He was thirty-two years old at that time,--no
mere youth, seeking treasure at the end of a rainbow. He was already a
man of experience and settled habits, inured to hardship and adverse
fortune. As a youth he had left his native hills of Connecticut, to sell
clocks, first in the South and then in the lumber camps of Michigan.
There, the business of Yankee pedlar having failed, he found himself
stranded. His father was a prosperous farmer; but a stepmother ruled the
household. So young Palmer hired out to a Michigan farmer, for he was
one of those hardy New Englanders who ask no favors of fortune.
Imagining a pretty frontier girl to be a sylvan goddess, with a
Puritan's devotion he made love to her, only to be scorned for his
modesty. But failure and disappointment served but to strengthen him,
and he struck out for California.
He nearly perished on the way there, while crossing the deserts of
Nevada. In Wyoming he had fallen into the hands of that brave true man,
John Enos, then in his prime, who had guided Bonneville, Fremont and the
Mormon pilgrims, and who,--living to the age of a hundred and four
years,--saw the wilderness he had loved and explored for eighty years
transformed to a proud empire.
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