End of the Wilderness Road

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road,
and our past is not a dead past,
but still lives in us.

Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves,
the wild outside.

We live in the civilization they created,
but within us the wilderness still lingers.

What they dreamed, we live,
and what they lived, we dream.

T.K. Whipple (1890-1939) . . .
as quoted by Mike Brown in the Rockdale Reporter . . .
and as quoted by Larry McMurtry
in his epigraph to Lonesome Dove