was thrown open to settlement, there
was a furious inrush of men on horseback and in wagons, and various
ambitious cities sprang up overnight. The new settlers were all under
the influence of that curious craze which causes every true westerner to
put unlimited faith in the unknown and untried; many had left all they
had in a far better farming country, because they were true to their
immemorial belief that, wherever they were, their luck would be better
if they went somewhere else. They were always on the move, and headed
for the vague beyond. As miners see visions of all the famous mines of
history in each new camp, so these would-be city founders saw future St.
Pauls and Omahas in every forlorn group of tents pitched by some muddy
stream in a desert of gumbo and sage-brush; and they named both the
towns and the canvas buildings in accordance with their bright hopes for
the morrow, rather than with reference to the mean facts of the day. One
of these towns, which when twenty-four hours old boasted of six
saloons, a "court-house," and an "opera house," was overwhelmed by early
disaster. The third day of its life a whirlwind came along and took off
the opera house and half the saloons; and the following evening lawless
men nearly finished the work of the elements. The riders of a huge
trail-outfit from Texas, to their glad surprise discovered the town and
abandoned themselves to a night of roaring and lethal carousal. Next
morning the city authorities were lamenting, with oaths of bitter rage,
that "them hell-and-twenty Flying A cowpunchers had cut the court-house
up into parts." It was true. The cowboys were in need of chaps, and
with an admirable mixture of adventurousness, frugality, and ready
adaptability to circumstances, had made substitutes therefore in the
shape of canvas overalls, cut from the roof and walls of the shaky
temple of justice.

One of my valued friends in the mountains, and one of the best hunters
with whom I ever travelled, was a man who had a peculiarly light-hearted
way of looking at conventional social obligations. Though in some ways
a true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of much shrewdness and of great
courage and resolution. Moreover, he possessed what only a few men do
possess, the capacity to tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, and
could tell them as they were, and he never told an untruth unless for
very weighty reasons. He was pre-eminently a philosopher, of a happy,
sceptical t