could step out
at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of the world that is
the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain for the
reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory
can take, will bring you to it now. The mountains are there, far and
shining, and the sunlight, and the infinite earth, and the air that
seems forever the true fountain of youth, but where is the buffalo, and
the wild antelope, and where the horseman with his pasturing thousands?
So like its old self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you
wait for the horseman to appear.

But he will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday. You
will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will
see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from Palos with his
caravels.

And yet the horseman is still so near our day that in some chapters of
this book, which were published separate at the close of the nineteenth
century, the present tense was used. It is true no longer. In those
chapters it has been changed, and verbs like "is" and "have" now read
"was" and "had." Time has flowed faster than my ink.

What is become of the horseman, the cowpuncher, the last romantic figure
upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did with his
might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages that he
squandered were squandered hard,--half a year's pay sometimes gone in a
night,--"blown in," as he expressed it, or "blowed in," to be perfectly
accurate. Well, he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his
chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among
us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero
without wings.

The cow-puncher's ungoverned hours did not unman him. If he gave his
word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times.
Nor did he talk lewdly to women; Newport would have thought him
old-fashioned. He and his brief epoch make a complete picture, for in
themselves they were as complete as the pioneers of the land or the
explorers of the sea. A transition has followed the horseman of the
plains; a shapeless state, a condition of men and manners as unlovely as
is that moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and
the face of Nature is ugly. I shall not dwell upon it here. Those who
have seen it know well what I mean. Such transition was inevitable. Let
us give