Did you know that the work of discovery is still going on? Ten years from now many changes will have come to pass; in a hundred years a new world will have been found.
This is the story of one of the greatest discoverers of our day--the story of a man who found a new world in the North Woods of New York. But like the other discoverers, he searched for one thing and found another, and he spent many years of patient work in trying to understand and use in the best way what he had found.
Edward Livingston Trudeau was born with a love of the woods and the life of the open. In his father, Dr. James Trudeau, the call of the wild was so strong that again and again he would leave the city and his work to lose himself in the great forests of the West far from the world of men. He used to say that it was only when he could lose himself in this way that he seemed to find himself. Once he lived for two years with the Osage Indians, learning their woodcraft and their skill in riding and hunting. In 1841 he went with Frémont, the explorer, on his great expedition to the Rocky Mountains. And it was never hard for his friend Audubon, the famous naturalist, to persuade him to shut up his office and fare forth with him into the wilds. He was always restless and ill at ease within walls; only when out under the open sky did he feel fully alive.
Of course, this uncertain, wandering life ruined his chances of success in his profession. He gave up his office in New York, and, leaving his children with their grandfather, returned to his earlier home in New Orleans, thinking that perhaps it would be easier to settle down there to a more regular and ordered life. But he was never able to resist for long at a time the craving for the freedom of the great outdoors.
Edward Trudeau’s childhood was spent in large cities--New York first, and then Paris; he never knew his father, and yet he shared his strong love for a wild, outdoor life. He used often to say that it was strange how the trait which in his father had wrecked his career as a physician saved the life of his son, at a time when he was so ill that he could live only in the open air, and really led to his success as a doctor by showing him that fresh air and sunshine are often a sure cure where medicines fail.