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.

The buffalo has gone. Gone also is the stagecoach whose progress his
pilgrimages often used to interrupt. Gone is the pony express, whose
marvelous efficiency could compete with the wind, but not with the
harnessed lightning flashed over the telegraph wires. Gone are the very
bone-gatherers who laboriously collected the bleaching relics of the
great herds that once dotted the prairies.

But the West of the old times, with its strong characters, its stern
battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, can never be
blotted from my mind. Nor can it, I hope, be blotted from the memory of