THIS HAS BEEN GREAT Indian country. Just northwest is the Custer battlefield; and southeast, so that now and then we ride past it, is the scene of the Wagon Box disaster. It is not so long since the Crows, the Sioux and the Blackfeet finally decided to be good Indians, and they have been so, more or less, since.
But like all nomads, they have left few traces behind them. Now and then one can pick up arrowheads of course, and on top of more than one high and windy hill on the ranch we still find the circle of stones which held down the skins of their winter lodges.
They chose no sheltered valleys for these winter camps, but always the top of a cold and windswept hill, the purpose being to keep watch there for their enemies, I dare say.
Strange to stand there as we did today and look out over the great plains, now dotted with plowed fields where soon the wheat will grow. Strange to think back over only fifty years, hardly a day in the history of nations, and see the strange and moving panorama which has passed over these very acres.
First the buffalo and the Indians; tall majestic Blackfeet, crafty hard-riding Cheyennes, and the patient, cruel Sioux. Then the first pioneers, and with them the soldiers to protect them; log forts and mud forts and long forgotten graves. Later on, moving up from the South in the eternal search for grass and water, long-horned Mexican and Texas cattle, driven by men in tall, broad-brimmed Mexican hats, with heavy silver-mounted saddles and a new terminology borrowed from the Spanish and still enriching our language. Cattle wars, water wars, wars against the sheep. Even the Boer War and great corrals built here to round up horses for the British cavalry in far-off South Africa. They are still standing, those corrals, and some of the English who came over at that time are still here.
But now——
A railroad runs through the valley, and tourists ride through and gaze patronizingly from the windows of their Pullman cars.
It looks monotonous to them, perhaps; monotonous and a trifle dreary. Because they do not see in each homestead a conquest, in each little weather-boarded town a miracle.
Nor do they know that just beyond this cultivated strip which follows the railroad still lies that portion of the old West which can never be conquered. The mountains.
Man cannot civilize a mountain.
It is growing warm. The local paper said this morning that now a man can use his vest to patch the seat of his trousers, which means that summer will soon be here.
And with summer the fourth great movement will be under way. Indians and buffaloes, pioneers and soldiers, cattle and punchers, and now—dudes. They will come in their hundreds and their thousands, bringing good Eastern money in exchange for good active Western life.
And soon the cottages around me will open like buds, and from them will emerge girls in riding clothes and men in shiny new Eastern riding apparel, which they will shamefacedly exchange very shortly for overalls from the store, tucked into high-heeled Western boots.
Riding parties will be taken out, and Joe De-Yong has made this little drawing out of the depths of his experience.
And the bad string will be brought in, and in a week or so Bill and George and Bruce and Curley—did I say Curley is coming back? We have just had a letter—will lead some bucking, fighting devils out to the chute and risk life and limb. So that next winter a number of people can be showing rather blurred-looking snapshots and saying:
“It isn’t very clear. The great brute was coming right at me. But you can make out what it is.”
The old ones are coming back too. They always do.
They leave their worn but beloved old garments here, and in half an hour they are in them again and looking about for changes. Half fearful too. They don’t like changes.
But we have one for them this year. They have harnessed Wolf Creek! “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.” From up toward the canon a great conduit leads down water from the creek, and by a system too intricate for my intellect produces enough electric current for a small city.
Proudly did they lead me to my cottage and proudly did they show me my illumination.
“It is wonderful,” I said.
But I am not so sure. Just a little do I miss my feeble oil lamp, set in the washbasin beside the head of my bed. There was something somnolent about it; to rise up, half asleep, and blow it out had been my last conscious thought for so many summers. Now I reach up and turn a switch.
I have a terrible feeling that the hand of civilization has reached out, even here, and caught me; that some day I shall return and find the horseshoe knocker replaced by an electric bell; and that they may even board in the shower bath on the side porch, and that never again will I hear wild shrieks from it as the water is turned on, and a voice calling:
“For heaven’s sake, somebody, come out and fasten this sail cloth! It’s blowing straight out!”