trail. Prosperous farms came into being in the meadows where the
antelope had pastured. Artesian wells, waterworks, electric lights,
street railways, colleges, all the adjuncts of a higher civilisation,
blossomed forth under the magic wand of Eastern capital. Doomed to
reaction, as an advancing pendulum is doomed to retrace its cycle, was
this premature evolution; but temporarily, as a springtime freshet
bears onward the driftwood in its path, it carried its predecessor, the
unconventional, fighting, wild-loving adventurer, before. On it went, on
and on until at last, fairly blocking its path, was the big, muddy,
dawdling Missouri. Then for the first time it halted; halted in a pause
that was to last for a generation. But it had fulfilled its mission.
High and dry on the western side of the barrier, imbued as when they had
settled to the east, with the restless spirit of the frontier,
unsubdued, unchanged, it cast its burden. There, as they had done
before, the newcomers immediately took root, and, after the passage of a
year, were all but unconscious of the migration. Over their heads was
the same blue prairie sky. Around them, treeless, trackless, was the
same rolling, illimitable prairie land. In but one essential were
conditions changed; yet that one was epoch-making. Heretofore,
surrounded by a common, an alien danger, compelled at a second's warning
to band together for life itself, all men were brothers. Now, with the
passing of the red peril, with eradication of necessity for any manner
of restraint, an abandon of licence, of recklessness, born of the wild
life, of overflowing animal vitality insufficiently employed, swept the
land like a contagion. Unique in the history of man's development was
this the era of the cowboy, as fantastic now as the era of the red
peril, its predecessor; yet vital, bizarre, throbbing, unconsciously
human, as no other period has ever been, as in all probability none
will ever be again. Generous, spendthrift, murderous when crossed,
chivalrous, fearless, profane, yet fundamentally religious, inebriate,