Sharlot Hall

[montezumawell]

Sharlot Hall is probably the Patron Saint of Arizona Backcountry People. If you don't know about her, you dang well should.

Anyway, we want to reprint one of her classic poems from "Cactus & Pine" published in 1911.
It pretty well sums up what we think is happening here at HAZ.
-----------------------------
A Creed

Let others frame their creed--mine is to work:
To do my best, however far it fall
Below the keener craft of stronger hands.
To be myself--full-hearted, free and true
To what my own soul sees, below, above;
To think my thought straight-forward from the
heart;
To feel, and be, and never stop to ask:
"Do all men so? Is this the World's Highway?"
To look unflinching in the face of life
As eagles look upon the noonday sun;
To cut my own path through primeval woods;
To lay my own course by the polar star
Across the trackless plains and mountains vast;
To seek, not follow, ever to the end.
And for the rest--bare-handed have I come
Into this world, I know not whence nor why;
Bare-handed and alone and unafraid,
With heart of fire and eyes that question still,
Will I go forth into the wide Beyond;
As went the men who bore my blood of old
To Prove their dream of Heaven, or dare their
H-e-l-l

----------------
Re-typed verbatim with spacing represented as best as possible from Page 137 of the current reprint edition available from the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott. We had to hypenate h-e-l-l to keep it from being morphed into "stinking mugrats."
---------------------
j&s

[Nighthiker]

Yep. Also read Filaree by Marguerite Noble.