limit of the young nation's energies, the earth as man knew it when his eye was focused for far horizons, when his soul did not shrink before vast solitudes.

Against this sweeping background the Indian loomed, ruler of a kingdom whose borders faded into the sky. He stood, a blanketed figure, watching the flight of birds across the blue; he rode, a painted savage, where the cloud shadows blotted the plain, and the smoke of his lodge rose over the curve of the earth. Here tribe had fought with tribe, old scores had been wiped out till the grass was damp with blood, wars of extermination had raged. Here the migrating villages made a moving streak of color like a bright patch on a map where there were no boundaries, no mountains, and but one gleaming thread of water. In the quietness of evening the pointed tops of the tepees showed dark against the sky, the blur of smoke tarnishing the glow in the West. When the darkness came the stars shone on this spot of life in the wilderness, circled with the howling of wolves.

The buffalo, driven from the East by the white man's advance and from the West by the red man's pursuit, had congregated in these pasture lands. The herds numbered thousands upon thousands, diminishing in the distance to black dots on the fawn-colored face of the prairie. Twice a day they went to the river to drink. Solemnly, in Indian file, they passed down the trails among the sand hills, worn into gutters by their continuous hoofs. From the wall of the bluffs they emerged into the bottom, line after line, moving slowly to the water. Then to the river edge the valley was black with them, a mass of huge, primordial forms, from which came bellowings and a faint, sharp smell of musk.

The valley was the highway to the West—the far West, the West of the great fur companies. It led from the Missouri, whose turbid current was the boundary between the frontier and the wild, to the s