WHEN you read in your history the stories of the men who discovered America, did you ever think that not one of them found that for which he searched when he sailed unknown seas and braved the perils of an unbroken wilderness? Columbus tried to find a sea-way to the Indies, and stumbled upon a new world. Henry Hudson, in seeking a short cut to the Pacific, found New York. De Soto, hunting in vain for gold, was little comforted by the sight of the muddy waters of the Mississippi. And so with Ponce de LeÓn, Balboa, La Salle, and all the rest. Each journeyed in search of one thing and found another.

Nor did any of these discoverers know what he had found. De Soto had no vision of great plains of golden grain, food for millions of men, along the shores of his river. Henry Hudson never dreamed of the city of New York. These men only blazed the trail. It was for those who came after to understand and use what they had found.

Each year men were finding, and helping others to find, a new land. Some of these men were the pioneers who cleared the ground and planted farms; some were those who built roads and bridges; some were those who took iron, coal, and oil from the ground; some were those who taught the children of the new land in the little bare school-houses. All of these people helped to discover our America.

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.

Did you know that only a very few years ago many people were afraid to open their windows? That was the time when so many were dying of tuberculosis that it was called “the great white plague.” It was as mysterious and terrible as the Black Death, which, we read, once carried off half the people of England, because this “white plague” was an enemy that never withdrew. No one knew what caused the trouble, but they thought it must be due to a chill of some kind, so they carefully shut out the fresh air. Every child to-day knows that they were shutting out the one thing that could cure them. But do you know that it was Edward Trudeau who taught us that? He was really the discoverer of the importance of fresh air as a cure for many ills, and, still better, as a means of keeping well. Besides this, he lived the life of a true hero. Listen to his story and see if you will not say with me that his was as brave a fight as that of any hero of battle. And his victory was one in which the whole world has a share.

Though Edward Trudeau was born with his father’s love of the open, most of his early life, as we have said, was spent in big cities. When he was a child of three, his grandfather, Dr. Berger, a French physician who had earned renown not only in his own country but also in New York, took him and his older brother to Paris, where they lived for fifteen years. Here he was like a wood-bird in a cage, looking at a strange life and strange people through the bars.

Sometimes the bits of life he saw were very gay and fascinating, for this was the time of the Second Empire, when the capital was always a-flutter over some occasion of royal pomp or brilliant celebration. Napoleon III (whom Victor Hugo wittily dubbed “Napoleon the Little” in contrast with his uncle, Napoleon the Great) tried to make the splendor and glitter of extravagant display take the place of the true glory of great deeds. One of his “big brass generals,” who was always quite dazzling in gold lace and gleaming decorations, lived on the first floor, immediately below Dr. Berger’s apartment, and Edward Trudeau felt, as he watched from the window this ideal figure of military power dash up to the porte-cochÈre on his spirited horse, all splendid, too, in gold trappings, that here truly was one of the great race of heroes. He trembled with delight when the great man took notice of his small, hero-worshiping self, and they became friends after a fashion. But General Bazaine was, as events proved, much more within his capabilities when sitting tall on a prancing, gold-caparisoned horse at a royal review of the troops than when leading the forces of France against the German army. When the Franco-Prussian War came in 1870 it was largely through his tactical blunders, and cowardly treachery, perhaps, that Sedan was surrounded and the French army obliged to surrender to the victorious Germans. When Edward Trudeau read in the papers the news of the French defeat his heart was sad over the fall of his boyish idol, but the truth entered his soul that the real victors of real battles are not always those magnificent ones who look most unconquerable.

Another vivid memory of his childhood days in Paris brought home the same truth. One day, as he watched at the window, he was thrilled to see a gorgeous equerry from the Palais Royal ride up in state to his door and hand a parcel to the butler. This package, he learned, contained the Cross of the Legion of Honor which the emperor had sent to his grandfather. Afterward, he noticed that his grandfather always wore a little red ribbon in his buttonhole. But when the small boy questioned him in regard to the reason for his wearing the decoration, he only smiled quizzically and said, “Pour faire parler les curieux, mon enfant” (“To give the curious a chance to talk, my child”). As for himself, this modest French physician preferred to let his deeds alone speak of what he had done.

