Fellow-Citizens and Gentlemen of the Wild West: Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who for two long years has met in the arena every shape of man or beast that the broad empire of Nebraska could furnish, and yet has never lowered his arm. If there be one among you can say that ever at grub dance or scalp german or on the war-path my action did belie my tongue let him stand forth and say it and I will send him home with his daylights done up in the morning paper. If there be three in all your company dare face me on the bloody sands let them come on and I will bore holes in the arena with them and utilize them in fixing up a sickening spectacle. And yet I was not alway thus, a hired butcher attacking a Deadwood coach, both afternoon and evening, the savage chief of still more savage men. My ancestors came from Illinois. They dwelt there in the vine-clad hills and citron groves of the Sangamon at a time when the country was overrun with Indians. Instead of paying to see Indians, my ancestors would walk a long distance over a poor road in order to get a shot at a white man. In Dakota my early life ran quiet as the clear brook by which I babbled, and my boyhood was one long, happy summer day. We bathed in the soiled waters of the upper Missouri and ate the luscious prickly pear in the land of the Dakotahs. I did not then know what war was, but when Sitting Bull told me of Marathon and Leuctra and Bull Run, and how at a fortified railroad pass Imre Kiralfy had withstood the whole Roman army, my cheek burned, I knew not why, and I thought what a glorious thing it would be to leave the reservation and go upon the warpath. But my mother kissed my throbbing temples and bade me go soak my head and think no more of those old tales and savage wars. That very night the entire regular army and wife landed on our coasts. They tore down our tepee, stampeded our stock, stole our grease paints and played a mean trick on our dog.