Ill 



THE HOME RANCH 



'Y home ranch lies on both sides of the Little Missouri, 

 the nearest ranchman above me being about twelve, 

 and the nearest below me about ten, miles distant. 

 The general course of the stream here is northerly, 

 but, while flowing through my ranch, it takes a great westerly reach of 

 some three miles, walled in, as always, between chains of steep, high bluffs 

 half a mile or more apart. The stream twists down through the valley 

 in long sweeps, leaving oval wooded bottoms, first on one side and then 

 on the other ; and in an open glade among the thick-growing timber 

 stands- the long, low house of hewn logs. 



Just in front of the ranch veranda is a line of old cottonwoods that 

 shade it during the fierce heats of summer, rendering it always cool and 

 pleasant. But a few feet beyond these trees comes the cut-off bank of 

 the river, through whose broad, sandy bed the shallow stream winds as if 

 lost, except when a freshet fills it from brim to brim with foaming yellow 

 water. The bluffs that wall in the river- valley curve back in semicircles, 

 rising from its alluvial bottom generally as abrupt cliffs, but often as steep, 

 grassy slopes that lead up to great level plateaus ; and the line is broken 

 every mile or two by the entrance of a coulee, or dry creek, whose head 

 branches may be twenty miles back. Above us, where the river comes 

 round the bend, the valley is very narrow, and the high buttes bounding it 

 rise, sheer and barren, into scalped hill-peaks and naked knife-blade ridges. 

 The other buildings stand in the same open glade with the ranch 

 house, the dense growth of cottonwoods and matted, thorny underbrush 

 making a wall all about, through which we have chopped our wagon roads 

 and trodden out our own bridle-paths. The cattle have now trampled 

 down this brush a little, but deer still lie in it, only a couple of hundred 

 yards from the house ; and from the door sometimes in the evening one 



