"My fire was in all its glory about midnight, and, having made a bark shed to shelter me from the rain and partially dry my clothing, I had nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns and prayers. . . .

"I have enjoyed thousands of campfires in all sorts of weather and places, warm-hearted, short-flamed, friendly little beauties glowing in the dark on open spots in high Sierra gardens, daisies and lilies circled about them, gazing like enchanted children; and large fires in silver fir forests, with spires of flame towering like the trees about them, and sending up multitudes of starry sparks to enrich the sky; and still greater fires on the mountains in winter, changing camp climate to summer, and making the frosty snow look like beds of white flowers, and oftentimes mingling their swarms of swift-flying sparks with falling snow-crystals when the clouds were in bloom. But this Wrangell campfire, my first in Alaska, I shall always remember for its triumphant storm-defying grandeur, and the wondrous beauty of the psalm-singing, lichen-painted trees which it brought to light."

When the first settlers landed on the eastern coast of North America, they just had to hike. The forest was so dense that they could not ride a horse through it. Of course, those who landed in Mexico and eventually went to the country we now call Texas found such enormous plains of grassland that they could travel on horseback instead of on foot.

The black areas show the heavily forested parts of our country before the white man came.

On several occasions the horses escaped because their owners had been killed by Indians. The horses then became wild and soon traveled over the Great Plains in herds. To the forest-covered shores of the North Atlantic coast, horses were soon imported by the Europeans. But these horses never became wild as did those in the West.

In order to travel on horseback the Eastern settlers had to cut wider and better trails than those generally used by the Indians. Some of the Indian trails had been used so long and so frequently by the red men that they had become well-worn paths. Those trails were soon made passable for horses and then for wagons. Now many a concrete road lies over an old Indian trail.

North America was a wonderful country in those days, when Indian trails were being converted into wagon roads. It is said that the forest was so dense that a squirrel could have gone from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River by jumping from tree to tree and never would have been obliged to touch the ground. So far as we know, no squirrel ever did make that journey in just that way. It would be interesting to estimate how long it would have taken a squirrel to do it.

In some places grass had taken possession of the land and covered huge areas of prairie. This gave a marvelous variety to the country. There were tens of thousands of square miles of forest and great expanses of grasslands. There were deserts where brilliantly colored cliffs and curious giant cactus trees gave new variation to the landscape, now admired by millions of tourists and hikers. In such places the "hiking" is done on horseback.

North America has not always been covered with forests, grass, and desert sands. At one time, many millions of years ago, it was nearly all under water. If there had been a map of the country at that time America would have looked like a series of islands - an archipelago.

This situation existed hundreds of millions of years ago. The Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans all met and flowed together over the land we now call North America. Geologists have given this flooded period a name. They call it the Devonian Period. At that time the brightest animal in all the world was an amphibian, which was something like a large frog. It waddled around and lived part of the time in the water and part of the time on land. It could not jump like a frog and it probably was by no means so intelligent an animal.

Southeastern Indian Trails in the early days of our country. Some of them were well-established routes.

How the landscape in eastern America may have looked before the Appalachian Mountains were formed more than two hundred million years ago.

In the course of ages, the land of North America rose and great plains took the place of inland seas. Then came an extremely cold period, when a large part of the country was probably covered with a layer of ice, which may have been more than a mile thick. After a million years or so the earth grew warm again and the ice disappeared, but the effects of another happening changed the character of America. This strange happening was the rise of the Appalachian Mountains.

For reasons unknown, some disturbance took place far down in the depths of the earth. Gases forced up molten rock so that the cool layers of the ground were pushed here and there in confused masses. Some of the molten rock was folded and piled high on the earth's surface, where it was exposed to the air. In time, of course, it cooled and became rock which we call granite.

This upheaval took place about 200 million years ago. At first those new mountains were lofty and full of precipices and canyons. They were as rough as the Rocky Mountains are today. They were young mountains, and jagged peaks are the sign of youth in mountains.

In 200 million years many boulders were rolled down by mountain torrents and crushed by continual pounding. Earthquakes changed the surface of the earth. Heat, cold, wind, and water weathered the rocks. Some of the boulders became sand and mud and scattered far and wide over the valleys and plains. So the Appalachians are now well-rounded mountains, over which the forests have grown. Through these mountain forests such clubs as the Green Mountain Club have blazed hundreds of miles of trails.