The "color" of what follows is real, gathered when the Wild West _was_ wild; and I make no excuse for its lack of what an Enos R. Mills or a Walter Pritchard Eaton would put in it, for they are naturalists while I am merely a survivor of a period in the development and upbuilding of a great section of the golden west. In relating incidents to develop certain phases of pioneer life real names of persons and localities have not always been used; and in some of the narratives several incidents have been merged. CHAPTER I LETTERS PASS BETWEEN OLD PARDS. _My Dear Friend_: Can you put me in correspondence with any of the old boys we met when the country was new, out in Wyoming? * * * Of the Medicine Bow range, or Whipple, the man I gave the copper specimens to? * * * Have you forgotten the importance you felt while walking up and down the long line of bovines, swinging your "gad" and cursing like a mate on a river boat? You looked bigger to me than a railroad president when you secured that job, as you used to say, breaking on a bull-train. I should say you were an engineer, but I suppose you know best. Those were happy days. When I recall the fool things we did to satisfy a boy's desire for adventure, I wonder that we are alive. How we avoided the scalping knife; escaped having our necks broken, or being trampled to death under the feet of herds of buffalo is a mystery to me. * * * When the building of the Union Pacific road checked the buffaloes in their passage from summer to winter feeding grounds, and they were banked up along the line near Julesburg in thousands, I recall the delight we took in watching them "get up and get." What clouds of dust they would kick up when they got down to business! And such dust as the Chalk Bluff would make never entered the eyes or lungs of man elsewhere. Weren't we whales when we could divide or turn a herd? And how we would turn tail-to, "spur and quirt" for our lives if the bunch did not show signs of swerving from their course. How a cow-pony can carry a man safely over such treacherous ground as the dog-towns is almost a miracle. O! to have my fill of antelope steak or buffalo "hump" broiled on a cone of buffalo chips! Nothing better ever entered my mouth on the plains. The soothing song of the lone night-herder of the bull-train as he circles and beds his stock is not more conducive to sweeter slumbers than we enjoyed by the rippling streams in the hills of Wyoming. The difficulty we had in boiling beans until done in so high an altitude; our hunt for a gun at old Dale Creek where "Shorty" Higgins died suddenly; the fool act on my part when, afoot and alone, I recovered the horse the Comanches had stolen from us. I wish we might corral some of our old-time friends and go over the past before we leave this land, "for when we die we will be a long time dead."