Hearty thanks are given to the Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, and the publishers of “Canadian Pictures,” for the use of pictures from that book by the late Duke, Governor-General of Canada; to Mrs. H. T. Martin for the beaver pictures from her husband’s book; to _Harper’s Magazine_ and Mrs. Remington’s executors for the two travel scenes by Frederic Remington; to the American Museum of Natural History, New York, for the giant lizards; to the scientific staff of the Victoria Museum at Ottawa for checking my pre-historic facts; to many other officers of the Dominion and the four Western Provinces, and unofficial informants, for pictorial and other details; above all, to the numberless good folk all over the West who have made my travelling and living among them an endless revelation and delight.—H.A.K. THE BOOK OF THE WEST THE BOOK OF THE WEST ————— A Hill-Top Adventure _B__ULLETS whistled about my ears as I leapt from my horse on Cutknife Hill. The Indians had us neatly ringed in, as once they used to trap the buffalo. Puffs of smoke rose from the gully on our left, from the gully on our right, from the creek-bed in our rear, from the ridge beyond the gully on each hand. Man after man fell, killed or wounded. The friend who had shared his supper with me, the night before, lay dead, a bullet through his head. The next bullet might go through mine. For five long hours the painted braves kept up the zip-zip-zip, shooting us down like rabbits. It was my first adventure in the West,—and the last of its kind the West will ever know._ _That little war of 1885 was the Great Divide of Western History. It marked an end and a beginning. The rising on the Saskatchewan was the last volcanic outbreak of the fire primeval, the savage spirit of the old Wild West. With the suppression of that rising, the fire was quenched for ever. The old times ended; our own new times began._ _Standing on the Great Divide of the Rocky Mountains we see, looking back, the long road we have travelled up from the Atlantic, and then, looking forward, the long road stretching down to the Pacific. So, looking back from the Great Divide of Western History, we see a moving picture of romance, of wonderful discovery, of long-drawn struggle against fearful odds; a picture brightened with heroic deeds, though darkened now and then by clouds of crime. Then, looking forward, we see the moving picture of our modern West, the inrushing flood of humanity, these forty years of peace and safety, of swift transformation from a hunter’s wilderness to a land of a million homes, of marvellous, though unsatisfying, progress._