visiting America; within whose wide extent all the elements of society, civilized and uncivilized, were to be found—where the great city could be traced to the infant town—where villages dwindle into scattered farms—and these to the log-house of the solitary backwoodsman, and the temporary ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... the other gentleman. "A backwoodsman named Trimble went to Rutledge with credentials from North Carolina, and has gone off to Cherokee Ford to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the old backwoodsman took the checkmate placidly and began to set the pieces for the second game in which the horses were the stake, hiding his useless rifle in a hollow tree,—his powder had been soaked and spoiled in the early morning plunge for life,—and drawing his ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... robe of leopard-skins, and upon his shoulder he carried his "roer"—a large smoothbore gun, about six feet in length, with an old-fashioned flint-lock,—quite a load of itself. This is the gun in which the boor puts all his trust; and although an American backwoodsman would at first sight be disposed to laugh at such a weapon, a little knowledge of the boor's country would change his opinion of the "roer." His own weapon—the small-bore rifle, with a bullet less than a pea—would be almost useless among the large game that inhabits the country ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... his stomach was greater than he who took a city. Beranger's Roi d'Yvetot, who ate four meals a day,—the Esquimaux, with his daily twenty-pound quantum of train-oil, gravy, and tallow-candles,—the alderman puffing over callipash and callipee,—the backwoodsman hungering after fattest of pork,—such men as these were no common sinners: they were assassins who struck at the very fountain of life, and throttled a human stomach. Pancreatic meant pancreative. Gastric juice was the long-sought elixir. The liver ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... a large city, but it seemed a crowded metropolis to Alec's eyes, accustomed to the quiet life of the little inland village. But it was not as a gaping backwoodsman he viewed its sights. If he had never seen a trolley-car before, he had carefully studied the power that propels one. The whir and clang, the rush of automobiles, the pounding of machinery in the great factory all seemed familiar, because they were a part of the world ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... publisher, himself something of a poet; but early in 1842 he had not yet received the MS. Perhaps Emerson heard of Tennyson through Carlyle, who, says Sterling, "said more in your praise than in any one's except Cromwell, and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty people with a bowie-knife." Carlyle at this time was much attached to Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review, and it may have been Carlyle who converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim. Carlyle had very little ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Junction in the early morning of the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on that time? 'T won't be inconveniencing you, because I know that there's precious few pickings to be got out of these Central India States—even though you pretend to be correspondent of the 'Backwoodsman.' " ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... wrote to Isabel: "Some of your admonitions came too late to me, for I am interested in politics again. I have just returned from Alton where I went to hear Douglas debate against a Mr. Lincoln, a lawyer of Springfield, who has been nominated for Senator by the Republicans. He is as much of a backwoodsman as anybody could be, as much so as Harrison and a good deal more so than Taylor. But he is not to be despised either in himself or on account of his backers. The Republican party in Illinois profits by the feeling of the German revolutionnaires; and ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country. ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... men was sacrificed to the phonograph, and for hours it never stopped going. Records had been brought by others of the men and girls, and Marjorie had never seen such gay and unwearied dancing. She was tossed and caught from one big backwoodsman to another, the dances being "cut-in" shamelessly, because the women were fewer than the men. They nearly all danced well, French or Yankee or Englishmen. There were a couple of young Englishmen whom she particularly liked, who had ridden twenty miles, she heard, to come and dance. And finally she ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... Political Evangel, wherein alone can liberty lie. Madly enough he preached, it is true, as Enthusiasts and first Missionaries are wont, with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant; yet as articulately perhaps as the case admitted. Or call him, if you will, an American Backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, rioting, and even theft; whom, notwithstanding, the peaceful Sower will follow, and, as he cuts the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... a Power which, by the light of our own observation and experience, we are able to measure and comprehend, I think our envy of the possessor is as deep and as passionate as is that of any other nation. No one can care less for a lord than the backwoodsman, who has had no personal contact with lords and has seldom heard them spoken of; but I will not allow that any