108 WANDERINGS AND MEMORIES 



common lot, there was always the irresistible 

 verve about him that carries others on and arrests 

 attention. Even when reading his first writings 

 in the Century Magazine, where he describes 

 how he captured two desperadoes in the heart of 

 the Rockies, and took them unaided in the depth of 

 winter over hundreds of miles of desolate prairies 

 to the nearest settlement, where they could be tried 

 and convicted, he exhibited the fact that he was 

 not only a man of exceptional courage and resource, 

 but also one out to do his duty to his country. His 

 rural life on the Little Missouri taught him many 

 things, and, above all, made him a lover of the great 

 out-of-doors, with its birds, beasts and virile men. 

 Yet in all his life he always placed his sports and 

 private tastes in a category subservient to the one 

 aim and object of his life, which was to lead the 

 people to better and higher things, to form the 

 national policy of his country and to clean Govern- 

 ment and private concerns of those undesirable 

 elements which clog the wheels of all progress. 

 That was why he attacked the meat-packers of 

 Chicago and the rotten police system of New York; 

 and if his detractors accused him of only stirring up 

 the mud without cleansing the stables of Augeus, they 

 forgot the honesty of purpose and the difficulty of 

 achieving successful results in a land, at any rate 

 at that time, seething with dirt and venal corruption. 

 From his childhood he told me he always loved 

 birds and animals. By the time he was sixteen he 

 knew all the birds of his early home, and had studied 

 the principal works of American ornithology. When 

 he was eighteen he went to Egypt and made a 

 small collection of Nile valley birds, which I think 



