A RANCHMAN'S RECOLLECTIONS 



ing on a great irrigation scheme at Prosser, Wash., 

 now a town of several thousand, but then just a 

 wide place in the road. He was fifteen or twenty 

 years before his time. The whole Yakima district 

 is now a great wheatfield or fruit orchard. Reed 

 was in every way an unusual man ; a brilliant writer, 

 a forceful speaker, a ready wit, and a charming com- 

 panion. He had worked as commissariat in the 

 railroad camps of the Northern Pacific during the 

 building of the line. Later, when the Prosser bub- 

 ble burst, he took to the mountains, and two stories 

 that he told me when we last met some years ago are 

 so typical of the west that I wish to make them a 

 part of my sketch. 



In all former frontier types I have touched upon 

 men widely known. This chapter deals only with 

 those known but little, and it is to the thought of 

 what the frontier does in moulding types that I want 

 to lead my readers. Zane Grey in a vivid story of 

 the U. P. Trail has made a composite picture of 

 early-day railroad camps, which in these days it is 

 diificult to believe possible, and yet in all its lurid 

 detail it was probably toned down to be printable. 

 Fred iReed saw the drama during the building of 

 the Northern Pacific, and I have seen it in the new 

 mining camps, just as Bret Harte, saw it in the gold 

 rushes of his day, and Jack London saw it in the 

 Yukon. Fred called his story, "Our Funeral," and 

 told It as follows, in his graphic way: 



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