The next day we went through another hundred miles of cattle and grain ranches. We were told that these towns, a hundred miles apart, had been trading-posts and stage-stops in the early days. Dickinson, Glendive, Miles City, and Billings, Montana, are all fine, thriving cities--excellent modern hotels, wide paved streets, fine churches, stores, office buildings, and theaters, not overlooking the movie houses. In passing, I wish to speak of the movies--a national, educational institution, to be reckoned with. If we were not too dead tired after a scrub, change of clothes, and dinner, we went to a movie and saw excellent pictures and the world’s doings to date. Usually there were plenty of electric fans, and always one big “paddle” fan _outside_ the front entrance. This we found the case with banks, office buildings, and shops. (Solve that if you can!) In many dozens of canaries were singing a jubilee. There was always a large clock in full view of the audience--another sensible idea. These cities were equipped with every modern device and invention. They claimed your admiration and deserved your unstinted praise. It was almost impossible to believe that the next morning, ten minutes after you left the pavements, you would again be out on the prairies, and perhaps meet no one for hours. At Dickinson, North Dakota, we found the St. Charles Hotel very good. We had been told to have lunch the next day in Medora, at the Rough Riders Hotel, one of the few buildings left of the early cowboy days. The town is nothing--a new school and store and a handful of old buildings. It is quite near the ranch where Colonel Roosevelt lived for two years. They instantly tell you that with real pride, for these people loved the man as they knew him. Like the buffalo, the picturesque cowboy is almost extinct. On the big cattle ranches we saw _near_ cowboys--boys in their teens herding the cattle, and some ordinary, dirty-looking men on horses. There were half a dozen men eating noon dinner at the hotel(?), a tumble-down old building about as romantic as any old woodshed. One grizzly old fellow was pointed out as having been a guide for the Colonel. The place was dirty, the food impossible, greasy and cold, and the few bullet-holes in the far-famed bar were not sufficient to make this member of the party rave over the place. It seemed like a travesty, or a ghost of some former existence. You _may_ infer that we did not care for Medora!