EARLY DAY STORIES. 25 



scenery can be found among the mountains of Colorado, 

 or Montana, or along the ocean coast of Oregon or Wash- 

 ington, but for exquisite beauty and loveliness, no scenery 

 can excel or equal that of a fertile rolling prairie in spring- 

 time, just as God made it, with its green hills, its sloping 

 valleys, its little meandering timber-bordered streams, and 

 its plats of blue, purple and yellow flowers. And so it was 

 here in Antelope county when I first saw it in 1869. I 

 would like to live in such a place, with such surroundings, 

 forever but the White Man has come with his plow, his 

 railroad, his telephone, his automobile and other discom- 

 forts of civilization and spoiled it. I do not blame the White 

 Man it is his way and I helped to do the spoiling myself. 

 But I look back with a tinge of sorrow and of regret, and 

 of longing to once more see what I never can behold again ; 

 a fertile prairie land in all its pristine loveliness, just as it 

 came from the hand of its Creator. These things are all 

 of the past and can never be again, and like Alexander the 

 Great, I weep that it is so and that there are no more lands 

 to conquer. 



That night we camped on a little branch of the Pa- 

 pillion, where there was a fine grove of elm timber, some 

 of the trees being very large. The grass and water were 

 both abundant and good, and it was an ideal camping 

 ground, excepting that there was no dry wood, the previous 

 campers having used all that was in sight. The next morn- 

 ing it was raining, and it continued to rain all day and grew 

 very cold for the season of the year. It was difficult to 

 keep a fire with the green elm, but by piling on a large 

 quantity of the green fuel, and finding some dry branches 

 by going a long way for them, we finally got and kept up a 

 good fire. Toward evening the rain ceased and Mr. Knapp 

 went out with the rifle and shot the heads off of four or 

 five wild pigeons. These were not the mourning or turtle 

 dove, such as we have here now, but were the genuine pas- 



