Yet it was the dawning of a new day for the West and all men knew it. The old order passeth, and so it was here; a new West was coming in, and the great pioneer heroes of an earlier day shook hands with the derby-hatted tenderfoot from the East and tilted glasses in friendly companionship. But the old West--the great, the never-to-be-forgotten epic of our newer civilization--still lingered; and happy, yes, a hero of sorts was he of the East who still sniffed the footprints. Railroads were still largely a dream; the Union Pacific had cut the boundless wastes of the great desert and made travel to California an actuality; but a second great transcontinental iron path was still largely a possibility. The footprints of the pioneers were everywhere; echoes of the pathfinder were yet in the air; gold and silver were being found every day in the wilderness of the Rockies; new camps--reachable only by the primitive stagecoach, whose final departure in an older realm had been magniloquently signed over by old Sir Walter--were springing up overnight; Leadville had a population of thirty thousand and not a score of streets named; Buena Vista, at eleven thousand feet above sea level, was a dream of the gods! Away to the South were Silver Cliff and Rosita, with their hitherto uncombed rocks pouring out fortunes. Ouray was an acknowledged bonanza; and into the Gunnison country poured a steady stream of prairie-wagons over mountain trails that the Indian himself did not know. The plains held unlimited resources in the golden imagination of the pioneer! Was there ever such a dream as his--of sheep and cattle by the thousands--such flocks as Abraham never dreamed of; and away to the South, boundless, unconceived-of possibilities, an absolute Eldorado! Such was the great, the Golden West--to make no concrete mention of California--when the compiler of these pages first felt the urge and the surge toward it. Horace Greeley’s pæan was in the air: “Go West, young man.” And most of us did; and whether fortune or its reverse came, there is not a man of us in whom the red blood flows still that can ever forget that splendid scene. If to the survivor, as to the more or less belated traveler, some echo of it lives in these pages, he has done his work faithfully.