Arch (Archibald) Bristow was a newspaperman from northwestern Pennsylvania. In later years, known as "The Sage of Garland" in Warren County, Bristow also wrote for the New York Times and the Erie Times.

He began his career in the newspaper business as a cartoonist with the owl character "Zimmie" in the early 1900s. While some accounts link the characters start to 1902 when Bristow was roughly 20 years old, other historical records indicate he began drawing the simple owl for the Johnstown Tribune around 1905.” Zimmie” liked to dispense words of wisdom, and even had a girlfriend Lizzie. The cartoon gained national syndication by 1908. At its height, the Zimmie cartoon appeared in 152 newspapers across the United States and Canada, reaching an estimated 14 million readers. 

In 1932, he published a book entitled “Old Time Tales of Warren County. The county is considered a part of north-central Pennsylvania, although it is not part of the Susquehanna Valley. It is part of the Allegheny National Forest and drained by the Allegheny River.

What attracted me to the book was his foreword, and that is the subject of this story. My Susquehanna Footprints have meandered off its familiar path because I believe any county in the Susquehanna Valley can be substituted in Bristow’s thoughts.

“It has been said that “History is a skeleton which only literature can clothe with life and feeling.’ A mere catalog of happenings is a priceless record, but it paints for us no complete picture of the past. To add some color to things already set down, to rescue from oblivion many true tales never before written, is the avowed object of this volume. Warren County is particularly rich in romance of the past. Since La Salle, supposedly the first white man ever to set eyes on the region of Warren County, came traveling down the Allegheny in his canoe; since his countryman Celeron de Bienville made his famous canoe trip down the Conewango many interesting men and women have lived and died among our favored hills of Warren County.

“Studying the lives of some of these sturdy pioneers who hewed their homes in the wilderness, the men who built the first churches and schoolhouses and rude log bridges which spanned the smaller streams, one wonders at times if such men now exist anywhere.

“How hard they worked, those men and women who struggled to rear their families here in Warren County when great, virgin forests clothed all the hills and valleys and life smelled of woodsmoke, pine chips, the steam of the great iron kettle bubbling in the open fireplace, and, sometimes, gunpowder!

“The business of living was a serious one; the day’s work began with daybreak, or before. Men walked unbelievable distances, carried tremendous loads, and endured hardships as a common part of the day’s work. Yet life must have been full of hope, there was a fine virility among the pioneers that made existence a thing worth fighting hard for. It seems that boredom rarely lives on bare board floors, and ennui is unknown in the home whose center of sustenance is a big iron kettle hung in a stone fireplace.

“Life was raw and hard in many ways in those pioneer times in Warren County when axes were ringing in the forest, the tall pines crashed and the winding waters of the Allegheny were carrying countless rafts of logs and lumber to the expanding markets of the south and west. It was work, work, work for the early settlers, and yet, as we look back into those fast fading days of the great forests through the memories of men and women still living, we catch a glimpse of a vivid freshness that permeated life, a tremendous faith and interest in existence not encountered in these modern times. Men labored through long, solitary days in the forest, felling trees, clearing the land with high hope in their hearts. Women sang at their wool carding and candle making, while they knitted sturdy gray stockings for the children to wear on snow-drifted trudgings to the log schoolhouse, often miles away.

“Hardship there was a-plenty, yet the vision seemed never to perish from the people. Babies were born in woodland cabins without the aid of a doctor. Many women had their dried bundles of herbs and roots hanging near the open fireplace, and in the great iron kettle were boiled and brewed such herbaceous remedies as occasion called for. And somewhere in the neighborhood there was always an old woman who “knew the herbs” and would come for a consideration, or without one, and minister to the sick.

“Rugged honesty existed in a high degree among the early homemakers in Warren County. Extensive pieces of land were often sold without the stroke of a pen. John Brown would say to John Davis, “I would like to buy two hundred acres of that land of yours along the creek. I have no money now, but I can pay you something at the end of a year.” And the land would be surveyed, or perhaps “stepped off”, the deal considered closed and payment never doubted. It was pretty well back when business was done that way in Warren County, yet such deals were made within the memories of men living in this year of 1930. It seems natural to clothe the past in mists of romance that obscure the harshness we know existed. Mankind is inclined to look backward and forward rather than at the present, vesting both past and future with a glamour born, in one case of kindly memory which is prone to forget the unpleasant, in the other of that hope which springs eternal in the human breast. Yet it is undeniable that the blue wood smoke that went curling up from Warren County’s pioneer cabins to go floating off through the endless green forests was full of romance and the picturesque.

“To catch some of that romance, to picture the picturesque, is the aim of this book.”

Bristow also self-published the “Hayrake Magazine” in the 1920s and 30s. It quickly grew to 20,000 subscribers in a few months.

Born in 1882, he died at the age of 82 in 1964 and is buried in the Garland Presbyterian Cemetery in Warren County.