history of Grant and I'll go in with you."

With this arrangement (which on my part was more than half a jest) I
left him and started homeward by way of Lake MacDonald, the Blackfoot
Reservation and Fort Benton, my mind teeming with subjects for poems,
short stories and novels. My vacation was over. Aspiring vaguely to
qualify as the fictionist of this region, I was eager to be at work.
Here was my next and larger field. As my neighbors in Iowa and Dakota
were moving on into these more splendid spaces, so now I resolved to
follow them and be their chronicler.

This trip completed my conversion. I resolved to preempt a place in the
history of the great Northwest which was at once a wilderness and a
cosmopolis, for in it I found men and women from many lands, drawn to
the mountains in search of health, or recreation, or gold. I perceived
that almost any character I could imagine could be verified in this
amazing mixture. I began to sketch novels which would have been false in
Wisconsin or Iowa. With a sense of elation, of freedom, I decided to
swing out into the wider air of Colorado and Montana.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Telegraph Trail

The writing of the last half of my Grant biography demanded a careful
study of war records, therefore in the autumn of '97 I took lodgings in
Washington, and settled to the task of reading my way through the
intricacies of the Grant Administrations. Until this work was completed
I could not make another trip to the Northwest.

The new Congressional Library now became my grandiose work-shop. All
through the winter from nine till twelve in the morning and from two
till six in the afternoon, I sat at a big table in a special room,
turning the pages of musty books and yellowed newspapers, or dictating
to a stenographer the story of the Reconstruction Period as it unfolded
under my eyes. I was for the time entirely the historian, with little
time to dream of the fictive material with which my memory was filled.

I find this significant note in my diary. "My Grant life is now so
nearly complete that I feel free to begin a work which I have long
meditated. I began to dictate, to-day, the story of my life as boy and
man in the West. In view of my approaching perilous trip into the North
I want to leave a fairly accurate chronicle of what I saw and what I did
on the Middle Border. The truth is, with all my trailing about in the
Rocky Mountains I have never been in a satisfying wilderness.