Episode
The Sunday Read: ‘What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero’
The Daily · Mar 23, 2025 · 51 min
Sometime in the 1850s or ’60s, at a terrible moment in U.S. history, a strange man seemed to sprout, out of nowhere, into the rocky landscape between New York City and Hartford, Conn. The word “strange” hardly captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy, and he wandered around on back roads, sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. As one newspaper put it: “He is a…
