A RANCHMAN'S RECOLLECTIONS 



and talents Into a fortune, which he did not know 

 how to keep, but in the making of which he has left 

 in the hearts of two continents the romance of the 

 prairies, now rapidly dying under the advance of the 

 hoe. Col. Cody had a heart as big as the story his 

 great wild west told. History will record him as its 

 most picturesque frontier type. Steeped as I am in 

 the love of the frontier, I read The Literary Digest's 

 compilation of American press tributes to Col. Cody 

 after his death with the feeling that they were strew- 

 ing flowers on something of my own — the wonderful 

 west. 



Capt. W. S. Tough was one of the outstanding — 

 I might almost say romantic — characters of those 

 stirring times, since the story of his hfe would make 

 fiction tame. He stood over six feet, built in propor- 

 tion, a born horseman, and a dead shot. He was 

 in the secret service of the Government during the 

 Civil War and a United States Marshal immediately 

 following, when the reaction from war and the great 

 flow westward brought him into action with outlaws 

 and bad men generally. He became one of the fa- 

 mous peace officers of the border through his cool, 

 picturesque courage. I saw much of him as a boy 

 on his breeding farm next to my father's, and later 

 (in 1880) in Denver, where he owned a horse sale 

 barn, making a specialty of single and team road- 

 sters, much in demand at that time. I was lonely, 

 and he Invited me to spend my spare time exercising 



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