4 PREFACE. 



and loose manuscript, and rewrote, excised and added ; al- 

 though occasionally for want of time I was obliged to let them 

 stand as written. This state of things comes in good play, for 

 whenever the critical reader takes exception to the use of flow- 

 ery language, redundant or rapturous adjectives and prosy 

 description of route or scenery within the volume, I can lay it 

 to the pen of the young ox-driver. 



There was a physiological law contemporaneous with my 

 school days, that the human system was changed once in seven 

 years ; that all that was there on the first year was expelled 

 through natural causes by the seventh and replaced with new 

 material. If this is in being yet and has not been relegated into 

 mythical nothingness by new and iconoclastic school-books, 

 along with the accounts of the "Maelstrom " and Sea Serpent, 

 and the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, which were estab- 

 lished facts as far as descriptive text and wood cuts could make 

 them, I am more than four removes from the young traveler 

 and ranchero of thirty years ago. Therefore should anything 

 be found in the book which makes a favorable impression 

 credit it to his mature successor or evolvent, who is palpable 

 and capable of feeling praise or blame. The other party is 

 away in the shadowy realms of the past, and unsensitive to 

 both. In fact, so disassociated is he from myself, that I can 

 give his portrait, as well as full-length representations of him in 

 connection with other illustrations, with no more feeling of 

 egotism than if I were showing off the features of one of his 

 fellow cowboys of the plains. 



Who reads this volume with the impression that it is full of 

 wild hunting adventures and narrations of murders and rob- 



