George Sears Quotes

George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose “Woodcraft,” published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.

We do not go into the woods to rough it; we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home. —GEORGE WASHINGTON SEARS Now or never. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU I get faster as I get older. —EMMA GATEWOOD

Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she could not endure a moment longer. She would kill herself rather than go on, she decided one night... Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma and when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet. She could hear it singing to her. She opened her arms to the fire, embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and fierce. And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite as much.

The red priestess shuddered. Blood trickled down her thigh, black and smoking. The fire was inside her, an agony, an ecstasy, filling her, searing her, transforming her. Shimmers of heat traced patterns on her skin, insistent as a lover’s hand.

But ’tis done—all words are idle— Words from me are vainer still; But the thoughts we cannot bridle 55 Force their way without the will. Fare thee well! thus disunited, Torn from every nearer tie, Sear’d in heart, and lone, and blighted, More than this I scarce can die.

Kiss me," I whispered. Make me forget, for a night, that this isn't real. Make me believe that this could be my life. That I'm not betraying everything I know to be here, to feel like this. Ember bent down. Her lips touched mine, and my doubts vanished. The soldier disappeared. Everything disappeared, except her. I felt nothing but her hands on my skin, her lips, her bodey pressed agaqinst me. I kissed her until I was consumed with her, searing this moment into my consciousness, driving away the soldier and St. George and everything about the war. I would get back to it tomorrow. Tonight, I wanted to be normal. Tonight, Garret the soldier didn't exist.

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime, With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats; And men are whithered before their prime By the curse paved in with the lanes and streets. And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine; And death stalks in on the struggling crowd— But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine

When the mountain streams are frozen and the Nor'land winds are out; when the winter winds are drifting the bitter sleet and snow; when winter rains are making out-of-door life unendurable; when season, weather and law combine to make it "close time" for beast, bird and man, it is well that a few congenial spirits should, at some favorite trysting place, gather around the glowing stove and exchange yarns, opinions and experiences.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The wines were great, and better by the minute, even as the drinkers softened. Just as wines opened at the table, so the friends' thirst changed. Their tongues were not so keen, but curled, delighted, as the wines deepened. Nick's Latour was a classic Bordeaux, perfumed with black currant and cedar, perfectly balanced, never overpowering, too genteel to call attention to itself, but too splendid to ignore. Raj's Petrus, like Raj himself, more flamboyant, flashier, riper, ravishing the tongue. And then the Californian, which was in some ways richest, and in others most ethereal. George was sure the scent was eucalyptus in this Heitz, the flavor creamy with just a touch of mint, so that he could imagine the groves of silvery trees. The Heitz was smooth and silky, meltingly soft, perhaps best suited to George's tournedos, seared outside, succulent and pink within, juices running, mixing with the young potatoes and tangy green beans crisp enough to snap.

Any officer serving under Sumner, who had joined the army in 1819, had to learn to cultivate the pose “that he is utterly ignorant, professionally—& that his colonel is not,” Johnston explained, and added “—the last most difficult.” Such a pose was unimaginable for anyone of George McClellan’s sensibilities.

Behind the recriminations was the fact that in this first test as a battlefield commander McClellan took resort in caution when his plan miscarried, leaving a portion of his army in possible peril.

Crediting Beauregard with 100,000 men poised for attack was McClellan’s own analysis.

George McClellan was by no means the only Civil War general to believe he was outnumbered when he was not, but he was the only one to believe it so obstinately and for so long.

With Calvinistic fatalism he believed his path to be the chosen path; anyone who raised criticisms or objections—whether president or Cabinet officer or legislator or editor or fellow general—was at best ignorant and misguided and at worst a traitor.

In the end, the Army of the Potomac proved to be no weapon for a coup d’etat, and George McClellan no general to lead one.

Like Pinkerton, Alfred Pleasonton combined great industry with small judgment.

General Lee, having defended Richmond in June with 200,000 men and threatened Washington in August with 120,000, would hardly invade the North in September with an army of less than 120,000. That in fact General Lee commanded a third of that number—that he was daring to challenge the Army of the Potomac with so small a force—was a reality contrary to George McClellan’s most strongly held conviction.

General Lee, in his confidence that he could complete the Harper’s Ferry operation and reunite his army without interference, once again displayed an intuitive ability to read his opponent’s mind. It was an ability that General McClellan conspicuously lacked.

McClellan received not a scrap of factual evidence on September 15 (for there was none) that Jackson’s command had actually reached Sharpsburg: no reports from the cavalry, no information from deserters or prisoners, no sightings by civilians. He simply made one of his deductive leaps, first imagining the worst that might happen, then believing that it had happened. His exercise in unreason ensured that the worst did in fact happen. When at last he fought the Battle of Antietam, he would face the entire Army of Northern Virginia.

Antietam was the only battle that George McClellan ever planned and directed—indeed, it was the only Civil War battle he ever witnessed from start to finish—and he fought it less to gain a victory than to forestall a defeat.

One of Pleasonton’s officers later observed that at Antietam the Federal cavalry arm “had not yet fallen into the hands of those who knew the proper use to make of it.

When it became necessary to replace Burnside, Joe Hooker’s popularity with the men would be a decisive factor in selecting him over John Reynolds or George Meade.

on September 17, 1862, “more errors were committed by the Union commander than in any other battle of the war.

Halleck replied, “The President has read your telegram, and directs me to suggest that, if the enemy had more occupation south of the river, his cavalry would not be so likely to make raids north of it.

He was not forced to resort to a siege by the president’s order, nor did it affect how the siege was conducted nor even how long it lasted. What made “rapid and brilliant operations impossible” was his own decision, already taken, to abandon any effort to turn Yorktown.

