Robert Louis Stevenson so many irons in the fire". He wrote "The Beach of Falesa", "Catriona" (titled "David Balfour" in the US), "The Ebb-Tide", and the "Vailima Letters" during this period. Stevenson grew depressed and wondered if he had exhausted his creative vein, as he had been "overworked bitterly" and that the best he could write was "ditch-water". He even feared that he might again become a helpless invalid. He rebelled against this idea: "I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse — ay, to
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way in the Rocky Mountains" that was part of the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Issue, and reprinted a century later. A Currier and Ives print from 1868 uses the same title and theme for a very different print, showing a railroad crossing a new settlement as the train goes west. A and a stereograph by Alexander Gardner, both of an 1867 end-of-track frontier construction train, were titled "Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way". David Foster Wallace named one of his short stories "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" in his 1989 collection "Girl with Curious Hair". Early revisions of