Sublime

August 1876, and Walker died two months later. He was seventy-seven years old. The cause of death, says Bil Gilbert, was nothing more or less than ‘having lived long enough’. How to distil that life into six lines, containing

Most of this trail, like so many others first ‘discovered’ by Joe Walker (or, more accurately, pieced together from existing Indian trails), is now a state highway.

Geographical curiosity and his abiding love for wilderness travel seem to have been the main reasons for these journeys, but he usually managed to find some practical, economic rationale: a railroad survey, a party of miners that wanted to be guided to some remote mountain range, a potential livestock market that called for investigation. In 1858 h

The white man behind it was Elihu Embree, an iron manufacturer and former slave owner who had evolved, at age thirty, into an abolitionist. Elihu mailed his newspapers to Southern politicians, intent on persuading them to end the horrors of slavery.

Walker rode on to California, hung up his saddle at his nephew’s ranch in Contra Costa County, and settled down to a calm, pleasant, dignified retirement, with no recorded bouts of nostalgia or restlessness.

In the Senate, the South staged an angry filibuster, but with Johnson using pressure and persuasion (civil rights leader James Farmer, seated in the Oval Office, heard the President “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary”), the bill was passed—its key provisions intact—with remarkable speed. And even before it was passed, t

The $15,000,000 bond issue, he said, must specifically authorize the Legislature “to provide for permanent improvements as well as the acquisition of land…for large facilities which make a park accessible and attractive to people.” “Conservation”—the previous park ideal—had to be combined with “recreation,” he said. Furthermore, he said, “permanent

Until the publication of Hamilton’s report, James Madison had been Washington’s most confidential adviser. That began to erode on February 11, 1790, when Madison rose in the House and, in a surprising volte-face, denounced the idea that speculators should benefit from Hamilton’s program. It was a stunning shot across the bow of the administration.