ing in their wake the most
phenomenally beautiful rainbows, whose trailing splendours which they
owe to the dry and rare air of the region, and its high refractory
power, are gorgeous in the extreme.

In 1872 the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad entered the valley
of the Upper Arkansas. Twenty-four years ago, on a delicious October
afternoon, I stood on the absolutely level plateau at the mouth of
Pawnee Fork where that historic creek debouches into the great river.
The remembrance of that view will never pass from my memory, for it
showed a curious temporary blending of two distinct civilizations. One,
the new, marking the course of empire in its restless march westward;
the other, that of the aboriginal, which, like a dissolving view, was
soon to fade away and be forgotten.

The box-elders and cottonwoods thinly covering the creek-bottom were
gradually donning their autumn dress of russet, and the mirage had
already commenced its fantastic play with the landscape. On the sides
and crests of the sparsely grassed sand hills south of the Arkansas a
few buffaloes were grazing in company with hundreds of Texas cattle,
while in the broad valley beneath, small flocks of graceful antelope
were lying down, quietly ruminating their midday meal.

In the distance, far eastwardly, a train of cars could be seen
approaching; as far as the eye could reach, on either side of the track,
the virgin sod had been turned to the sun; the "empire of the plough"
was established, and the march of immigration in its hunger for the
horizon had begun.

Half a mile away from the bridge spanning the Fork, under the grateful
shade of the largest trees, about twenty skin lodges were irregularly
grouped; on the brown sod of the sun-cured grass a herd of a hundred
ponies were lazily feeding, while a troop of dusky little children were
chasing the yellow butterflies from the dried and withered sunflower
stalks which once so conspicuously marked the well-worn highway to the
mountains. These Indians, the remnant of a tribe powerful in the years
of savage sovereignty, were on their way, in charge of their agent,
to their new homes, on the reservation just allotted to them by the
government, a hundred miles south of the Arkansas.

Their primitive lodges contrasted strangely with the peaceful little
sod-houses, dugouts, and white cottages of the incoming settlers on the
public lands, with the villages struggling into existence, and above
all wit