“Personally I’m nobody, but officially I’m Corporal in Company B, Texas Rangers—well, if there isn’t smiling Ed Winters, the biggest cattle thief ever born in Medina County. Why, I’ve got papers for you; for altering the brands on over fifty head of ‘C’ cattle into a ‘G’ brand. Come here, dear, and give me that gun of yours. Come on, and no false moves or funny work or I’ll shoot the white out of your eye. Surround this layout, lads, and let’s examine them more closely.” At this command, every man in our outfit whipped out his six-shooter, the Rangers leveled their carbines on the rustlers, and in less than a minute’s time they were disarmed and as crestfallen a group of men as ever walked into a trap of their own setting. Hames got out a “black book,” and after looking the crowd over concluded to hold the entire covey, as the descriptions of the “wanted” seemed to include most of them. Some of the rustlers attempted to explain their presence, but Hames decided to hold the entire party, “just to learn them to be more careful of their company the next time,” as he put it. The Farming Frontier [Illustration: Plowing on the prairies west of the Mississippi] Homesteading in the Dakotas The last frontier to fall before the westward march of civilization was that of the farmer. Farmers were beginning to plow the virgin prairie soil even before the Civil War, but after the conflict the line of farming communities in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas began to move relentlessly westward. The railroads were given large tracts of public land which they sold to settlers. Many Civil War veterans took up free land after their discharge, as provided for in the Homestead Act of 1862. The following selections illustrate the farming frontier on the plains. O. E. Rölvaag Pictures the Norwegian Settlers O. E. Rölvaag, the author of the following selection, grew up in a Norwegian fishing village, but at the age of twenty he emigrated to America and worked for his uncle on a Dakota farm. Later he worked his way through St. Olaf College and eventually became a professor of Norwegian literature at his alma mater. His excellent novel, _Giants in the Earth_, from which the following pages are taken, describes the life of Norwegian farmers in the Dakota Territory. As the novel opens, several Norwegian families are taking up homesteads. Before they make their first crops and can afford real houses, they have to live in sod houses, which are really cellars dug in the prairie and roofed over with sod.