how--which would depict in different
colors the great occupied areas of the West, with the earliest dates of
their final and permanent occupation. Such a map as this would show us
that the last frontier of America was overleaped and left behind not
once but a score of times.

The land between the Missouri and the Rockies, along the Great Plains
and the high foothills, was crossed over and forgotten by the men who
were forging on into farther countries in search of lands where fortune
was swift and easy. California, Oregon, all the early farming and
timbering lands of the distant Northwest--these lay far beyond the
Plains; and as we have noted, they were sought for, even before gold was
dreamed of upon the Pacific Slope.

So here, somewhere between the Missouri and the Rockies, lay our last
frontier, wavering, receding, advancing, gaining and losing, changing
a little more every decade--and at last so rapidly changed as to be
outworn and abolished in one swift decade all its own.

This unsettled land so long held in small repute by the early Americans,
was, as we have pointed out, the buffalo range and the country of the
Horse Indians--the Plains tribes who lived upon the buffalo. For a long
time it was this Indian population which held back the white settlements
of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado. But as men
began to work farther and farther westward in search of homes in Oregon,
or in quest of gold in California or Idaho or Montana, the Indian
question came to be a serious one.

To the Army, soon after the Civil War, fell the task of exterminating,
or at least evicting, the savage tribes over all this unvalued and
unknown Middle West. This was a process not altogether simple. For
a considerable time the Indians themselves were able to offer very
effective resistance to the enterprise. They were accustomed to living
upon that country, and did not need to bring in their own supplies;
hence the Army fought them at a certain disadvantage. In sooth, the Army
had to learn to become half Indian before it could fight the Indians on
anything like even terms. We seem not so much to have coveted the lands
in the first Indian-fighting days; we fought rather for the trails than
for the soil. The Indians themselves had lived there all their lives,
had conquered their environment, and were happy in it. They made a
bitter fight; nor are they to be blamed for doing so.

The greatest of our Indian wars hav