Englishman has a profounder envy of a lord than has the average American who has lived long ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... Then came the compact, boxy, buggy, buttoned-up vehicle of our friend the pedler—a thing for which the unfertile character of our language, as yet, has failed to provide a fitting name—but which the backwoodsman of the west calls a go-cart; a title which the proprietor does not always esteem significant of its manifold virtues and accommodations. With a capacious stomach, it is wisely estimated for all possible purposes; and when opened with a mysterious but highly becoming ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... sending the drip in a shower on the glassy water. The smoke from the lawyer's pipe hung behind him in the quiet air, while the note of the reveille clangored from the little buglette of the Norseman. Jimmie and the big Scotch backwoodsman swayed their bodies in one boat, while the two sinister voyagers dipped their ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... only incident of consequence that occurred on my way to John Miller's, where I arrived on the following day, and was received by the veteran with the rough kindness of a backwoodsman. He was a gray-haired man, hardy and weather-beaten, with a blue wart, like a great beard, over one eye, whence he was nicknamed by the hunters 'Bluebeard Miller.' He had been in these parts from the earliest settlements, and had signalized himself in the hard conflicts with ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the "notions" referred to appeared to tickle the fancy of the backwoodsman, for he paused to indulge in a quiet chuckle which wrinkled up all the lines of good-humour and fun in his rough countenance. After applying himself for a few seconds with much energy to the drumstick,—he resumed ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... clothes basket and went into an adjoining room, leaving Kintchin to muse alone. He heard the low whistle of a backwoodsman's improvised tune, and looking up, saw a man leaning against the door-facing. To the old negro the new comer was not a stranger. Once that big foot had kicked him out of the road, and lying in his straw bed the poor wretch had burned with resentment, cowed, helpless; ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... still wild and simple states of the far West, where no duel has yet been fought, there is no specific law upon the subject beyond that in the Decalogue, which says, "Thou shalt do no murder;" but duelling every where follows the steps of modern civilisation; and by the time the backwoodsman is transformed into the citizen, he has imbibed the false notions of honour which are prevalent in Europe and around him, and is ready, like his progenitors, to settle his differences with the pistol. In the majority of the States the punishment for challenging, fighting, or acting as second, is ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... a minute, the latter raised himself up, and allowed the blanket to slip from over his head, which now appeared bound round with a piece of calico, fringed with gouts of congealed blood. The backwoodsman cast a side glance at the Indian, but it was only a momentary one, and he allowed his gaze to revert ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... the answer; "but not of the Redskins. As brave a backwoodsman as ever crossed the Mississippi lies buried there. You are not altogether wrong, though. I believe it was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... and critical. But the quality that made most impression upon others was their shrewdness in business transactions. They could drive a bargain and could discover loopholes in a contract in a fashion to take the average backwoodsman off his feet. "Yankee tricks" became, indeed, a household phrase wherever New Englander and Southerner met. Whether the Yankee talked or kept silent, whether he was generous or parsimonious, he was always ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Fulk expected to be made the confidant of his vehement admiration for Emily Deerhurst. The gentle lady-like girl impressed the backwoodsman in a wondrous manner. It seemed to him, as if his wealth would have real value, if he could pour ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Deerslayer several years younger. Their dress was composed of deer-skins, and they were armed with rifles, powder-horns, and hunting-knives. The two men were guided by very different principles, those of Hurry Harry being entirely selfish, while Deerslayer sought, backwoodsman though he was, to live up to what ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... a mixture of something rather pleasant in them. Roaming about in the woods with hatchet in hand, like a backwoodsman, followed by a troop of dogs; starting up of birds, snakes, hares and foxes, and examining the various kinds of trees, flowers, and birds' nests, was at least, a change from the monotonous drag and pull ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... illustrative instance related to me by the distinguished Methodist, Dr. David P. Durbin. Standing near the platform from which he was to preach at a camp-meeting, he observed a powerfully built young backwoodsman who was manifestly there with no better intent than to disturb and break up the meeting. Presently it became evident that the young man was conscious of some influence taking hold of him to which he was resolved not to yield; he clutched with ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... nearly