Worthy Crown

itiative—in direct relation to the trees, the animals and the weather around them. No soil banks. No wardens. No reforestation projects. No game limit. No permits. Just a man and his wife—on the earth, harming no one, and unspectacularly doing what they wished.

This was from 1910 to 1912. Reading about George and Minnilou Bailey’s cleanly unbureaucratized lives, I remembered that it was in these same years that millions of less lucky Americans were beginning to read that strangely symptomatic genre of daydream we now call the “Western story,” in which, significantly, the hero is a lone cowboy on an unmechanized horse who can still do what he wants to do and wander where he pleases, without joining a union, waging class warfare, or filling in depersonalizing forms in quadruplicate. ROBERT PHELPS

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Roy Campbell

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itiative—in direct relation to the trees, the animals and the weather around them. No soil banks. No wardens. No reforestation projects. No game limit. No permits. Just a man and his wife—on the earth, harming no one, and unspectacularly doing what they wished.

This was from 1910 to 1912. Reading about George and Minnilou Bailey’s cleanly unbureaucratized lives, I remembered that it was in these same years that millions of less lucky Americans were beginning to read that strangely symptomatic genre of daydream we now call the “Western story,” in which, significantly, the hero is a lone cowboy on an unmechanized horse who can still do what he wants to do and wander where he pleases, without joining a union, waging class warfare, or filling in depersonalizing forms in quadruplicate. ROBERT PHELPS