Ranching in the Bad Lands 17 



Hunter," Dodge's "Plains of the Great West," or 

 Caton's "Deer and Antelope of America"; and 

 Coues' "Birds of the Northwest" will be valued if 

 he cares at all for natural history. A Western 

 plainsman is reminded every day, by the names of 

 the prominent landmarks among which he rides, 

 that the country was known to men who spoke 

 French long before any of his own kinsfolk came 

 to it, and hence he reads with a double interest 

 Parkman's histories of the early Canadians. As 

 for Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell, and the 

 other standbys, I suppose no man, East or West, 

 would willingly be long without them; while for 

 lighter reading there are dreamy Ik Marvel, Bur- 

 roughs's breezy pages, and the quaint, pathetic char- 

 acter-sketches of the Southern writers Cable, Crad- 

 dock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet 

 Sherwood Bonner. And when one is in the Bad 

 Lands he feels as if they somehow look just exactly 

 as Poe's tales and poems sound. 



By the way, my books have some rather unex- 

 pected foes, in the shape of the pack rats. These 

 are larger than our house rats, with soft gray fur, 

 big eyes, and bushy tails, like a squirrel's ; they are 

 rather pretty beasts and very tame, often coming 

 into the shacks and log-cabins of the settlers. Wood- 

 men and plainsmen, in their limited vocabulary, 

 make great use of the verb "pack," which means 

 to carry, more properly to carry on one's back; and 

 these rats were christened pack rats, on account of 

 their curious and inveterate habit of dragging off 



