own town and contesting, as well, the grim advances made by the
relentless Reaper.

In travels that have taken me over a good slice of Mother Earth, and
that have brought me into contact with all sorts and conditions of men,
I have never met one whose friendship I would rather have than that of
John H. Cady. If I were asked to sum him up I would say that he is a
_true_ man--a true father, a true and courageous fighter, and a true
American. He is a man anybody would far sooner have with him than
against him in a controversy. If so far as world-standards go he has not
achieved fame--I had rather call it "notoriety"--it is because of the
fact that the present-day standards do not fit the men whom they ignore.
With those other men who were the wet-nurses of the West in its
infantile civilization, this hardy pioneer should be honored by the
present generation and his name handed down to posterity as that of one
who fought the good fight of progress, and fought well, with weapons
which if perhaps crude and clumsy--as the age was crude and clumsy
judged by Twentieth Century standards--were at least most remarkably
effective.

The subject of this autobiography has traveled to many out of the way
places and accomplished many remarkable things, but the most astonishing
thing about him is the casual and unaffected way in which he, in
retrospect, views his extraordinarily active life. He talks to me as
unconcernedly of tramping hundreds of miles across a barren desert
peopled with hostile Indians as though it were merely a street-car trip
up the thoroughfares of one of Arizona's progressive cities. He talks of
desperate rides through a wild and dangerous country, of little scraps,
as he terms them, with bands of murderous Apaches, of meteoric rises
from hired hand to ranch foreman, of adventurous expeditions into the
realm of trade when everything was a risk in a land of uncertainty, of
journeys through a foreign and wild country "dead broke"--of these and
many similar things, as though they were commonplace incidents scarcely
worthy of mention.

Yet the story of Cady's life is, I venture to state, one of the most
gripping and interesting ever told, both from an historical and from a
human point of view. It illustrates vividly the varied fortunes
encountered by an adventurous pioneer of the old days in Arizona and
contains, besides, historical facts not before recorded that cannot help
making the work of unfailing interest to