t and cooked our own food--a glorious experience to me, but to
Zulime (as I learned afterward) the trip was not an unmixed delight.

We visited several other Indian reservations on our way home, and all
along the way my mind was busy with the splendid literary problems here
suggested. Deep down in my brain a plan was forming to picture these
conditions. "First I must put together a volume of short stories to be
called _The Red Pioneer_; then I shall complete a prose poem of the
Sitting Bull to be called _The Silent Eaters_, and third, and most
important of all, I must do a novel of reservation life, with an army
officer as the agent."

In these volumes I planned to put the results of all my studies of the
Northwest during my many explorations of the wild. In this way I would
be doing my part in delineating the swiftly changing conditions of the
red man and the mountaineer.

Everywhere I went I studied soldiers, agents, missionaries, traders and
squaw-men with insatiable interest. My mind was like a sponge, absorbing
not facts, but impressions, pictures which were necessary to make my
stories seem like the truth. While in camp and on the train, I took
notes busily and actually formulated several tales while riding my horse
along the trail.

Perfectly happy in this work, I believed my wife to be equally content,
for she bravely declared that to tumble off a pullman in the middle of a
moonless night, and help me set up a tent on the prairie grass was fun.
She pretended to _enjoy_ cooking our food at a smoking camp fire in a
drizzle of rain; but I now know that she was longing for the comforts,
the conveniences, the repose of West Salem.

"Oh, but it is good to be home," she said as we reached the old house,
and I too was ready for its freedom from care and its opportunity for
work, happy in the belief that I had bestowed on my wife some part of
the store of heroic and splendid experiences, which made up so large a
section of my own life, experiences which were to serve as the basis for
all my future work.

The flame of my ambition burned brightly at the close of these weeks of
inspirational exploration. "With nothing to distract or weaken me I
ought now, at least to justify the faith which Howells and other of my
literary friends and advisers had been kind enough to declare." Seizing
my pen with new resolution I bent to the task of putting into fiction
certain phases of the great Northwest which (up to this year) had