40 Days to Santa Fe

I just finished reading 40 Days to Santa Fe by Leonard Smith. It's the story of the adventures of young Johnny Foote as he makes his way west with a wagon train in the years prior to the Civil War. The book is a little cheesy but it's a well spun yarn with good character development and scenery descriptions. My wife and I followed the Santa Fe trail a few years back which was the reason I picked up the book in the first place. A Google search turned up a few more books written by Mr. Smith which I wouldn't mind reading if I ever came across them on the cheap. I don't normally read much fiction now but when I was younger I read most of Hemingway's stuff and Robert Ruark's The Old Man and the Boy and The Old Man's Boy Grows Older, both of which I've reread in the last couple of years. Like a lot of young boys growing up in the fifties, the adventurous life of a cowboy or hunting and fishing in the mountains had great appeal to me.

In 40 Days to Santa Fe, Mr Smith describes Johnny's feelings when he awakens and sees the mountains for the first time. As a flatlander, I remember seeing the Rockies for the first time and thinking much the same thing. Johnny is being mentored by a mountain man, Beaver Bolles, and Bolles had a couple of interesting things to say along the trail:

You got a lot to larn; and the time to start an eddication is afore you need it.

Lots of folks think the Trail is hard now, but think what it was to the fust fellers that worked it out. And we don't even know their names. I got a notion that every road we travel, and every step up we humans make, has come about through the sufferin' of somebody we don't know nothin' about.

And I reckon the real job fer all of us is to make the goin' a little easier fer the next feller.

Most folks live offen the work done by fellers they won't even shake hands with.

Something to think about even though those words were first published 71 years ago. While I'm never going to be a mountain man or a cowboy, the little boy in me still has a hankerin' for that lifestyle. Hopefully, I always will.