Mostly Canallers: Collected Stories Book

About three pages into *Mostly Canallers*, I recognized it--not the book itself, but as the kind of book I read over and over as a child. Not surprisingly--the libraries of the '50s would have been full of books from this era.
Anyway, I absolutely loved it. I especially enjoyed the descriptions--I could picture everything. I loved how the stories were always a little understated. Certainly there's a period feel to them, a feeling of the era Edmonds was writing in (not about), like Western movies made in the 1940s. I even liked the way the stories were arranged, from birth to death.
It's pretty obvious I loved the stories, too, given that I went out of my way to visit the Black River Canal Museum in Boonville, NY - and it's a great museum with a model of a canal boat and an interactive display showing the Black River Canal (more than 100 locks in 35 miles!)