110 THE CONDOR Vol. XX 



gan, at other times relying solely on protective coloration ; and on the face of 

 a cliff between sky and water, as in the Cliff Swallow. 



But the White-throated Swift has outschemed and outfigured them all in 

 the selection of its nest site and construction of a comfortable nest, — out of 

 reach of floods, storms, sliding rocks, reptiles, predatory mammals and birds, 

 and the wisest ones beyond the depredations of the most enthusiastic oological 

 crank unless the life of the latter is insured for twice its value ! This bird has 

 eliminated practically every danger to its home except the vermin, and why it 

 has not figured this out also is difficult for me to understand. 



Denver, Colorado, February 11, 1918. 



A RETURN TO THE DAKOTA LAKE REGION 



By FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY 



{Continued from page 70) 



II. BIRDS OF THE UNBROKEN PRAIRIE 



THE LAND bordering the Sweetwaters was nearly all in grain, but three 

 miles to the northeast, by the section lines, there was still a strip of ori- 

 ginal, unbroken prairie, as I found to my satisfaction when invited to a 

 family dinner by the grandparents of our little school boy. As the farm-house 

 was torn up by repairs at the moment, a "cook car" left in the yard by a 

 threshing outfit, a car twenty feet long by ten wide stilted up on four wheels, 

 was used as an emergency dining-room, greatly to my delectation, as it was my 

 first opportunity to examine one. We climbed up the high front steps — taken 

 in before starting on the road that the four horses might be driven from the 

 front door — and as we sat on benches drawn up to the long table fitted to serve 

 twenty or thirty men and I looked with curiosity at the stove at the end of the 

 car and the protected trays for dishes against the walls, the old settlers told in- 

 teresting tales of the early days on the prairie. 



When they had come as pioneers in 1884, prairie fires were a real danger, 

 it was an easy matter to get lost in the big sloughs with grass standing seven 

 or eight feet high, and buffalo bones strewed the ground. Ox cart trains of 

 Sioux, with squaws and papooses, used to come from Fort Totten to pick up the 

 bones to ship out for fertilizer, and the primitive ungreased wooden carts with 

 wheels five feet high — coming usually in trains of from seven to eleven but 

 once in a train of twenty-eight cars — as the pioneer expressed it, "squawked 

 so " they could be heard crossing the Belgrade Bridge four miles away. For 

 four or five years after the first settlers came, the Indians kept on "picking 

 bones", which gives a slight idea of the hordes of buffalo that once roamed 

 that part of the prairie. 



In the narrow strip of unbroken prairie that is left, a few Prairie Chickens 

 were still to be found. When the hunting season opened, the sound of shots 

 made the Grandfather exclaim regretfully, "He's got them !" But the only ones 

 seen by me in the neighborhood were on the road between the two farmhouses 



