s spot of life in the
wilderness, circled with the howling of wolves.

The buffalo, driven from the East by the white man's advance and from
the West by the red man's pursuit, had congregated in these pasture
lands. The herds numbered thousands upon thousands, diminishing in the
distance to black dots on the fawn-colored face of the prairie. Twice
a day they went to the river to drink. Solemnly, in Indian file, they
passed down the trails among the sand hills, worn into gutters by their
continuous hoofs. From the wall of the bluffs they emerged into the
bottom, line after line, moving slowly to the water. Then to the river
edge the valley was black with them, a mass of huge, primordial forms,
from which came bellowings and a faint, sharp smell of musk.

The valley was the highway to the West--the far West, the West of the
great fur companies. It led from the Missouri, whose turbid current
was the boundary between the frontier and the wild, to the second great
barrier, the mountains which blocked the entrance to the unknown
distance, where the lakes were salt and there were deserts rimed with
alkali. It stretched a straight, plain path, from the river behind it
to the peaked white summits in front.

Along it had come a march of men, first a scattered few, then a broken
line, then a phalanx--the winners of the West.

They were bold men, hard men, men who held life lightly and knew no
fear. In the van were the trappers and fur traders with their beaver
traps and their long-barreled rifles. They went far up into the
mountains where the rivers rose snow-chilled and the beavers built
their dams. There were mountain men in fringed and beaded buckskins,
long haired, gaunt and weather scarred; men whose pasts were unknown
and unasked, who trapped and hunted and lived in the lodges with their
squaws. There were black-eyed Canadian voyageurs in otter-skin caps
and coats made of blankets, hardy as Indian ponies, gay and light of
heart, who poled the keel boats up the rivers to the chanting of old
French songs. There were swarthy half-breeds, still of tongue, stolid
and eagle-featured, wearing their blankets as the Indians did,
noiseless in their moccasins as the lynx creeping on its prey.

And then came the emigrants, the first white-covered wagons, the first
white women, looking out from the shade of their sunbonnets. The squaw
wives wondered at their pale faces and bright hair. They came at
intervals, a few wag