t yet for many years. A cattle king of Queensland held
at one time sixty thousand square miles of land. It is said that the
average size of pastoral holdings in the northern territory of Australia
is two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres. Does this not recall the
old times of free range in the American West?

This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor
of Elizabethan ideas. It does not plan for inordinate fortunes, the
continual amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan for the use
by the individual of his individual life. Australian business hours are
shorter than American. Routine is less general. The individual takes
upon himself a smaller load of effort. He is restive under monotony. He
sets aside a great part of his life for sport. He lives in a large and
young day of the world. Here we may see a remote picture of our own
American West--better, as it seems to me, than that reflected in the
rapid and wholly commercialized development of Western Canada, which is
not flavored by any age but this.

But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means who
had behind them government aid and a semi-paternal encouragement in
their adventures. The same is true in part of the government-fostered
settlement of Western Canada. It was not so with the American West. Here
was not the place of the rich man but of the poor man, and he had no one
to aid him or encourage him. Perhaps no man ever understood the American
West who did not himself go there and make his living in that country,
as did the men who found it and held it first. Each life on our old
frontier was a personal adventure. The individual had no government
behind him and he lacked even the protection of any law.

Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements, afoot, on
horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains. It crawled across the
Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and up them yet again; and at
last, in days of new transportation, it leaped across divides, from one
river valley to another. Its history, at first so halting, came to be
very swift--so swift that it worked great elisions in its own story.

In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow
country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills running
from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still more ancient
cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance
as the Old West