Originally published at crisis magazine
One of my hobbies, as I often mention, is to collect and to read popular magazines published from around 1875-1910. I have about fifteen years of The Century, my favorite, another five or six of Scribner’s, five or six of Harper’s, and this or that of several others. Wherever I go in these, I am impressed by the adventuresomeness of people who did not enjoy our high-tech health care, who had no police forces armed to the teeth, and who yet commonly engaged in enterprises that demanded boldness, and often considerable physical hardship and courage.
Here are some examples: a young British man, hardly more than a boy, leads an exploratory expedition into the heart of Borneo; John Muir gives an account of how a camp dog, Stickeen, helped him find his way back in the fog from a needle-like spur of a glacier, several miles long and bounded by a sheer precipice one thousand feet deep; workers underground dig and blast and shore up a conduit of twenty miles to bring water from the Croton Dam to New York City; the Plains Indians celebrate the ritual “Sun Dance”—which a youth must pass, with hours of protracted pain and loss
