ven faster, till near
the end of June, except for a few immune from principle or poverty, the
whole community of South and West Dakota had but one talk--the race, and
what they risked or hoped to make on it.

One must remember that the West has always been the land of boom. It is
filled with the energetic and enterprising who, by a natural process,
are selected from the peoples of the East; and the stuff such booms feed
on, grow on, and grow mighty on as they feed, is Hope. Every Westerner
knows that the land is full of possibility, opportunity--free, equal
opportunity multiplied; and he hopes that his name will be the next one
called by fortune. To respond to the call at whatever cost--to be ready
to respond--that is the condition of life worth while. A dozen bad
defeats are passing trifles if the glad call only comes and one fail not
to rise to it. So it is ever easy in a land of such undaunted souls to
start a boom. Hope never dies in the West.

Reader, I have ridden the Plains and seen many a settler living with his
family in one small, dirty room, constructed out of sods with a black
dirt roof, and dirt and dust on everything, on every side. I have seen
them with little food, pinched and sick and struggling with poverty and
famine. I have seen them in every dreadful circumstance of want and
wasting pain that could be named in the sum of horrors of the vilest
Eastern slum: and yet they made no bid for sympathy or help, or for a
moment lost their pride; for one great fundamental difference there was
between them and the slummers of the East: the prairie pioneer is
_filled with hope_! Hope gleams in his eye; he lives in a land of hope;
he was lured to the West by the blazing star of bright new Hope; just on
a little way it shines for him; and every sod upturned and every
posthole sunk, or seed put in, is turned or sunk or sown in the light of
strong, unfading hope. Just a little while, a few short months, maybe,
and he believes, he _knows_ his name will be the next one called.

O land of hope, land of the shining four-rayed star, long, long may you
remain the world's great vale of youth, where none grow old at heart or
pray for death, for none can ever wholly lose their glimpse of that
beckoning hope. The fountain of eternal youth springs up and gushes
'neath no other light.

O star of Hope! O blessed Lodestar of the soul! Long, long, yes, ages
long may you be there, swung in the sky for all the world to see and
k