That the destruction of the eagle and the mountain lion marked another stage of that remorseless march which is called civilization I fully recognized and--in a certain sense--approved, although the raising of billions of hens and pigs admittedly useful, was not to me an inspiring employment of human energy. The long-horn white-faced steer was more picturesque than a "Mooly" cow. Doubtless a dairyman is a more valuable citizen in the long run than a prospector or miner, but he does not so easily appeal to the imagination. To wade irrigating ditches, hoe in hand, is not incompatible with the noblest manhood, but it is none the less true that men riding the trail or exploring ledges of quartz are more alluring characters to the novelist--at least that was the way I felt in 1909 when I began to shape another book concerning the great drama which was going on in the forests of the High Country. For more than fifteen years, while trailing among the mountains of Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, I had seen the Forest Service, under Gifford Pinchot's leadership, gradually getting into effect. I had seen the silver miner disappear and the army of forest rangers grow from a handful of hardy cowboys and "lonesome men" into a disciplined force of over two thousand young foresters who represented in some degree the science and the patriotism of their chief. As in _Hesper_ and _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_ I had attempted to depict certain types of the red men, miners and ranchers. I now began to study the mountain vedettes from the point of view of the Forest Ranger, a federal officer who represented our newly acquired ideals of Conservation, and whose duty it was to act as custodian of the National Forests. I decided to write a novel which should, in some degree, delineate the heroic side of this warden's solitary life as I had seen it and shared it in a half-dozen forests in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. In this writing I put myself at the opposite pole from the scenes of _The Shadow World_, a study of psychic phenomena with which I had been deeply involved for a year or more. From dark cabinets in murky seance chambers, from contact with morbid, death-fearing, light-avoiding residents of crowded apartments, I now found myself riding once again ten thousand feet above sea level with men who "took chances" almost every hour of their lives--not from any reckless defiance of death but merely by way of duty, men who lived alone and rode alone, men in whose ears the mountain streams as they fell from the white silences of the snows, uttered songs of exultation. In the presence of these hardy trailers the doings of darkened seance rooms seemed morbid, if not actually insane.