services and
reap a greater reward. Let it be enough for him that he too has served,
and that by doing well he has prepared the way for the other man who can
do better.

CHAPTER IV

IN COWBOY LAND

Though I had previously made a trip into the then Territory of Dakota,
beyond the Red River, it was not until 1883 that I went to the Little
Missouri, and there took hold of two cattle ranches, the Chimney Butte
and the Elkhorn.

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of
Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of
the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher. That
land of the West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis," gone to
the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land of vast
silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game
stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of
herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked
in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we led a free and hardy
life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer
sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew
the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late
fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our
eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through
blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burned our faces. There
were monotonous days, as we guided the trail cattle or the beef herds,
hour after hour, at the slowest of walks; and minutes or hours teeming
with excitement as we stopped stampedes or swam the herds across rivers
treacherous with quicksands or brimmed with running ice. We knew toil
and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths
as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with
one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours
was the glory of work and the joy of living.

It was right and necessary that this life should pass, for the safety of
our country lies in its being made the country of the small home-maker.
The great unfenced ranches, in the days of "free grass," necessarily
represented a temporary stage in our history. The large migratory flocks
of sheep, each guarded by the hired shepherds of absentee owners, were
the first enemies of the cattlemen; and owing to the way they