428 The Wilderness Hunter. 



was in the saddle it threw itself over sideways with a great 

 bound, and he fell on his head, and never spoke again. 



Such accidents are too common in the wild country to 

 attract very much attention ; the men accept them with 

 grim quiet, as inevitable in such lives as theirs lives that 

 are harsh and narrow in their toil and their pleasure 

 alike, and that are ever-bounded by an iron horizon of 

 hazard and hardship. During the last year and a half 

 three other men from the ranches in my immediate neigh- 

 borhood have met their deaths in the course of their 

 work. One, a trail boss of the O X, was drowned while 

 swimming his herd across a swollen river. Another, one 

 of the fancy ropers of the W Bar, was killed while roping 

 cattle in a corral ; his saddle turned, the rope twisted 

 round him, he was pulled off, and was trampled to death 

 by his own horse. 



The fourth man, a cowpuncher named Hamilton, lost 

 his life during the last week of October, 1891, in the first 

 heavy snowstorm of the season. Yet he was a skilled 

 plainsman, on ground he knew well, and just before stray- 

 ing himself, he successfully instructed two men who did 

 not know the country how to get to camp. They were 

 all three with the round-up, and were making a circle 

 through the Bad Lands ; the wagons had camped on the 

 eastern edge of these Bad Lands, where they merge into 

 the prairie, at the head of an old disused road, which led 

 about due east from the Little Missouri. It was a gray, 

 lowering day, and as darkness came on Hamilton's horse 

 played out, and he told his two companions not to wait, 

 as it had begun to snow, but to keep on towards the 



