The Blazed Trail

Michigan pine, 1890s: a young man takes a timber contract he cannot afford to lose, against a syndicate that means him to lose it, and the log drive down the river in spring is the whole argument. White prospected, logged and hunted across the West and Africa and put all of it on the page; Theodore Roosevelt read him and approved, which in 1902 meant something. The lumber camp here was reported, not imagined. Fifty-eight plates, from Shishkin's fir forests to Bierstadt's western light, give the timber and the men who worked it a visual record to match White's.