h we owe! Who has not helped us? Nor does the
traveler through the castellated steeps of the "Bad Lands" know, nor
probably does he care, that this caption came from the far-traveling
French trapper, whose venturesome and tireless feet have made him at
home in all places on our continent. How valuable, however, must be
these names to one who cares to familiarize himself with the knowledge
and romance of those pioneers of geography! Of like origin is "butte."
The voyager saw those isolated peaks, too high to be called hills and
too low to be called mountains, and said they are buttes
(knolls)--names which cling to them as tenaciously as their shadows.

In a word, I have found this study a breath blown from far mountain
ranges of history; and this breath upon the face has made an hour of
life grow young and beautiful, for which reason I now write the story
of my pleasure. The North American continent lends itself with
peculiar grace to such a study as is here suggested, because its story
lies under the eyes of history. 'Twas scarcely an hour ago, in the
world's day, since Columbus found out this continent, and, with a
giant's hand, swung its huge doors inward for the centuries to enter;
and all those discoveries are our commonplace knowledge. What tribes
were here, Prescott and Parkman have told us in thrilling narratives;
and columns of eager colonists we have seen press their way along the
seashore, into forests, over mountains, across deserts, never halting,
save to catch breath as a climber of a mountain does,--on, on, till a
continent is white with the tents of millions. But the Indian
aborigine, for whom the tepee was portable habitation, and the stretch
of plain and hill and lake and river, hunting-ground or
battle-ground,--the Indian is mainly the reminiscence of an old man's
straggling speech; and these names he has left, clinging to lake and
river and hamlet, are his memorial. In Montezuma's empire, where once
a barbaric splendor held court and set in tragic splendor, lurid even
yet at these centuries' remove, what is left save a vocabulary or a
broken idol lying black and foreboding in some mountain stream? Or
those discoverers whose adventurous deeds are part of the world's
chosen treasure, what but their names are written on the streams or
hills? The import of these observations is this, that from American
geography we may, with reasonable accuracy and detail, decipher this
romantic history. In th