my youth, should be awakened, I should
feel richly repaid.

The Indian, tamed, educated and inspired with a taste for white collars
and moving-pictures, is as numerous as ever, but not so picturesque. On
the little tracts of his great inheritance allotted him by civilization
he is working out his own manifest destiny.

The buffalo has gone. Gone also is the stagecoach whose progress his
pilgrimages often used to interrupt. Gone is the pony express, whose
marvelous efficiency could compete with the wind, but not with the
harnessed lightning flashed over the telegraph wires. Gone are the very
bone-gatherers who laboriously collected the bleaching relics of the
great herds that once dotted the prairies.

But the West of the old times, with its strong characters, its stern
battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, can never be
blotted from my mind. Nor can it, I hope, be blotted from the memory of
the American people, to whom it has now become a priceless possession.

It has been my privilege to spend my working years on the frontier. I
have known and served with commanders like Sherman, Sheridan, Miles,
Custer and A.A. Carr--men who would be leaders in any army in any age.
I have known and helped to fight with many of the most notable of the
Indian warriors.

Frontiersmen good and bad, gunmen as well as inspired prophets of the
future, have been my camp companions. Thus, I know the country of which
I am about to write as few men now living have known it.

Recently, in the hope of giving permanent form to the history of the
Plains, I staged many of the Indian battles for the films. Through the
courtesy of the War and Interior Departments I had the help of the
soldiers and the Indians.

Now that this work has been done I am again in the saddle and at your
service for what I trust will be a pleasant and perhaps instructive
journey over the old trails. We shall omit the hazards and the
hardships, but often we shall leave the iron roads over which the
Pullman rolls and, back in the hills, see the painted Indians winding
up the draws, or watch the more savage Mormon Danites swoop down on the
wagon-train. In my later years I have brought the West to the
East--under a tent. Now I hope to bring the people of the East and of
the New West to the Old West, and possibly here and there to supply new
material for history.

I shall try to vary the journey, for frequent changes of scenes are
grateful to travelers. I sha