to choose. Even
Clark is sometimes spelt Clarke, while Boon was apparently indifferent
as to whether his name should or should not contain the final silent
_e_. As for the original Indian titles, it is often quite
impossible to give them even approximately; the early writers often
wrote the same Indian words in such different ways that they bear no
resemblance whatever to one another.

In conclusion I would say that it has been to me emphatically a labor
of love to write of the great deeds of the border people. I am not
blind to their manifold shortcomings, nor yet am I ignorant of their
many strong and good qualities. For a number of years I spent most of
my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other
frontiersman. The wild country in which we dwelt and across which we
wandered was in the far west; and there were of course many features
in which the life of a cattleman on the Great Plains and among the
Rockies differed from that led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany
forests a century before. Yet the points of resemblance were far more
numerous and striking. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and
shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil
government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of
the Little Missouri and among the wooded, precipitous foot-hills of
the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years
previously built their log-cabins beside the Kentucky or in the
valleys of the Great Smokies. The men who have shared in the fast
vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with
the already long-vanished frontier life of the past.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, _May_, 1889

FOREWORD.

In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a
century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright
from the western world. During the march of our people from the crests
of the Alleghanies to the Pacific, the Spaniard was for a long period
our chief white opponent; and after an interval his place among our
antagonists was taken by his Spanish-American heir. Although during
the Revolution the Spaniard at one time became America's friend in the
sense that he was England's foe, he almost from the outset hated and
dreaded his new ally more than his old enemy. In the peace
negotiations at the close of the contest he was jealously eager to
restrict our boundaries to the line of the Alleghanies; while ev