"But he is content. The shadows of the wilderness have been chased away; the savage beast and savage man have retired before him; nature has brought her flowers to strew the steps of his old age; in his soul he feels that somewhere the record of his work and of his high thoughts has been kept; and so he smiles upon the younger generation and is content. "May that contentment be his to the end." It was an anniversary night in Pioneer Hall, in Virginia City, Nevada, one July night in 1878, and the foregoing were the closing words of a little impromptu speech that Alex Strong had delivered. A strange, many-sided man was Alex Strong. He was an Argonaut. When the first tide set in toward the Golden Coast, he, but a lad, with little save a pony and a gun, joined a train that had crossed the Missouri and was headed westward. The people in the company looked upon him as a mere boy, but, later, when real hardships were encountered and sickness came, the boy became the life of the company. When women and children drooped under the burdens and the fear of the wilderness, it was his voice that cheered them on; his gun secured the tender bit of antelope or grouse to tempt their failing appetites; his songs drove away the silence of the desert. He was for the company a lark at morn, a nightingale at night. Arriving in California, he sought the hills. When his claim would not pay he indicted scornful songs to show his "defiance of luck." Some of these were published in the mountain papers, and then a few people knew that somewhere in miner's garb a genius was hiding. Amid the hills, in his cabin, he was an incessant reader, and with his books, his friction against men and in the study of nature's mighty alphabet, as left upon her mountains, with the going by of the years he rounded into a cultured, alert, sometimes pathetic and sometimes boisterous man, but always a shrewd, all-around man of affairs. When we greet him he had been for several years a brilliant journalist. He had jumped up to make a little speech in Pioneer Hall, and the last words of his speech are given above. When he had finished another pioneer, Colonel Savage, was called upon. He was always prepared to make a speech. He delighted, moreover, in taking the opposite side to Strong. So springing to his feet, he cried out: "Too serious are the words of my friend. What of hardships, when youth, the beautiful, walks by one's side! What of danger when one feels a young heart throbbing in his breast! "Who talks of loneliness while as yet no fetter has been welded upon hope, while yet the unexplored and unpeopled portions of God's world beckon the brave to come to woo and to possess them!