2 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



actual hunger. The terrors of smallpox epidemic were 

 added, for epidemics and famines commonly go together. 



It was partly these difficulties and tragedies and partly 

 the pioneer spirit which leads ever farther and farther 

 afield that took our family from the woods of Manitoba 

 out upon the prairies of Dakota. I had been born in 1879 

 just before the flood and was less than two years old 

 when we crossed the frontier into the United States. 



For some ten years I grew up on a Dakota farm and 

 walked two or three miles in winter to the little country 

 school which in those days was in session only a small 

 part of the year. However, there were several schools 

 in different directions from our farm and it was some- 

 times possible for me, when one school closed, to get in 

 a few extra weeks at a second school when their terms 

 did not happen to coincide. 



After the death of my father we sold the farm and I 

 became for four years a cowboy on the "wild land," as 

 we then called the prairies that had not yet been home- 

 steaded. Our nearest neighbors were ten or fifteen miles 

 away in various directions between northeast and south- 

 east, but to the west I never knew how far our nearest 

 neighbors were. It may have been a hundred or two 

 hundred miles. 



In boyhood I read by the dozen stories of cowboys 

 and frontier life, and the open prairie was to me a land 

 of romance. The buffaloes were just disappearing, but 

 their whitening bones lay everywhere and their deep 

 trails wound like endless serpents over hill and valley. 

 Sitting Bull and his Indians were near enough and power- 

 ful enough so that the more sober of us feared him and 

 the more romantic hoped that his war parties might some 

 day come over the line of the horizon. In my imagina- 



