originally nourished it. Rather, romance and irony have

There is of course still a matter of the Frontier, but it is another
frontier: the Canadian North and Northwest, Alaska, the islands of
the South Seas, latterly the battle fields of France, and always the
trails of American exploration wherever they may chance to lead. The
performers upon
such themes--the Rex Beaches, the Emerson Houghs, the Randall
Parrishes, the Zane Greys, the James Oliver Curwoods--march ordinarily
under the noisy banner of "red blood" and derive from Stephen Crane,
Frank Norris,
Jack London, those generous boys of naturalism whose temperaments
carried them again and
again into the territories of vivid danger. Criticism notes in the
later annalists of "red blood" their spasmodic energy, their
considerable technical knowledge, their stereotyped characters, their
recurrent formulas, their uncritical, Rooseveltian opinions, their
enormous popularity, their almost complete lack of distinction in
style or attitude, and passes by without further

obligation than to point out that Stewart Edward White probably
deserves
to stand first among them
by virtue of a certain substantial range and panoramic faithfulness to
the life of the lumbermen represented in his most successful book,
_The Blazed Trail_. This phase of life deserves particular emphasis
for
the reason that there has recently been growing up among the
lumber-camps from the Bay of Fundy to Puget
Sound the legend of a mythical hero named Paul Bunyan who is the only
personage of the sort yet invented and elaborated
by the ordinary run of
men in any American calling. Paul is less a patron saint of the
loggers than an autochthonous Munchau