The Sunday Read: ‘What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero’

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,…