When the Peninsula dispatches were made public in 1864, James Russell Lowell wrote that he had to go back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote to find a self-deception comparable to General McClellan’s.

George McClellan was beaten in the battle for Richmond by an army that existed only in his mind’s eye, its overwhelming numbers real enough to him so that he was able, in a final act of evasion, to make a plausible case to his own army and to the country and to himself that nothing of what had happened was actually his fault.

On three straight days, while the Army of the Potomac fought to survive, he abdicated the position of commanding general and went to the rear, leaving it to others to direct all the fighting.

The Army of the Potomac’s command system, by contrast, had worked effectively during the Seven Days, the measure of its success the fact that the army survived consecutive, critical days of fighting when it was abandoned by the general commanding.

The issue was at once sectional, political, and economic, and the result was a hopeless deadlock.

It is something of a curiosity that the American cavalry arm utilized a tactical manual and a saddle developed by an officer who had never served—and would never serve—a day with the cavalry.

Whatever advantage he would have as a military administrator in 1861, he possessed no more tactical insights into the war to come than did any of his fellow (or opposing) generals.

The diamond doors flew open. I blinked in disbelief at the transformation within. The tent was no longer of silk but flesh (speckled and pink with spoiled blood); the feast was not a feast, but, rather, on long tables inside, numerous human forms were stretched out, in various stages of flaying; the host was no king, no Christ, but a beast, bloody-handed and long-fanged, wearing a sulfur-colored robe, bits of innards speckling it. Visible therein were three women and a bent-backed old man, bearing long ropes of (their own) intestines (terrible!), but most terrible of all was the way they screeched with joy as my funeral-suited friend was dragged in among them, and the way that poor fellow kept smiling, as if attempting to ingratiate himself with his captors, listing the many charitable things he had done back in Pennsylvania, and the numerous good people who would vouch for him, especially in the vicinity of Wilkes-Barre, if only they might be summoned, even as he was wrestled over to the flaying table by several escort-beings apparently constituted entirely of fire, such that, when they grabbed him (their searing touch instantaneously burning away his funeral suit), his pain was so great that he could no longer struggle or move at all, except his head turned briefly in my direction, and his eyes (horror-filled) met mine.

His fantasies were nurturing, not predatory. If he could have Jess, he would feed her. Laughable, antique, confusingly paternal, he longed to nourish her with clementines, and pears in season, fresh whole-wheat bread and butter, wild strawberries, comte cheese, fresh figs and oily Marcona almond, tender yellow beets. He would sear red meat, if she would let him, and grill spring lamb. Cut the thorns off artichokes and dip the leaves in fresh aioli, poach her fish- thick Dover sole in wine and shallots- julienne potatoes, and roast a whole chicken with lemon slices under the skin. He would serve a salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and just-picked basil. Serve her and watch her savor dinner, pour for her, and watch her drink. That would be enough for him. To find her plums in season, and perfect nectarines, velvet apricots, dark succulent duck. To bring her all these things and watch her eat.

Sentimentally, he thought of Jess. Irrationally, he despaired of having her. But this was not a question of pursuit. Raj would laugh at him, and Nick would look askance. His fantasies were nurturing, not predatory. If he could have Jess, he would feed her. Laughable, antique, confusingly paternal, he longed to nourish her with clementines, and pears in season, fresh whole-wheat bread and butter, wild strawberries, comte cheese, fresh figs and oily Marcona almonds, tender yellow beets. He would sear red meat, if she would let him, and grill spring lamb. Cut the thorns off artichokes and dip the leaves in fresh aioli, poach her fish- thick Dover sole in wine and shallots- julienne potatoes, and roast a whole chicken with lemon slices under the skin. He would serve a salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and just-picked basil. Serve her and watch her savor dinner, pour for her, and watch her drink. That would be enough for him. To find her plums in season, and perfect nectarines, velvet apricots, dark succulent duck. To bring her all these things and watch her eat.

The warmth returned, but it was the mellow, genial warmth of autumn that rejoiced at the thought of evening thunderstorms and the cool of morning, which had been sorely lacking during the searing summer months, leaving the land thirsty. The

George McClellan’s conviction that he was forever outnumbered was the one constant of his military character.

The fact of the matter is that George G. Meade, unexpectedly and against the odds, thoroughly outgeneraled Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg.18

In view of such an atmosphere, it is strange that when he dressed for the half-hour trip to the center of his forces, Patton chose his “dress,” whipcord riding breeches, a custom-tailored light-khaki shirt and cavalry boots, and carried a candid camera and riding crop. More standard with Patton in combat was an item at his side, gleaming in the searing southern sun: the Colt .45 Single Action, strapped in its mahogany-bay Myres holster. Binoculars completed the showy outfit, together with helmet-liner and an old helmet.

Progress? Of course, this is progress; but, whether backward or forward, had better be decided sixty years hence. And, just what has happened to the obscure valley of Marsh Creek, is happening today, on a larger scale, all over the land. It is the same old story of grab and greed. Let us go on the "make" today, and "whack up" tomorrow; cheating each other as villainously as we may, and posterity be d—d. "What's all the w-u-u-rld to a man when his wife is a widdy?" This is the moral: From Maine to Montana; from the Adirondacks to Alaska; from the Yosemite to the Yellowstone, the trout-hog, the deer-wolf, the netter, the skin-hunter, each and all have it their own way; and the law is a farce—only to be enforced where the game has vanished forever.

clear; fold the cloth snugly and put it in another vessel, pour the solution on

We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home; in towns and cities; in shops, offices, stores, banks anywhere that we may be placed - with the necessity always present of being on time and up to our work; of providing for the dependent ones' of keeping up, catching up, or getting left.