Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/377

 ROBERT E. PEART By Minnie Pbey EInotts FROM the frozen north, on a September day in 1909, came tidings which brought joy and satisfaction to the hearts of the American people. The wireless station at Indian Harbor flashed through the crisp Labrador air this message, Myths both curious and absurd, speculations sayoring of the truth, and hopes held for centuries by nearly all civilized nations had given place to realization. The American flag floated over the coveted goal. An American had placed it there. Robert E. Peary says : * * I have always^ been proud that I was bom an American, but never so proud as when on that biting, sunlit Arctic day I saw the Stars and Stripes wav- ing at the apex of the earth, and told myself that an American had set 'Old Glory' there. As I watched it fluttering in the crisp air of the Pole, I thought of the twenty-three years of my own life which had been spent in laboring toward that goal, and realized that at last I had made good ; that I could now lay at the feet of my country a trophy which the greatest nations of the world had been struggling to attain for nearly four hundred years.*' The price of victory is hardship and pain. This American had paid it in twenty-three years of struggle with cold and hunger, the blinding snow and light of the Arctic region, brute hard labor, and the awful uncertainty of the great, white, treacherous ice. On the sixth of May, 1856, a son, Robert Edwin, was bom to Charles N. and Mary (Wiley) Peary at Cresson, Pennsyl- vania. His ancestors were an old family of Maine lumbermen of French and Anglo-Saxon blood. One writer has said of him : * * This ancestry explains the man, for he is a compound of fiery French imagination and icy Anglo-Saxon firmness. The former quality enabled him to see the vision of the unknown
 * Stars and Stripes nailed to the North Pole."