The small boy who could scarcely remember the time when he did not live in France and whose relatives were all French did not forget for a moment that he was an American. The toy boats which he sailed in the fountains of the Tuileries all bore the Stars and Stripes. And his favorite playmates at the LycÉe Bonaparte, where he went to school, were hardy American boys whose parents were living in Paris.

During the years at the French school the vague, inner yearning for a freer, more natural life, found vent in many pranks and covert rebellion not only against the class routine, but also, more openly, against the established order of things on the playground. Here some of the delicately aristocratic French boys were much disconcerted by the blunt and wholly effectual way in which Edward Trudeau and his chums, the Livingston lads, settled questions by argument straight from the shoulder.

When he returned to New York at eighteen, Edward could speak only broken English, but he felt so truly American that he wondered why his cousins laughed when he said, “Ze English is so hard a language to prononciate.”

Then came his “wander years” in which he tried, with a deep, unsatisfied longing after he knew not what, to find his proper niche in life. Something of the memory of the stirring day when the American lads in Paris had thrilled over the news of the capture of the privateer Alabama by the United States cruiser Kearsarge off the coast of France led him to think that he wanted to enter the Navy. So he went to a preparatory school at Newport, as the United States Naval Academy had been, on account of the war, removed from Annapolis to that city, together with the historic old ship Constitution, which furnished quarters for the cadets.

At the very moment when he was prepared to enter the academy, Fate decided otherwise. His only brother, Francis, whose delicate health had always been a cause of much anxiety, became alarmingly ill. Though Edward was several years younger, he had always, as far back as he could remember, tried, at school and on the playground, to take care of this frail brother. He learned to know by the signs of the paling face and blue lips when the weak heart was missing its proper beat, and he was always at hand to say: “Steady, old fellow, steady! Let’s drop out of the game and rest up a bit.”

Most of the thrashings that he had dealt out to the school bullies were given on his brother’s account. But if Frank was not able to hold his own when it came to fisticuffs, in other encounters Edward learned to rely on the strong character and high ideals of this brother, who seemed a tower of strength when it came to battles of the spirit against doubts, fears, and wild gusts of temptation.

Now these two, who were so closely united by the strong double bond of mutual dependence and protection, had come to the great parting of the ways. The white plague had Francis in its terrible grip. During the last months of the hopeless struggle Edward watched with him night and day, drinking strong green tea to keep himself awake, and, by the doctor’s orders, carefully keeping all the windows closed, since the outside air was supposed to aggravate the painful cough.

The man who was to cure many by the simple means of fresh air learned his first lesson in that sick-room where he watched the one he loved best struggle for breath, and where he himself caught the seeds of the dread disease. This first great sorrow was really the first stage on his great journey of discovery—the discovery of a new world of life, restored to many who believed that they were nearing the “Valley named of the Shadow.” But how often is it true that the seeker after El Dorado searches for one thing and finds another. How often must the fortunate ones who at last arrive at the great goal travel by ways they know not.

Edward Trudeau had not yet found his lifework. He studied for a few months at the school of mines before he realized that he was not destined to be an engineer. This was but one of many false starts. Indeed, his early path was strewed with so many bits of wreckage from his spasmodic trials and failures that when one of his friends announced to a group at the Union Club that he had entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a fellow-member said, “I bet five hundred dollars he never graduates.” And not one of the companions who knew and loved him so well was ready to take up the bet.

These merry companions of his youth, who thought they knew Edward Trudeau better than he knew himself, loved him well; for he ever had the gift of friendship with man and beast. Dogs and horses at once felt his comprehending hand and heart. And as for the human kind—were they great masters of finance like Edward H. Harriman, gay young men about town like the Livingstons, or sturdy mountain guides like Paul Smith and Fitz-Greene Halleck—all and each were not only boon companions when the opportunity served, but lifelong friends whom neither time nor circumstance could change. When Dr. Trudeau used to say with feeling, “No one ever had better friends than I have,” we always thought, as we looked into his kindly eyes, so alive with understanding sympathy and ready cheer, “How true it is that the best way to win a friend is to be one.”

The best friend of all from beginning to end, however, was Miss Charlotte Beare, who became his wife as soon as he had graduated from the medical school and had spent six months as

house physician in The Strangers’ Hospital. When he wrote, toward the close of his life, a record of what his experiences had meant, he gave the book this dedication:

It was through his love for her, he said, that he was able to keep steadily at work during his college days, when close application to study and the confinement of city life were telling not only upon his health but also wearing away the inner soul that ever craved, with a deeper and more poignant longing, the freedom of open spaces and the breath of the life-giving woods.

