on in 1837, sweeping with desolation through the prairie tribes,
moves me more than the storied catastrophes of old. It was a Reign of
Terror. Even Larpenteur's bald statement of it fills me with the fine
old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened at dawn and were dead at sunset.
Every day a cartload or two of corpses went over the bluff into the
river; and men became reckless. Larpenteur and his friend joked daily
about the carting of the gruesome freight. They felt the irresistible,
and they laughed at it, since struggle was out of the question. Some
drank deeply and indulged in hysterical orgies. Some hollowed out their
own graves and waited patiently beside them for the hidden hand to
strike. At least fifteen thousand died--Audubon says one hundred and
fifty thousand; and the buffalo increased rapidly--because the hunters
were few.

Would not such a story--here briefly sketched--move old Sophocles?

The story of the half-breed woman--a giantess--who had a dozen sons, has
about it for me all the glamour of an ancient yarn. The sons were
free-trappers, you know, and, incidentally, thieves and murderers. (I
suspect some of our classic heroes were as much!) But they were
doubtless living up to the light that was in them, and they were game to
the finish. So was the old woman; they called her "the mother of the
devils." Trappers from the various posts organized to hunt them down,
and the mother and the sons barricaded their home. The fight was a hard
one. One by one the "devils" fell fighting about their mother. And then
the besieging party fired the house. With all her sons wounded or dead,
the old woman sallied forth. She fought like a grizzly and went down
like a heroine.

A sordid, brutal story? Ah, but it was life! Fling about this story of
savage mother-love the glamour of time and genius, and it will move you!

And the story of old Hugh Glass! Is it not fateful enough to be the
foundation of a tremendous AEschylean drama? A big man he was--old and
bearded. A devil to fight, a giant to endure, and an angel to forgive!
He was in the Leavenworth campaign against the Aricaras, and afterward
he went as a hunter with the Henry expedition. He had a friend--a mere
boy--and these two were very close. One day Glass, who was in advance of
the party, beating up the country for game, fell in with a grizzly; and
when the main party came up, he lay horribly mangled with the bear
standing over him. They killed the bear, but the old