The Autobiography of an Idea by Louis H. Sullivan

While at Lyons Falls, Louis made acquaintance of the sons of the tenant farmer; twins, two or three years older than he, and he appraised them accordingly. Broad shouldered, heavily built throughout, with large-featured homely faces evenly browned by the sun, they had big coarse hands which Louis envied. They swayed and lurched in talking, shifting their feet; good natured, heavy-minded fellows, taller than Louis. One day they said they were bound for Brown's Tract and would have as guide a trapper, a grown man; that they would head for a certain lake twenty miles away, where the trapper had a shack and a canoe; that they were after game; they asked Louis if he would like to come along. Louis jumped at a chance he had been aching for. Many a day he had wondered what a forest could be, within its depths, as he gazed at the mass of sombre and silentious green rising from the dark waters of the river and had seen no hope to solve the mystery. The boys warned him that it would be rough, heavy work, with some danger; but he said the rougher the better, and that as to the dangers he was curious.

Now, afoot, heavy laden, they have passed the fringe of the forest, and begun the ascent of a rough stony trail, climbing and descending the hills in a winding obscure way. Five miles in, they cross a "bark road," so called, a ragged gash through the woods with stumps of trees, loose boulders and corduroy for roadbed. Strewn along the way of the road lie huge naked hemlocks stripped of bark for the tanneries to southward. No trail beyond this road; the real hard work, the stern hardship begins in the utter wildness of ancient fallen trees, tangled wildwood, precipitous ravines, the crossing of raging torrents -- feeders of the Moose River -- roaring under masses of forest wreckage, involving high danger in the crossing, their waters dark brown, forbidding, foaming brown-white; detours to be made around impassable rock outcroppings; wadings through cedar swamps; a bit of smooth needle-carpeted floor, for relief at times; many panting rests, many restarts, grimly wending their way between close-set uprearing shafts of mighty hemlocks, and tamaracks, with recurring narrow vistas quickly closing as the trampers cross a plateau, and then again descent and climb and hardship, hidden danger of falling aged trees, no warning but the groan, then a crash and trembling earth; so pass four weary ones through a long August day, amid cathedral gloom, the roaring and the stillness of primeval forest.