It was a very different story from those light-hearted, familiar ones where “they married and lived happily ever after.” The rain followed the sunshine very soon after the young doctor had returned from his wedding-trip and settled down to practice in New York. After months of struggle against what he thought was a sort of stubborn malaria, together with the old rebellion against a shut-in life, the doctor who had worked so bravely to fit himself to cure others came face to face with the truth that he himself had a disease which no doctor could cure. The world seemed dark indeed when he thought he must soon leave his loved wife, the little Charlotte and baby Ned, and all that he had hoped to accomplish in the future.

He little realized that he had but reached the second stage in the journey that was to prepare him in a way he could not understand to be the “Beloved Physician,” one destined to save many who, like him, had met death face to face and trembled before the thought of separation from those they loved.

A faint light seemed to shine in the blackness of the night that had closed about him when the resolve came to go away from the city into the still woods—where he had felt the keenest joy in “mere living” on brief hunting-trips to the Adirondacks. His dear wife should be spared seeing the terrible, hopeless fight, and he should before the end have a bit of that free life for which his tired spirit longed. And so, though it meant separation, perhaps forever, from those he loved best, he prepared to go to Paul Smith’s hunting-lodge, which was forty-two miles from the nearest railroad in the heart of a still country of mountain lakes and vast, untroubled forest.

It took three days for the sick man to make the journey. His friend Lou Livingston, who accompanied him, tried in vain to persuade him to give up going to such a rough, remote place. A mattress and pillows were arranged in the two-horse stage, in which they had to travel the forty-two miles of rough mountain road to the hunting-lodge, and the sick man was made as comfortable as possible; but when at sunset he caught sight of the house through the pines he was too weak with fever and the jolting of the long trip to stand or walk. A hearty, mountain guide picked him up as if he had been an infant, carried him up to his room, and, as he laid him on his bed, remarked comfortingly:

“That’s nothing, Doctor! You don’t weigh no more than a dried lambskin.”

The invalid might well have been depressed by these words, but the magic of the country had already begun its work. He ate a hearty meal with the keenest relish he had known in weeks and fell asleep like a tired child.

“When I thought I had come to the end, it proved but the turn in the road,” said Dr. Trudeau. “I went to the mountains to die—I found there the beginning of a new life.”

As the weeks passed and left him not losing ground, but actually gaining day by day, the truth gradually dawned upon him that fresh air and rest were doing what doctors despaired of.

After proving what a few months could accomplish, and finding that even a short visit to his home meant an alarming setback, Dr. Trudeau and his wife decided that they must go to the mountain country to live. Can you imagine what spending a winter in the Adirondacks meant at that time, when the only houses were hunting-lodges and the cabins of the guides? Once, when making the journey to their winter quarters, the family was caught in a blizzard. When the sweat of their struggling horses was turned to a firm casing of ice and they all had hard work to keep faces and ears from freezing, they left the cutter, put blankets on the horses, wrapped the children in buffalo-robes and buried them in the snow, while the men tramped ahead and made a track up the hill for the weary horses. At last, when it was clear that the animals could go no farther, Paul Smith set off to the hut of a guide for fresh horses. As he left the little family buried in the snow, he said with his hearty laugh which seemed to put new life in the anxious travelers:

“Doctor, don’t you know Napoleon said, ‘The dark regions of Russia is only fit for Russians to inhabit’?”

Altogether these Napoleons were three days making the journey through the snow to their winter haven at Paul Smith’s hunting-lodge.

For several years Dr. Trudeau lived with his family in this wilderness where he had found health and happiness. His skill as a physician was given mostly to caring for the lumbermen and guides for miles about and for their dogs and horses. Of course there were, too, the people of the summer camps. And the story of his cure led a New York doctor to send a few patients to try the same life. The number of these people increased, and gradually the colony of health-seekers began to grow.

One day, when Dr. Trudeau was on the side of Mount Pisgah, near Saranac Lake, he fell asleep while leaning on his gun and dreamed a dream. He saw as in a vision the forest on the shore of the lake melt away, and the whole slope covered with houses, built, as it were, inside out, so that most of the life of the people could go on in the open. As he said years later, when he was making an address at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the building of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium at Saranac Lake, “I dreamed a dream of a great sanitarium that should be the everlasting foe of tuberculosis, and lo, the dream has come true!”

