Silas Strong, Emperor of the Woods

A guide in the Adirondacks whose forest is being cut and sold around him refuses to leave it, and the state, the lumber company and his own family arrange his defeat. Irving Bacheller knew the north woods and wrote this in 1906, when the great logging was ending. Silas is one of the few American characters of the period whose speech is transcribed rather than invented. Fifty-one woodland landscapes by painters including George Inness and Albert Bierstadt, from 1820 to 1896, follow the forest that Silas refuses to surrender.