The Shepherd of the Hills: A Novel of the Ozarks

By Harold Bell Wright and Michael Phillips

A stranger rides into the Ozarks with a secret past and a message of forgiveness in this classic Christian novel—a new edition edited by Michael Phillips.

The Shepherd of the Hills tells the classic tale of a stranger who takes the Old Trail deep into the Ozark mountains, many miles from civilization. Learned yet melancholy, he spends his days tending local sheep. And though he lives apart from the townsfolk of Mutton Hollow, he is a friend to one and all. As the story of his tragic past comes to light, so do the lessons of grace and forgiveness bestowed upon us all by the true shepherd.

First published in 1907, The Shepherd of the Hills became an instant bestseller and was later adapted into a classic film starring John Wayne and Harry Carey. This edition has been edited by the noted devotional author Michael Phillips.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9780795300974

Book preview

The Shepherd of

the Hills

Harold Bell Wright

New York, 2017

The Shepherd of the Hills

Originally published in 1907, by the A.L. Burt Co.

Edited edition Copyright © 1988 by Michael Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2017 by RosettaBooks

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5092-4

www.RosettaBooks.com

HAROLD BELL WRIGHT (1872–1944), the American novelist, was born to the farming life in upstate New York, working in the fields at an early age. As he grew he sought an education, which eventually led him into the ministry. Traveling to the Ozarks in the 1890s to recuperate from pneumonia, Wright began the work of a fill-in preacher in a little mountain log schoolhouse, remained there, and eventually was offered a regular pastorate. Over the next ten-years he pastored churches in Missouri, Kansas, and California until declining health forced him once more back to his beloved Ozarks for a time of rest and seeking God. He had previously written one book, specifically for his church congregation. But while in the Ozarks he decided to begin another novel, this time as a test, as a means of letting God guide his steps toward the future. The book was entitled The Shepherd of the Hills, was published in 1907, and became an immediate bestseller. From that time on it was by the pen rather than the pulpit that he was known.

Harold Bell Wright went on to become one of America's top-selling inspirational authors. His seventeen books achieved estimated sales in excess of six million copies.

Harold Bell Wright titles, edited by Michael Phillips The Shepherd of the Hills

The Least of These My Brothers

A Higher Call

THE EDITOR

Michael Phillips is one of the most versatile writers of our time. In addition to his reputation as a best-selling novelist, he has penned more than two-dozen non-fiction titles.

Phillips is also known as among those who helped rescue Victorian Scotsman George MacDonald from obscurity in the 1980s with his new publications of MacDonald’s works. His efforts contributed to a worldwide renewal of interest in the man C.S. Lewis called his master. Phillips is today regarded as a man with rare insight into MacDonald’s heart and spiritual vision. Phillips’ many books on the nature and eternal purposes of God are highlighted by several groundbreaking volumes on MacDonald’s work.

What many readers have not known is that Phillips’ editorial expertise in exhuming the works of his favorite authors of yesteryear has not been limited to the Scotsman. He has also edited three of American Harold Bell Wright’s most memorable titles—The Shepherd of the Hills, That Printer of Udells, and The Calling of Dan Matthews. Phillips’ conviction that the works of this novelist and man of God of a century ago are worthy of new life for our time remains as strong today as when his new editions of these two titles were first published.

