LET 'ER BUCK 



crowd now with the added color of his best "harness," 

 which he sometimes "slicks up" with for a Saturday 

 night in town, but more particularly as you see him 

 now during the Round-Up. 



Perhaps, too, no phase of calling and type of man so 

 much in the limelight of the world is quite so little 

 really known and appreciated. Its very picturesque- 

 ness has thrown an eclat and a veil over the popular 

 vision and hidden not only many of the cowboy's true, 

 manly, and generous qualities, but has perhaps ob- 

 scured the value of his service to civilization, which 

 by the great majority is scarcely thought of. It was the 

 cowboy who was often the first discoverer of "some- 

 thing lost behind the ranges"; who first "entered on 

 the find" ; whose pony was the first to lead "down the 

 hostile mountains where the hair-poised snow-slide 

 shivered, and through the big fat marshes that the vir- 

 gin ore-bed stains." His ears were often the first to 

 hear the "mile-wide mutterings of unimagined rivers"; 

 his eyes the first to see beyond "nameless timber the 

 illimitable plains." He has often been not only the 

 forerunner, but the pioneer over wide regions now 

 dotted with towns and cities, rivers hemmed with 

 water frontage, throbbing with industries and dammed 

 for "plants to feed a people." He may well say in the 

 words of The Explorer, of the clever chaps that fol- 

 lowed him that they 



"Tracked me by the camps I'd quitted, 

 Used the water holes I'd hollowed. 

 They'll go back and do the talking, 

 They'll be called the pioneers." 



Who is the cowboy and where does he come from? 

 Why, the cowboy fundamentally is the son of the pio- 



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