completed his group of the Pioneer, for the Capitol at Washington. It represents a backwoodsman rescuing his wife and child from an Indian who is in the act of smothering them in the folds of his blanket. The action of the group symbolizes the one unvarying story of the contest between civilized ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... has been a sort of backwoodsman's life, and if there are treasure-vaults in this place I think we shall be able to get at them, however thick and heavy the stones may be on ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... wasn't backwoods bred, and the other girls said she was timid and afraid of her shadder," chuckled Long Jerry. "She warn't afraid of the boys, and mebbe that's why the other gals said sharp things about her," pursued the philosophical backwoodsman. "You misses know more ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... and Bob left the room. The conversation now turned upon Johnny, who appeared, from all accounts, to be a very bad and dangerous fellow; and after a short discussion, they agreed to lynch him, in backwoodsman's phrase, just as cooly as if they had been talking of catching a mustang. When the men had come to this satisfactory conclusion, they got up, drank the judge's health and mine, shook us by the hand, and left ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... represented the first man of his family to scale the mountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from the reddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its central portions where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over the rocks: Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewing and fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women and children. With his passion for the wilderness—its game, enemies, campfire and cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely, stern, gaunt ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... in the crisp of the morning, while yet the faint mists clung over the brook and the warmth of the camp-fire was attractive, the Boy proclaimed his find. Jabe had asked no questions, inquisitiveness being contrary to the backwoodsman's code of etiquette; but his silence had been full of interrogation. With his mouth half-full of fried trout and ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... ought to write it, salvage,[9] is nothing more grim or terrible than one who dwells in sylvis, in the woods—a meaning we can appreciate from our still comparatively pure application of the adjective sylvan. A 'backwoodsman' is therefore the very best original type of a savage! 'Savage' seems to be hesitating between its civil and its ethical applications; 'villain,' 'pagan,' and 'heathen,' however, have become quite absorbed in their moral sense—and this by a contortion that would seem ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... more about your home in America. Do you know I've listened to your stories until I'm half a backwoodsman's wife already? ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... The backwoodsman swept his broad hand toward the south, to indicate the strip of woods that he desired to cross. The plan seemed feasible enough. The town, although seemingly near, was over five miles distant. The road by which ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... their delicate hands showing no signs of toil, hurried by a misguided enthusiasm from fond friends and luxurious family firesides, contrasted strangely with the long black hair, lank looks of the Louisiana Tiger, or the rough, bloated, and bearded face of the Backwoodsman of Texas. A Brigadier, who looked like an honest, substantial planter, lay half over the rails, upon which he had doubtless stood encouraging his men, while lying half upon his body were two beardless boys, members of his staff, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... tobacco vigorously like any backwoodsman (had chewed it originally because she'd heard it cured toothache, then had kept up the habit because ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... undertook the commission in the early spring, when the mountains were still white with snow and the streams had swollen into torrents. He was clad in a buckskin hunting shirt, with leggings and moccasins of the same material, the simple garb of a backwoodsman, in perfect keeping with the wildness of the scenes he had to encounter. In his broad leathern belt were stuck a long hunting-knife and an Indian tomahawk. As he rode his horse, he frequently carried in his ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne,—though he does use that abominable word, reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the ooze of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as his we know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... in the scale more than Mount Mitchell, and not to see him was to miss one of the most characteristic productions of the country, the typical backwoodsman, hunter, guide. So we rode down Bolling Creek, through a pretty, broken country, crossed the Caney River, and followed it up a few miles to Wilson's plantation. There are little intervales along the river, where hay is cut and corn grown, but the region is not much cleared, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hero. We have seen the most purely ideal philosopher in this country face the black muzzles of a dozen loaded revolvers with his usual serene composure. And on the other hand, we