CONTENTS

Introduction to Harold Bell Wright

The Two Trails

1. The Stranger

2. Sammy Lane

3. The Voice From Out of the Mists

4. A Chat With Aunt Mollie

5. Jest Nobody

6. The Story

7. What Is Love?

8. Why Ain't We Got No Folks?

9. Sammy Lane's Folks

10. A Feat of Strength and a Challenge

11. Ollie Stewart's Goodbye

12. The Shepherd and His Flock

13. Sammy Lane's Ambition

14. The Common Yeller Kind

15. The Party at Fords'

16. On the Way Home

17. At the Ranch

18. Learning to Be a Lady

19. The Drought

20. The Shepherd Writes a Letter

21. God's Gold

22. A Letter From Ollie Stewart

23. Ollie Comes Home

24. What Makes a Man

25. Young Matt Remembers

26. Ollie's Dilemma

27. The Champion

28. What Pete Told Sammy

29. Jim Lane Makes a Promise

30. Sammy Graduates

31. Castle Building

32. Preparation

33. A Ride in the Night

34. Jim Lane Keeps His Promise

35. I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes Unto the Hills

36. Another Stranger

37. Old Friends

38. I Ain't Nobody No More

39. A Matter of Hours

40. The Shepherd's Mission

41. The Other Side of the Story

42. The Way of the Lower Trail

43. Poor Pete

44. The Trail on the Sunlit Hills

45. Some Years Later

INTRODUCTION

HAROLD BELL WRIGHT

There is something about getting to know a time and a place and the people that go with them which forever alters us. We long to reach across miles and boundaries to touch unfamiliar locales. But this itch to acquaint ourselves with past times and faraway places cannot be satisfied with mere facts and textbook information. Instead we want to meet people. We want to know what life was like there and what it was to live back then, not by studying statistics but by living through it with real live individuals. We want to learn with them, love with them, grow with them, cry with them, laugh with them, grow old with them, and even sometimes die with them. We want to feel life as they lived it—in their time and their place. The exposure to times and places and people touches our emotions, changes us, and helps us grow and face our own lives with a little more understanding, and hopefully with a little more strength.

The best writers of fiction are writers who understand these three primary ingredients of meaningful fiction—time, place, and people. They take us to a place and make us love it; we learn about a particular time, a little slice of history; and they introduce us to men and women who become our friends through the printed page.

But the truly great writers, those with lasting significance whose books transcend the periods in which they wrote and reach across the years to readers decades and even centuries later, add still another dimension to their books. They add meaning. We do not just meet people; we meet people growing and laboring, seeking to understand the attitudes and emotions that have true significance. As we walk beside them, we feel their struggle to come to terms with the meaning of life.

It is this fourth dimension that truly separates writers of distinction from the crowd. When fictional characters touch a responsive emotional chord in the heart of a reader, there is impact. As readers, you and I may not always be able to isolate this or that and say, It was that particular point I liked best about the book. But when it is over and we have finished the last page, something down inside says, That touched me.

When that happens, a writer has achieved his or her goal. He has reached out and communicated with his reader at the heart level.

Such a writer was Harold Bell Wright (1872–1944)—an American novelist whose books reach out and touch their readers on all four levels—time, place, people, and meaning.

In the late 1800s as a young man from upstate New York, young Wright cherished an ambition, not to be a writer but to help his fellowmen and women discover the truths of life. Born of an early American farm family in 1872 in the very house in Rome, New York, built by his grandfather, Harold learned to work hard at an early age. His mother died when he was ten and he was put out to work on a farm before he was a teenager.

Throughout the next twenty years, as his Christian faith deepened, he learned to love truth and hate sham and hypocrisy while his desire to spread his faith broadened. Attending Hiram College in Ohio for two years, Wright gradually moved into the ministry with no formal seminary training. He worked his way through school with odd jobs about town and grew very active in the work of the Christian Church. However, from the intensity of his school schedule, work, and church involvement he contracted a severe case of pneumonia and was forced to withdraw from the college.

Advised against further schooling until his health improved, Wright embarked on a long recuperative canoe trip down the Mahoning River with his sketch pad and notebook. Thus for the first time he came to the Ozark mountains in Missouri and Arkansas. Here for some months, while regaining his strength, he secured farm work, while sketching and painting from his surroundings.

It was while in the Ozarks that young Harold Bell Wright preached his first sermon, filling in for the regular preacher one Sunday in the little mountain log schoolhouse church. From this, and other fill-in opportunities that followed, he was not long thereafter offered a regular pastorate in Pierce City, Missouri, at a yearly salary of $400. His resolve had long been to involve himself in whatever work that would allow him to help the most people. Convinced that he could show people the truth through the pulpit, he accepted the position.

Before long he had left his charge at Pierce City for the larger work at Pittsburg, Kansas, where he was married the following year, in 1899. The response of his congregation to the young pastor was very enthusiastic. The church grew, attendance and finances mounted, but still Wright remained unsatisfied. Pittsburg was a rough mining town, with saloons and brothels doing a rampant business in what had been only a few years earlier the wild west of the American prairie. Men still wore guns, the saloon was the center of the town's nightlife, and arguments were settled with fists and bullets. In this environment Wright's heart burned to make a lasting impact on the morality of the place. With the hope of arousing the people of his congregation to action, he wrote his first book, entitled The Printer of Udell's, which he intended to read by installments in the weekly evening services. It was the story of a church and its people, the sort of place Wright envisioned his church at Pittsburg should and could be.

