e taken place since our own Civil
War; and perhaps the most notable of all the battles are those which
were fought on the old cow range--in the land of our last frontier. We
do not lack abundant records of this time of our history. Soon after the
Civil War the railroads began edging out into the plains. They brought,
besides many new settlers, an abundance of chroniclers and historians
and writers of hectic fiction or supposed fact. A multitude of books
came out at this time of our history, most of which were accepted
as truth. That was the time when we set up as Wild West heroes rough
skinclad hunters and so-called scouts, each of whom was allowed to tell
his own story and to have it accepted at par. As a matter of fact, at
about the time the Army had succeeded in subduing the last of the Indian
tribes on the buffalo-range, the most of our Wild West history, at least
so far as concerned the boldest adventure, was a thing of the past.
It was easy to write of a past which every one now was too new, too
ignorant, or too busy critically to remember.

Even as early as 1866, Colonel Marcy, an experienced army officer and
Indian-fighter, took the attitude of writing about a vanishing phase of
American life. In his Army "Life on the Border," he says:

"I have been persuaded by many friends that the contents of the book
which is herewith presented to the public are not without value as
records of a fast-vanishing age, and as truthful sketches of men of
various races whose memory will shortly depend only on romance, unless
some one who knew them shall undertake to leave outlines of their
peculiar characteristics.... I am persuaded that excuse may be found
in the simple fact that all these peoples of my description--men,
conditions of life, races of aboriginal inhabitants and adventurous
hunters and pioneers--are passing away. A few years more and the prairie
will be transformed into farms. The mountain ravines will be the abodes
of busy manufacturers, and the gigantic power of American civilization
will have taken possession of the land from the great river of the West
to the very shores of the Pacific.... The world is fast filling up.
I trust I am not in error when I venture to place some value, however
small, on everything which goes to form the truthful history of a
condition of men incident to the advances of civilization over the
continent--a condition which forms peculiar types of character, breeds
remarkable developments