have known a black-bearded backwoodsman, whose mere voice and presence would quell any riot among the lumberers,—yet this man, nicknamed by his employees "the black devil," confessed himself to be in secret the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... rocks as an Androscoggin should. We passed the last hamlet, then the last house but one, and finally drew up at the last and northernmost house, near the lumbermen's dam below Lake Umbagog. The damster, a stalwart brown chieftain of the backwoodsman race, received us with hearty hospitality. Xanthus and Balius stumbled away on their homeward journey. And after them the crazy coach went moaning: it was not strong enough to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... him. Even the most pronounced backwoodsman in the South is sometimes graced with a sudden and almost marvelous courtesy, the unconscious revival of a long lost dignity; and this came upon the old man, ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... about them, but saw them, as he did most facts, exactly as they were. He had none of the false sentimentality about the noble and injured red man, which in later days has been at times highly mischievous, nor on the other hand did he take the purely brutal view of the fighting scout or backwoodsman. He knew the Indian as he was, and understood him as a dangerous, treacherous, fighting savage. Better than any one else he appreciated the difficulties of Indian warfare when an army had to be launched into the wilderness and cut off from a base of supplies. He was well aware, too, that ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... tobacco, and walked away. For several days he went through the same performance, until at last one day he brought out his trusty axe and made the chips fly. Soon the chestnut was lying prone on the ground pointing away from the house. What this old backwoodsman did was to wait until a strong wind had sprung up, blowing in the direction that he wanted the tree to fall, and his skilful chopping with the aid of the wind placed the tree exactly where ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... we are indeed beyond measure fortunate in the characters of the two greatest of our public men, Washington and Lincoln. Widely though they differed in externals, the Virginia landed gentleman and the Kentucky backwoodsman, they were alike in essentials, they were alike in the great qualities which made each able to do service to his nation and to all mankind such as no other man of his generation could or did render. Each had lofty ideals, but each in striving to attain these lofty ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... in the measurement of the man is that with a sublime reliance on God, he conducted an immense nation through the most tremendous civil war ever waged, and never committed a single serious mistake. The Illinois backwoodsman did not possess Hamilton's brilliant genius, yet Hamilton never read the future more sagaciously. He made no pretension to Webster's magnificent oratory; yet Webster never put more truth in portable form for popular guidance. He possessed Benjamin Franklin's immense common sense, and gift ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... produced at the Boston Theatre The Minute Men, where it was received with immense enthusiasm. It was somewhat conventional in plot, but in all its scenes of home life was true and fine. The central figures were Reuben (a backwoodsman), and Dorothy, his adopted daughter. Whatever concerned these two characters was keyed to the note of life. Like all Mr. Herne's acting, Reuben was utterly unconscious of himself. He went about ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... that a newly settled country offers endless opportunities for the humor which turns upon incongruity, it is also true that the new country offers countless occasions for the humor which turns upon the sudden glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is amusing to the man of the settlements, and the backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share of amusement out of watching the "tenderfoot" in the woods. It is simply the case of the old resident versus the newcomer. The superiority need be in no sense a cruel ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... explorer passing up or down the river or one of its branches in an Indian canoe; then the first faint changes, the building of one or two little French fur traders' hamlets, the passing of one or two British officers' boats, and the very rare appearance of the uncouth American backwoodsman. ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... and all before the age of thirty-one. In Congress Albert Gallatin describes him "as a tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his brows and face, and a queue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular, his manners and deportment those of a backwoodsman." He remained, however, but a year or two in all at Philadelphia—then the seat of national government—and afterward became a planter in Tennessee, fought duels, subdued Tecumseh and the Creek Indians, winning finally the great opportunity of his life by being made a Major-General in the United ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... You have heard but few of them in Louisiana, I guess, or you would know the difference betwixt thunder and the crack of a backwoodsman's rifle. To be sure, yonder oak wood has an almighty echo. That's James's rifle—he has shot ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... clear