As Wright's popularity and impact grew, so did the demands on his time and energy. Besides his church responsibilities, he was sought after for a wide variety of speaking engagements. His courage in combating the evils of the little mining town brought him great admiration from friends and enemies alike and earned him an expanding reputation in the Midwest as a noted preacher. He was offered a larger pastorate in Kansas City, which he accepted, to the great disappointment of his friends in Pittsburg.

Moving to Kansas City, Wright was enthusiastic about the service he could perform and the impact he could have for the cause of Christ. But his health was still not the best, and after only one year he found he was physically unable to carry out the work in the great city he had dreamed of. At this point he first began to ponder whether there might not be some other way to spread his message of God's principles of love and upright living that would not so tax his physical system.

As he had ten years earlier, prior to entering the ministry, Wright again left for the Ozarks for a period of rest and meditation. The thought had been growing within him of the possibility of devoting more of his time to writing. Quite by accident while on a trip to Chicago some years earlier, Wright made contact with a publisher who later offered him a contract on the book he had read to his congregation in Pittsburg. He had written nothing since. But now, as he went again to the Ozarks to reflect on his life and ministry, his vision for reaching people, and his lack of physical stamina, he decided to try his hand at writing again. While there he began a new novel, as a test. Whatever message he was able to put onto the printed page through his story and characters, and the response it should find in the hearts of the men and women who might read it, would decide for him what his ministry in the future would be—whether he would teach the precepts of Jesus by voice or pen, from the pulpit or through the printed page. As he wrote, much of his personal soul-searching came through, and a reader, knowing of the background that prompted the book, does not have to look hard to see the autobiographical nature of many of the thoughts of the lead character. Therefore, this book begun in the serene surroundings of the Ozark mountians always had a special significance for its author because of the fleece-like nature of its beginnings.

The book was completed in late 1906 and published in 1907. Its title was The Shepherd of the Hills and it immediately became a phenomenal bestseller. The fleece had been put out and God's answer was resoundingly clear—it was by the printed page that Harold Bell Wright would have the greatest impact on his time. By the time of the book's release, he had already accepted the pastorate of the Christian Church in Redlands, California, hoping that the land of sunshine would strengthen his health. But within a year he resigned in order to give himself to writing full time.

He continued to write bestsellers. Many of his books sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. Out of a total of seventeen books, it is estimated that his sales were in excess of six million copies. His two bestsellers were The Winning of Barbara Worth (a million and a half in sales) and The Shepherd of the Hills (over a million copies). Harold Bell Wright became one of America's best-loved fiction writers in the early 20th century. His clean, simple, forceful style conveyed spiritual truths without sentimentality. He did not write gospel tracts, but moving stories about real men and women facing real life problems and issues, expounding the basic truths of right and wrong and one's response to God through romance, adventure, mystery, and drama. So popular were his books that several were dramatized for the stage and one became a feature motion picture.

Why were the novels of Harold Bell Wright so widely received? It is because he captured the essence of the fourfold ingredients to significant fiction. As we read he takes us to a place, provides us a little slice of history to remember, introduces us to characters we cannot forget, and through it all weaves meaning and spiritual significance. He brings regional Americans to life, whether writing about life in the Ozarks or in the new cities springing up in southern California. His books are part of our country's heritage and growth. Such factors caused the public to respond so greatly to his books three generations ago, and make them timeless for our own enjoyment as well.

However, times and tastes change. Today's world is far different in outlook from the world for which Harold Bell Wright wrote seventy years ago. Neither the general public nor the publishing world today is interested in spiritual themes and books that convey God's principles. Therefore, out of Harold Bell Wright's seventeen published works, all but one have long since gone out of print and are currently unavailable. Bestsellers in his own day, they have nearly been forgotten in our own.

There are those, however, who are out of touch with the so-called modern trends of today's world. I am one of them. I cannot help enjoying the masters of past generations often more than today's top bestsellers. I often find that the qualities in a particular book that coincide with my own tastes are to be found in long-forgotten volumes discovered quite by accident in the most unusual places. I made my first acquaintance with a hundred-year-old George MacDonald novel on the dusty bottom row of a used bookstore. Similarly, my wife and I bought our first Harold Bell Wright book at a garage sale. We were introduced to Ralph Connor by two friends who insisted we read some of his books for their old-fashioned virtues. Here, we thought in each case, were kindred spirits.

But as was the case with Connor and MacDonald, adapting a writer like Harold Bell Wright to today's market required some modification. In the pre-television era, when life was not so fast-paced and entertainment not so widespread, reading was more leisurely. Therefore, books had a different tone and feel that often make them difficult for today's reader to adjust to.

