ne, as mother
nature, as nature's master, God himself.

CHAPTER IV

RECONSTRUCTION

The day of the Indian terror had passed. No longer did the name of
Little Crow carry stampede in its wake. The battles of Big Mound, of
White Stone Hill, and of the Bad Lands had been fought, had become mere
history; dim already to the newcomer as Lexington or Bull Run. Still in
the memory, to be sure, was the half-invited massacre of Custer at the
Little Big Horn; but the savage genius of Sitting Bull, of Crazy Horse,
and of Gall, who had made the last great encounter bloodily unique in
the conflict of the red man and the white, was never to be duplicated.
Rightly or wrongly deprived of what they had once called their own,
driven back, back on the crest of the ever-increasing wave of
settlement, facing the alternative of annihilation or of submergence in
that flood, the Sioux had halted like a wild thing at bay, with their
backs to the last stronghold, the richest plot of earth on the face of
the globe, the Black Hills country, and as a cornered animal ever
fights, had battled ferociously for a lost supremacy. But, robbers
themselves, holding the land on the insecure title of might alone,
fighting to the end, they had at last succumbed to the inevitable: the
all-conquering invasion of the dominant Anglo-Saxon. Here and there a
name stood out: "Scarlet Point," "Strikes-the-Ree," "Little Crow,"
"Sitting Bull," "Crazy Horse," "Spotted Tail," "Red Cloud," "Gall,"
"John Grass," names that in multiple impressed but by their fantastic
suggestion; but their original pulse-accelerating meaning had long since
passed. Now and then a prairie mother, driven to desperation, might
incite temporary rectitude in the breast of an incorrigible by a
harrowing reference to one or to another; yet to the incoming swarms of
land-hungry settlers they were mere supplanted play actors, fit heroes
for fiction, for romance perhaps; but like the bison to be kept in small
herds safe in the pasture of a reservation, preserved as a relic of a
species doomed to extinction.

A thing at which to marvel was the growth of the eastern border of
Dakota Territory in this, the time of the great boom. History can
scarcely find its parallel. In the space of a decade the census leaped
from two-score thousand to nearly a half million. New towns sprang up
like fungi in a night. Railroads reached out like the tentacles of an
octopus, where a generation before the buffalo