The fierce Maniot people were well described by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his book Mani (1958), but the region has been more recently celebrated in Charles Foster's brilliant The Edges of the World, published in January. In history the Mani was known variously for the relentless and sometimes centuries-long vendettas between its local clans, as a fertile recruiting ground for Mediterranean piracy and as an early outpost for Greek liberation from Ottoman rule.
When legendary mountain men, trappers, and explorers scrambled over Bend's forests, peaks, and rivers in the early 1800s, there were moments, amid the plying of beaver pelts, the mapping, surveying, and general Manifest Destiny-type tromping, when they were simply knocked out by the snow-dusted volcanic peaks, endless stretches of ponderosa pine, and the sagebrush-scented serenity of the high desert. After camping along Tumalo Creek in what is now Bend's beloved Shevlin Park in December 1843, famed US expedition leader John C. Frémont journaled,
