Lebanon was English, progressive, and brazenly modern; Manitou was slow, reactionary, more or less indifferent to education, and strenuously Catholic, and was thus opposed to the militant Protestantism of Lebanon.
It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the wastes.

I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central figure of my story.

He was highly educated, well born, and carefully brought up.

He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new country--intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision.

He had an original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to do in new countries, he looked far ahead.