Thirty years have passed since I first crossed the plains. The buffalo and antelope have disappeared and in their stead herds of cattle and sheep graze in countless thousands. Farms are tilled where raging fires swept the mighty plains in ungoverned fury; cities and towns rear their spires where once stood Indian tepees. The westward march of civilization has stretched across the continent and redeemed the desert. The soil has been made to yield its harvest and the eternal hills to give up their buried treasure. For the men who made the trails by which these things were done, life’s shadows are falling toward the east. They braved the vicissitudes of the western wilderness as heroic as any soldier faced the battlefield; and the trails over which the pioneers slowly made their way across the desert wastes, were blazed with blood and fire. Women, too, on the frontier, volumes might be written of her sacrifices--Indians, poverty, years of patient toil, far from former home and friends, the luxuries of organized society denied, all for the purpose of earning a home and a competence for declining years. It was my good fortune to become personally acquainted with many early pioneers of the west and number them among my warmest friends, and as I recall to mind some of their heroic deeds I feel that these chapters would be incomplete without a personal mention of a few of them. * * * * * Captain Jack Crawford, the poet scout, is one of those noble characters whose memory will live so long as records exist of the pioneers who braved the vicissitudes of the frontier and made possible our Western civilization of today. A man of broad mind, daring and brave and yet with all the sweet tenderness of a child of nature, he became great by achievements alone. Others have gained a temporary fame by dime novel writers. Captain Jack, in comparison with others, stands out as a diamond of the first water. He has helped to make more trails than any scout unless it was Kit Carson. That was before the war. During that struggle he was wounded three times in the service of his country. When the war closed he was for many years chief of scouts under General Custer. He laid out Leedville in the Black Hills in 1876, and was of great service to the government in the settlement of the Indian troubles which succeeded the Custer massacre. [Illustration: Captain Jack Crawford (page 208).] Captain Jack is one of the very few thrown together with the wild, rough element of the frontier who maintained a strictly moral character. I knew him in the “Hills” in 1876 and have known him ever since, and have always found him to be the same genial, whole-souled, brave Captain Jack. * * * * *