falo-hunter, the soldier and the cowpuncher.
That land of the West has gone now, "gone, gone with lost Atlantis,"
gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories. It was a land
of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild
game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered
ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who
unmoved looked in the eyes of life or death. In that land we led a
free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the
scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in
the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round
the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars
were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the
winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust
burnt our faces. There were monotonous days, as we guided the trail
cattle or the beef herds, hour after hour, at the slowest of walks;
and minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped stampedes
or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or brimmed
with running ice. We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and
we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and
cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat
of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy
of living.

Theodore ROOSEVELT
(_Autobiography_)

PREFACE

To write any book is an adventure, but to write this book has been the
kind of gay and romantic experience that makes any man who has
partaken of it a debtor forever to the Giver of Delights. Historical
research, contrary to popular opinion, is one of the most thrilling of
occupations, but I question whether any biographer has ever had a
better time gathering his material than I have had. Amid the old
scenes, the old epic life of the frontier has been re-created for me
by the men who were the leading actors in it. But my contact with it
has not been only vicarious. In the course of this most grateful of
labors I have myself come to know something of the life that Roosevelt
knew thirty-five years ago--the hot desolation of noon in the
scarred butte country; the magic of dawn and dusk when the long
shadows crept across the coulees and woke them to unexpected beauty;
t