with a big fire-place.  I got out a rocking-chair—­I am very fond of rocking-chairs—­and enough books to fill two or three shelves, and a rubber bathtub so that I could get a bath.  And then I do not see how any one could have lived more comfortably.  We had buffalo robes and bearskins of our own killing.  We always kept the house clean—­using the word in a rather large sense.  There were at least two rooms that were always warm, even in the bitterest weather; and we had plenty to eat.  Commonly the mainstay of every meal was game of our own killing, usually antelope or deer, sometimes grouse or ducks, and occasionally, in the earlier days, buffalo or elk.  We also had flour and bacon, sugar, salt, and canned tomatoes.  And later, when some of the men married and brought out their wives, we had all kinds of good things, such as jams and jellies made from the wild plums and the buffalo berries, and potatoes from the forlorn little garden patch.  Moreover, we had milk.  Most ranchmen at that time never had milk.  I knew more than one ranch with ten thousand head of cattle where there was not a cow that could be milked.  We made up our minds that we would be more enterprising.  Accordingly, we started to domesticate some of the cows.  Our first effort was not successful, chiefly because we did not devote the needed time and patience to the matter.  And we found that to race a cow two miles at full speed on horseback, then rope her, throw her, and turn her upside down to milk her, while exhilarating as a pastime, was not productive of results.  Gradually we accumulated tame cows, and, after we had thinned out the bobcats and coyotes, more chickens.

The ranch house stood on the brink of a low bluff overlooking the broad, shallow bed of the Little Missouri, through which at most seasons there ran only a trickle of water, while in times of freshet it was filled brimful with the boiling, foaming, muddy torrent.  There was no neighbor for ten or fifteen miles on either side of me.  The river twisted down in long curves between narrow bottoms bordered by sheer cliff walls, for the Bad Lands, a chaos of peaks, plateaus, and ridges, rose abruptly from the edges of the level, tree-clad, or grassy, alluvial meadows.  In front of the ranch-house veranda was a row of cottonwood trees with gray-green leaves which quivered all day long if there was a breath of air.  From these trees came the far-away, melancholy cooing of mourning doves, and little owls perched in them and called tremulously at night.  In the long summer afternoons we would sometimes sit on the piazza, when there was no work to be done, for an hour or two at a time, watching the cattle on the sand-bars, and the sharply channeled and strangely carved amphitheater of cliffs across the bottom opposite; while the vultures wheeled overhead, their black shadows gliding across the glaring white of the dry river-bed.  Sometimes from the ranch we saw deer, and once when we needed meat I shot one