is lived. The fireplace and the great mud chimney are still
there, and the smut of the old log fires still clings inside. The man
who sat before that hearth was an American king. A simple word of
command spoken in that room was the thunder of the law in the wilderness
about, and men obeyed. There's a bat living there now. He tumbled about
me in the dull light, filling the silence with the harsh whir of
pinions.

I thought about that night a long, long time ago when all the people
under the protection of the newly erected fort, gathered here for a
house-warming. How clearly I could hear that squawking, squeaking,
good-natured fiddle and the din of dancing feet! Only the sound got
mixed up with the dim, weird moonlight, until you didn't know whether
you were hearing or seeing or feeling it--the music of the fiddles and
the feet. Oh, the dim far music!

I thought about the other ruins of the world, the exploited,
tourist-haunted ruins; and I wondered why the others attract so much
attention while this one attracts practically none at all. How they do
dig after old Troy--poor old long-buried, much-abused Troy! And nobody
even cares to steal a brick from this ruined citadel that took so great
a part in the American epic. Indeed, you would not be obliged to steal a
brick; there are no guards.

Some one has said that the history of our country as taught in the
common schools is the history of a narrow strip of land along the
Atlantic coast. The statement is significant. The average school-teacher
knows very little about Fort Benton, I suspect.

And yet, one of the most tremendous of all human movements centered
about it--the movement that brought about the settlement of the
Northwest. One of these days they will plant a potato patch there!

But modern Benton?

Get on a train in the East, snuggle up in your berth, plunge on to the
Western coast, and you run through the real West in the night. They are
getting Eastern out there at the rim of the big sea. Benton is in the
West--the big, free, heart-winning West; and it gives promise of staying
there for a while yet.

Charter a bronco and canter out across the river for an hour, and it
will be very plain to you that the romantic West still lives--the West
of the cowboy and the bronco and the steer. Not the average story-book
West, to be sure. Perhaps that West never existed. But it is the West
that has bred and is still breeding a race of men as beautiful in a
virile way