But Dr. Trudeau was a man who knew that, if good dreams are to come true, one must have the faith to pray as if there were no such thing as work, and the steady resolution to work as if there were no such thing as prayer. Much faith and much hard work went into the beginnings of that City of the Sick near Lake Saranac.

There was the time of small things, when the chosen spot, with its scant grass and huge boulders, looked more like a pasture for goats than a building-site. Faith, however, can not only move mountains, it can turn them into building material; faith, too, can move the hearts of men and make many work together as one for a great cause. The guides whose families the Beloved Physician had tended without price gave sixteen acres on the sheltered plateau where he had seen his dream city arise.

“We shall build not a great hospital where many are herded together, but cottages where those who seek refuge here may each have his zone of pure air and something of the rest and freedom of home,” said Dr. Trudeau. He talked to his friends, he talked to friends of his friends—to all who would pause in their busy lives to listen. His glowing faith kindled enthusiasm in other hearts. Day by day, not only through the large gifts of the few who could give much, but also through the small gifts of the many who could give but little, the fund grew. The doctor’s dream became a reality.

When we hear the stories of the heroes of old—the men of might, the grand of soul—does it seem as if our little day gives no chance for great deeds? Look at the Beloved Physician of Saranac, with his frail body, his cheerful smile, his unconquerable hope. See him going about with loving care among those whom life seemed to have broken and cast aside. See him in his little laboratory struggling hour after hour, through weeks and months and years, with no apparatus save that of his own contriving, with no training in scientific method, to lure the germs of the white plague within the field of his microscope, and force them to give up the secret of their terrible power. Surely there is no heroism greater than that of such brave, patient labor against all odds, against all ills, in spite of sorrow and loss and the fear of failure.

I like to picture this hero, with his genius for taking pains, at work over his test-tubes when his famous patient, Robert Louis Stevenson, came to visit the laboratory. Dr. Trudeau held out a little tube of liquid with the words,

“Here is our enemy fairly entrapped at last. This little scum is consumption, the cause of more human suffering than anything else.”

The discoverer of “Treasure Island” turned pale with disgust and backed out of the laboratory with these words, “Yes, Doctor, I know you have a lantern at your belt, but I don’t like the smell of your oil!”

The brilliant imagination of the great writer failed to understand the steady light of the imagination that seeks patiently after scientific truth in spite of discouragements and years of fruitless work.

In the last public address which Trudeau made, in 1910, before a gathering of physicians and surgeons, he said these words which show that he had caught the gleam of Stevenson’s lantern:

One of Trudeau’s most cherished possessions was a fine copy in bronze of MerciÉ’s statue “Gloria Victis,” given him by one of his patients. The sculptor created this statue in 1871, after the crushing blow inflicted on France by the German arms, to console and inspire the French people with the hope of triumph through defeat. It shows a young gladiator who has received his death-wound while facing the foe, lifted up and borne onward by a splendid Victory with outstretched wings. He has fought the fight and still holds his sword in his lifeless hand. In losing his life he wins his victory, that of one of the “faithful failures” who marched toward the new day whose dawn is not for them but for those who come after.

Dr. Trudeau, ever in the grip of the enemy that could be held at bay, but never conquered, labored year after year to save the lives of others. Many he was able to cure through rest and the life-giving air of the place he had found and made to be the battle-ground against tuberculosis. In many more he succeeded in arresting the disease and giving years of useful life, with restrictions—days and nights in the open, eternal watchfulness. And always, so conditioned himself, he worked, while often laboring for every breath he drew, to find the real cure—a something that would be able to destroy the terrible germs. He never lived to find it, but he prepared the way for others, who will go on with his work and carry it to success.

Shortly before his death, in November, 1915, Dr. Trudeau tried to explain what the statue “Gloria Victis” had meant to him:

“It typifies,” he said, “many victories I have seen won in Saranac Lake by those whom I had learned to love; the victory of the spirit over the body; the victories that demand acquiescence in worldly failure, and in the supreme sacrifice of life itself as a part of their achievement; the victory of the Nazarene, which ever speaks its great message to the ages.”