Daniel Carter Beard
By:
June 21, 2010
It could be said that The American Boy’s Handy Book, written by DANIEL CARTER BEARD (1850-1941) in 1883, did not so much preserve the frontier spirit as offer its epitaph. In place of lore handed down from generation to generation, it could be said, Beard’s book offered only a mail-order know-how, a manufactured legacy. But that’s a churlish view. For running between the seasonal cycles of fishing and fire-building and the mechanical amusements of modern life is a creek, hidden and feral; it flows out of town streets and manufactories, through corn-and-soybean prairielands, into broken fields of silage giving way to silver maple and honey locust trees, whose knuckled trunks kneel at the river’s edge; and if you’re the sort of American boy given to whiling away the hours in kite-making; or jugging for cats; or fashioning a soap-bubble pipe; or snaring partridges; or building a sleigh out of a folding-chair; then this creek, with its falls, its burbling fountains, and its dark pools, haunted by carp and alligator gar rocketing beneath the reflections of the trees, whose shadows encrypt the secrets of Pilgrims and Indians and knights-errant, will suit your fancies; and although some will tell you that its waters are streaked with the stain of commerce, or chauvinism, or glorymaking jingoism, or the tragedy of a commons of lost authenticity, you will not mind them overmuch; for whatever danks and deeps befoul the creek, in fact it’s always run this way — between an imaginary past and an uncertain future — and the only balm for it is to dig, to plunge, to fly, and to burn.
ALSO BORN THIS DATE: Mary McCarthy
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