Word: frontiersman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...train ride in the western hemisphere. It was 1881 when he took over construction of the trans-Canadian railway, a project that consumed several fortunes, 4 1/2 years of agonizing labor and an untold number of lives. "Since we can't export the scenery," he once said, expressing a frontiersman's thirsty love of the land, "we'll have to import the tourists...
Both critics have a point; Cooper's characterization of Natty Bumppo, the sharpshooter who boasts, "What I can see, I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquitoe's eye," shuttles uneasily from stolid frontiersman to animated cartoon. Yet the surrounding Delaware, Iroquois and Sioux are presented for the first time as complex beings with heroic as well as villainous traits. It took another century to amplify the efforts of Cooper, whose unacknowledged voice can still be heard in romantic protest literature and films. If his works now seem closer to scenarios than to novels...
...Frontiersman who became a minor patron saint of the Kennedy revisionists was Chester Bowles, the career diplomat. He thought that he had located a central problem with the Kennedy Administration. He feared that it deliberately, almost scornfully, detached pragmatic considerations from a larger moral context. To discuss the morality of actions was evidence of softness, and intellectuals with power in their hands cannot bear to be thought soft. Everyone carried the Munich model around in his head. One talked in laconic codes, a masculine shorthand; one did not, like Adlai Stevenson, deliver fluty soliloquies about the morality...
...first sheriff of Independence, Mo., the first white man to lead a party to the brink of the Yosemite Valley and the first to lead a wagon train into California, in 1843. Frontiersman Joseph Walker, says Biographer Bil Gilbert, "should have become a gaudy boon to the toy and TV industries" like his contemporary, Kit Carson. The reason he did not: Walker's stubborn refusal to embroider his achievements for legend-hungry Eastern journalists. So they "moved on to men and events that could be conventionally romanticized...
...descendant of Frontiersman Jim Bowie, who struck out swinging at the Alamo, Kuhn is not exactly a buckskin man or most people's idea of a romantic. Standing 6 ft. 5 in., he was never much of an athlete, a "lousy ballplayer" by his own reckoning, better suited for basketball but in love with baseball. As a calm, scholarly child in Washington, B.C., already too stiff to ask the Senators' players for autographs, Kuhn whiled away early 1940s summers manning the scoreboard for a dollar a day, just to have some part in the wondrous events at Griffith...