![]() ![]() He went back to the camp and told his wife and the others that they were turning back and settling in Colorado. "It was gigantic," says Michener, "thirty or forty feet tall, with wild, curving tusks and beady eyes that glowed." Levi went out one night to check on his oxen, and out of the shadows rose the great elephant. Then, just as they reached the far side of the mountains, where the going would be easier, it happened. In the Rocky Mountains, they ran into all kinds of troubles. They loaded all their belongings on a big Conestoga wagon and headed for Oregon. Michener described the migration of a young Mennonite farmer, Levi Zendt, and his new wife, Elly, from Pennsylvania to the West. ![]() He had seen it in Western novels, he said, and always in the context of somebody's being spooked on the trail by something - spooked so badly, in fact, that he would never return to that trail.Ī few weeks later, by coincidence, I was reading James Michener's massive novel Centennial, about the settling of the state of Colorado, and ran into the part of the phrase about the elephant. When I asked where it came from, my friend pleaded ignorance. ![]() Several years ago I was walking with a contractor friend through the lovely Japanese gardens in Fort Worth, Texas, when he said something about a certain man he knew, that he guessed he had "seen the elephant and heard the owl." I had never heard the phrase before, and was intrigued by it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |