PREPARATIONS 3 



tion I could see myself as a brave scout upon whom the 

 lives of the settlement depended, watching from afar the 

 camp fires of the Indians. But one day we heard that 

 Sitting Bull had been shot and that the ghost dances 

 were over. 



Although the buffalo was gone, Buffalo Bill was still 

 with us. I never saw him but my elder brother, Joe, 

 wore a sombrero and long hair down his back in the best 

 frontier style and looked much like him. A number of 

 the cowboys I worked with had known him in the early 

 days before he started out with his Wild West show. 

 Most of them let on they could shoot better and ride 

 better than Buffalo Bill. Modesty is not a special virtue 

 of the frontier nor are jealousies unknown. 



In another corner of our territory was Roosevelt, gath- 

 ering on the open prairie through his contact with pio- 

 neers some of the breadth and freedom and vision that 

 characterized him later. We did not even know he was 

 there, for in our part of the country telegraphs and tele- 

 phones were still in the future and the stray copies of 

 newspapers we saw were frequently six months old. His 

 fame did not spread to our section until it began to spread 

 over the whole world. That was after my cowboy days. 



My first ambition, so far as I remember, was to be 

 Buffalo Bill and to kill Indians. That was while I was 

 still a small boy on the farm. When I became a cowboy 

 and began to dress like Buffalo Bill and to put on my re- 

 volver in the morning as I would an article of clothing, 

 my ambition shifted and my ideal became Robinson Cru- 

 soe. That is an ambition that never left me. Twenty 

 years later when I discovered lands and stepped ashore 

 on islands where human foot had never trod, I had in 

 reality very much the thrills of my boyhood imagi- 