Therefore, in this new edition of what is perhaps Harold Bell Wright's best-loved novel, I have—while maintaining the flavor that makes the book unique and timeless—edited the original to make it easier for you to enjoy. The entire story is present and the length has not been significantly cut. But the lengthy sentences of the original have been tightened, awkward punctuation changed, out-of-date words and phrases modified to reflect current usage, and some of the country dialect modified slightly to make the dialogue easier to understand.

As is always my desire with the books I present, I hope you can here meet a new friend. The Shepherd of the Hills Farm still stands near Branson in southern Missouri south of Springfield, a monument to the characters of Wright's creation. Matt's cabin and the Old Trail have been preserved as a testimony to the young preacher who wandered into those very hills in 1906 to reflect on his ministry, and in remembrance of the fictional shepherd who followed in the author's own footsteps.

I want nothing more than for you to enjoy Harold Bell Wright at his best. And now it is time for you to meet the shepherd of the hills for yourself!

Michael Phillips, 1990

BACKGROUND

THE TWO TRAILS

This, my story, is a very old one.

In the hills of life there are two trails. One lies along the higher sunlit fields where those who journey see afar, and the light lingers even when the sun is down. The other leads to the lower ground, where those who travel always look over their shoulders with eyes of dread, and gloomy shadows gather long before the day is done.

This, my story, is the story of a man who took the trail that leads to the lower ground, and of a woman, and how she found her way to the higher sunlit fields.

It all happened in the Ozark mountains, many miles from what we would call civilization. In life it has all happened many, many times before, in many, many places. The two trails lead afar. The story, so very old, is still in the telling.

Preachin' Bill, who runs the ferry, says, When God looked upon the work of His hands an' called it good, He was sure lookin' at this here Ozark country. Rough country? Law, yes! It were made that-a-way on purpose. Ain't nothin' to a flat country nohow. Jist look how much more country there is this-a-way! Take forty acres o' flat, an' it's just a forty; but you take forty acres o' this here Ozark country an' God almighty only knows how much 'twould be if it were rolled out flat. 'Tain't no wonder God rested when He made these here hills; He jist naturally had to quit, fer He done His best an' were plumb wore out.

Of all the country Bill had seen, he figured the Mutton Hollow neighborhood was the prettiest. From the Matthews place on the ridge that shuts in the valley on the north and east, there is an Old Trail leading down the mountain. Two hundred yards below the log barn, the narrow path finds a bench on the steep slope of the hillside, and, at that level, follows around the rim of the Hollow. Dipping a little at the head of the ravine east of the spring, then lifting itself over a low, heavily timbered point of one of the higher hills, it comes out again into the open. Following a rocky ledge, farther on the way leads through a clump of sumac bushes, past the deer lick in the big low gaps, then around the base of Boulder Bald, along another ledge, and out on the bare shoulder of Dewey Bald, which partly shuts in the little valley on the south.

From the rock that Sammy Lane calls her Lookout, the Old Trail leaves the rim of Mutton Hollow and slips easily down into the lower valleys; down past the little cabin on the southern slope of the mountain where Sammy lived with her father; down to the banks of Fall Creek and to the distant river bottom. Here the thread-like path finds a wider way, leading somehow out of the wilderness to the great world that lies miles and miles beyond the farthest blue line of hills.

No one seems to know how long that narrow path has lain along the mountain. But it must be very long, for it is deeply worn in places.

Often swift leaping deer would cross the ridge at the low gap and follow along the benches to the spring. And sometimes a lithe panther, in the belt of timber, or a huge-pawed cougar on some overhanging rock would lie in wait for a fawn or doe. Or perhaps a gaunt timber wolf would sniff the trail, and with wild echoing howls call his comrades to the chase.

When he was young, Jim Lane followed that winding way from the distant river, and from nobody knows where beyond, when he came to build his lonely hunter's shack by the spring on the southern slope of Dewey. And later, when the shack in the timber was replaced by a more substantial settler's cabin, Jim led Sammy's mother along the same way to her new home. Then came the giant Grant Matthews with Aunt Mollie and their little family. They followed the path and went three miles farther past Jim Lane's cabin, and built their home where the trail climbs over the ridge.

When Grant Matthews, Jr. was eighteen, his father mortgaged the hard-won homestead on the ridge to purchase the sheep ranch in Mutton Hollow. Then it was that another path was made, branching off in the belt of timber from the Old Trail and following the spur down into the little valley where the sheep corral was snugly