at mine.  Everybody worked, everybody was willing to help everybody else, and yet nobody asked any favors.  The same thing was true of the people whom I got to know fifty miles east and fifty miles west of my own range, and of the men I met on the round-ups.  They soon accepted me as a friend and fellow-worker who stood on an equal footing with them, and I believe the most of them have kept their feeling for me ever since.  No guests were ever more welcome at the White House than these old friends of the cattle ranches and the cow camps—­the men with whom I had ridden the long circle and eaten at the tail-board of a chuck-wagon—­whenever they turned up at Washington during my Presidency.  I remember one of them who appeared at Washington one day just before lunch, a huge, powerful man who, when I knew him, had been distinctly a fighting character.  It happened that on that day another old friend, the British Ambassador, Mr. Bryce, was among those coming to lunch.  Just before we went in I turned to my cow-puncher friend and said to him with great solemnity, “Remember, Jim, that if you shot at the feet of the British Ambassador to make him dance, it would be likely to cause international complications”; to which Jim responded with unaffected horror, “Why, Colonel, I shouldn’t think of it, I shouldn’t think of it!”

Not only did the men and women whom I met in the cow country quite unconsciously help me, by the insight which working and living with them enabled me to get into the mind and soul of the average American of the right type, but they helped me in another way.  I made up my mind that the men were of just the kind whom it would be well to have with me if ever it became necessary to go to war.  When the Spanish War came, I gave this thought practical realization.

Fortunately, Wister and Remington, with pen and pencil, have made these men live as long as our literature lives.  I have sometimes been asked if Wister’s “Virginian” is not overdrawn; why, one of the men I have mentioned in this chapter was in all essentials the Virginian in real life, not only in his force but in his charm.  Half of the men I worked with or played with and half of the men who soldiered with me afterwards in my regiment might have walked out of Wister’s stories or Remington’s pictures.

There were bad characters in the Western country at that time, of course, and under the conditions of life they were probably more dangerous than they would have been elsewhere.  I hardly ever had any difficulty, however.  I never went into a saloon, and in the little hotels I kept out of the bar-room unless, as sometimes happened, the bar-room was the only room on the lower floor except the dining-room.  I always endeavored to keep out of a quarrel until self-respect forbade my making any further effort to avoid it, and I very rarely had even the semblance of trouble.