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Centennial QUOTES

Centennial QUOTES

1 " It took her three seconds-one, two, three-to know that her destiny required her to join this man, and his gun and his wagon, and his waiting horses. She had no conception of what was being asked of her, but she knew that there could be no viable alternative. She dashed inside the orphanage and grabbed the few things that belonged to her. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

2 " Only the rocks live forever, Gray Wolf said. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

3 " The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation’s unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences. There’s no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased—much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

4 " At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

5 " Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

6 " The Rockies are therefore very young and should never be thought of as ancient. They are still in the process of building and eroding, and no one today can calculate what they will look like ten million years from now. They have the extravagant beauty of youth, the allure of adolescence, and they are mountains to be loved. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

7 " Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter.

Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

8 " Our People were imprisoned within the most difficult of the Indian languages, so difficult indeed that no other tribe except one related branch, the Gros Ventres, ever learned to speak it. It stood by itself, a language spoken by only 3300 people in the world: that was the total number of Our People. The enemy tribes were not much larger: the Ute had 3600; the Comanche, 3500; the Pawnee, about 6000. The great Cheyenne, who would be famous in history, had only 3500. The Dakota, known also as the Sioux, had many branches, and they totaled perhaps 11,000. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

9 " From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

10 " He tested his scales as carefully as Saint Peter is supposed to test his while weighing souls. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

11 " Any segment of land . . . can be interesting of itself, but its greater significance must always lie in the life it sustains. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

12 " The relationship of a man to his land is never easy. It is perhaps the noblest relationship in the world, after the family, and certainly the most rewarding. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

13 " The abuses stemmed from the fact that the owners of the railroads never saw themselves as servants to an expanding nation; they were men trying to squeeze the last penny of profit from a good thing, and to accomplish this, they subverted legislatures, perverted economic law and persecuted anyone who tried to hold them to a more honest discharge of their duties. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

14 " You preserve nothing without encountering some disadvantages. If we keep this [prairie] dog town, horses will break their legs and rattlers will come back. But in the large picture, things balance out, as they did two thousand years ago. The trick is to preserve the balance and pay whatever price it costs. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

15 " It was the year in which the two races approached a state of equilibrium: the Indians still owned the land and still controlled it, the buffalo were plentiful, and white soldiers had not yet begun to shoot at Indians they were fearful of, and peace was still possible. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

16 " The Platte!” I gasped. “None other,” Leeds said. “That’s the sorriest river in America. You’ve heard all the jokes about the Platte. ‘Too thick to drink, too thin to plow.’ That’s a nothing river. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

17 " It was rather that he discovered for himself the inherent undesirability of becoming a leader; it was an act of pomp engaged in by lesser men who enjoyed bedecking themselves in feathers. He would let others use office to proclaim their feats. He would concentrate on the feat itself, doing what had to be done … in silence. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

18 " western paintings did not occur. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

19 " Certain Americans in western states, having lost their Indians and with few blacks at hand, naturally turned to hating Mexicans, "

― James A. Michener , Centennial

20 " those men and women who were openly committed to some worthy goal achieved more than those who were reluctant to associate themselves with anything. "

― James A. Michener , Centennial