CHAPTER I

I am about to take the back-trail through the Old West--the West that I

knew and loved. All my life it has been a pleasure to show its

beauties, its marvels and its possibilities to those who, under my

guidance, saw it for the first time.

Now, going back over the ground, looking at it through the eyes of

memory, it will be a still greater pleasure to take with me the many

readers of this book. And if, in following me through some of the

exciting scenes of the old days, meeting some of the brave men who made

its stirring history, and listening to my camp-fire tales of the

buffalo, the Indian, the stage-coach and the pony-express, their

interest in this vast land of my youth, should be awakened, I should

feel richly repaid.

The Indian, tamed, educated and inspired with a taste for white collars

and moving-pictures, is as numerous as ever, but not so picturesque. On

the little tracts of his great inheritance allotted him by civilization

he is working out his own manifest destiny.