in his duty, and had an oath in heaven. He calmly and bravely heard the voice of doubt and fear all around him; but he had an oath in heaven, and there was not power enough on earth to make this honest boatman, backwoodsman, and broad-handed splitter of rails evade or violate that sacred oath. He had not been schooled in the ethics of slavery; his plain life had favored his love of truth. He had not been taught that treason and perjury were the proofs of honor and honesty. His moral training was against ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... a bad river have been dwelt upon, I suppose, by every writer who has occupied his pen at all with the life of the lumber-camps. But to the daring backwoodsman there seldom falls a task more hazardous than that of cutting loose a brow of logs when the logs have been piled in the form of what is called a "rough-and-tumble landing." Such a landing is constructed by driving long timbers into the mud at the water's edge, ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... as the work of most shallow and mediocre fellows. House dogs and donkeys make the most harmless and chaste companions for young innocence in the world. Mark Twain's humor is of the kind that teamsters use in bantering with each other, and his laugh is the gruff "haw-haw" of the backwoodsman. He is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands on the river steamer and chewed uncured tobacco when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters. It is an unfortunate feature of American literature that a hostler ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... pamphlet—"for the use of emigrants, by a Backwoodsman," is one of the pleasantest and most sensible little books of the day. It is worth all the "great big books" upon the same subject, and, strange to say, has scarcely a spice of the leaven of party wickedness in its pages. The information is in a facete but earnest vein, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... and, what surprised him beyond measure, was three women in one of the sleds who had come to make dinner and took possession of his shanty. They worked with a will. The logs were hauled and built into heaps and fire set, and every art the backwoodsman knows was used to make them burn. As ashes were scraped they were shovelled into the boxes on the sleds and started for Magarth's, returning with small loads of boards. With so many hands the small clearance was, late in the afternoon, ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman. The wild country in which we dwelt and across which we wandered was in the far west; and there were of course many features in which the life of a cattleman on the Great Plains and among the Rockies differed from that led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany forests a century before. Yet the points of resemblance were far more numerous and striking. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... seized her; a sudden revulsion of feeling, amounting almost to repugnance, against the rugged man of the people who had hewn out his own fortune, and who looked, she thought, more like a backwoodsman than a gentleman. Yes; it was madness—such madness as is ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... what would you do were you President?" he asked the raw backwoodsman, turning badly ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... he dared not use his gun nor build a fire for fear his foes might find out where he was. He reached the fort in safety, and was of great service in beating off the attacking party. This is only one of the many narrow escapes of this fearless backwoodsman. ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... called the attention of the voyagers, who crossed over. They proved to be the three Kentucky hunters, of the true "dreadnought" stamp. Their names were Edward Robinson, John Hoback, and Jacob Rizner. Robinson was a veteran backwoodsman, sixty-six years of age. He had been one of the first settlers of Kentucky, and engaged in many of the conflicts of the Indians on "the Bloody Ground." In one of these battles he had been scalped, and he still wore a handkerchief bound round his head to protect the part. These men had passed several ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... backwoodsman, ready for fight or prayer. He suffers at the hands of desperadoes, but is dauntless, and always gets the better of his partner in a trade. His white mule Ma'y Jane, is the only creature that outwits him, and that only ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... young clerks from Boston, who saw a wild animal in every thicket, and repeatedly leveled their guns at some bear or panther, which turned out to be neither more nor less than a bush or tree-stump. They pestered our guide with all sorts of simple questions, which he, with a true backwoodsman's indifference, left for the most part unanswered. After about an hour, we found ourselves on the borders of a long and tolerably wide swamp, formed by the overflowings of the river, and which stretched for some five miles from north to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Designs Bay, and the embouchure of the Indian river; and just at dusk landed opposite my friend's house, pretty well tired, though much delighted with our day's journey. We were received with a welcome such as only a backwoodsman knows how to give. In half an hour I felt as much at home as if I had belonged ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland |
