No one who has spent a recent summer in Europe can fail to perceive the change of sentiment which has come, since the war, to the peoples of the Old World. To them America is admittedly the dominating economic force of to-day. No well-informed European writer or speaker now pretends to patronize the United States as a young and unformed colony. The foundation stages of American history have acquired new value in the minds of many English and French readers, and such students this book which Mr. French has built up of scattered and neglected chronicles will stimulate to wider research. I commend it to all Americans who have neither time nor opportunity to read in their entirety the volumes from which these notable and representative chapters have been lifted. Broadly chronological in arrangement, they suggest a panorama of the rigorous Westward march of the hunters, woodsmen, planters and gold-miners who were chief actors of the century which ended with the outbreak of the Spanish War in 1898. With regard to the inclusion of a section from one of my own books I can only say that when approached for a grant of copyright I suggested something to offset the many chapters of life in the mining camps and on the trail, something which should tell of the homely methods of settling the plains. Beyond this suggestion, I did not care to go. The excerpt which the editor has used is a leaf out of my personal experiences in Brown and MacPherson counties in Dakota, in the spring of 1883, and is a faithful picture of the life we led while holding down our homestead claims. HAMLIN GARLAND. PREFACE Oh, that glorious West! The magic and the memory of it! How it thrilled us in our boyhood, how it held us in our youth, how the dream of it filled our young pulsing manhood, till there was none other! “O, to be in England now that April’s there!” once sang Browning, but the song in the heart of young America, forty years ago and more, was the great glorious, boundless West! I crossed the bare Kansas and Colorado plains in the month of March, 1880,--when the Great West was still a vision, yet largely a dream; when scarce small clumps of buffalo could still be seen from the car windows. I shook hands at the bar of the St. James Hotel in Denver with Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack in full buckskin regalia,--still to be seen and known in their habit as they lived.