FOREWORD

Westward, along the level prairies of a kingdom yet to be, my memory runs, with a clear vision of the days when romance died not and strong hearts never failed.  The glamour of the plains is before my eyes; the tingle of courage, danger-born, is in my pulse-beat; the soft hand of love is touching my hand.  I live again the drama of life wherein there are no idle actors, no stale, unmeaning lines.  And beyond the action, this way up the years, there runs also the forward-gazing vision toward a new Hesperides: 

       Through the veins
  Of whose vast Empire flows, in strength’ning tides,
  Trade, the calm health of nations.

* * * * *

       And sometimes I would doubt
  If statesmen, rocked and dandled into power,
  Could leave such legacies to kings.

I

CLEARING THE TRAIL

VANGUARDS OF THE PLAINS

A ROMANCE OF THE SANTA FE TRAIL

I

THE BEGINNINGS OF A PLAINSMAN

  There came a time in the law of life
    When over the nursing sod
  The shadows broke, and the soul awoke
    In a strange, dim dream of God. 
 —­Langdon Smith.

It might have been but yesterday that I saw it all:  the glinting sunlight on the yellow Missouri boiling endlessly along at the foot of the bluff; the flood-washed sands across the river; the tangle of tall, coarse weeds fringing them, edged by the scrubby underbrush.  And beyond that the big trees of the Missouri woodland, so level against the eastern horizon that I used to wonder if I might not walk upon their solid-looking tops if I could only reach them.  I wondered, too, why the trees on our side of the river should vary so in height when those in the eastern distance were so evenly grown.  One day I had asked Jondo the reason for this, and had learned that it was because of the level ground on the farther side of the valley.  I began then to love the level places of the earth.  I love them still.  And, always excepting that one titanic rift, where the world stands edgewise, with the sublimity of the Almighty shimmering through its far depths, I love them more than any other thing that nature has yet offered to me.

But to come back to that picture of yesterday:  old Fort Leavenworth on the bluff; the little and big ravines that billow the landscape about it; the faint lines of trails winding along the hillsides toward the southwest; the unclouded skies so everlastingly big and intensely blue; and, hanging like a spray of glorious blossoms flung high above me, the swaying folds of the wind-caressed flag, now drooping on its tall staff, now swelling full and free, straight from its gripping halyards.