246 
NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE 
The prairie 
wildness. 
Nature's 
revenges. 
But the prairies have undergone great change, 
like all things American. The settler and the 
plough have turned under the Indian and the 
buffalo, the divides are now planted with houses 
and wire fences, and the wind is blowing over 
fields of wheat instead of prairie grass. The 
great charm of the land, its wildness, has passed 
away. Time was—and not more than thirty or 
forty years ago at that—when never a trace of 
white man’s activity was seen on the Dakota 
uplands; when not a railroad crossed it, and 
even an Indian trail was almost unknown. The 
horseman found his way by the run of the 
divides or the sun, and every adventuresome 
explorer riding over that tract felt in his heart 
that he was another Balboa discovering the 
Pacific of the plains. 
It is not impossible that that wildness may 
return again, for nature has a way of reassert- 
ing herself after long bending to the will of man. 
‘¢ They say the lion and the lizard keep 
The courts where Jamschyd gloried and drank deep; 
And Bahrim—that great hunter—the wild ass 
Stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.” 
Those who have been plucking the brightest 
skeins from the fabric of the prairies will pass 
