For several days we trailed forest fires. The whole state was so tindery that a lighted match might sweep it clear. Puffs of blue-white smoke blurred the sharp outlines of the mountains and the air was warm with an acrid, smoky haze. Sometimes we passed newly charred forests with little tongues of flame still leaping at their edges, and once we barely crossed before a smouldering fire swept down a hillside and crossed the road where we had been a moment earlier. The people we met were in a state of passive depression after the ruin of the wheat at this last blow to their bank accounts. Some blamed the I. W. W. for the fires, but most of them spoke of this possibility with the caution one pins a scandal to an ugly neighbor in a small town. Montana’s cities were also at the mercy of the I. W. W. The usual strikes were agitating at Butte, and at the two leading hotels of Great Falls, both perfectly appointed, every waiter had gone on strike, and the cafeterias were doing a rushing business. The chambermaids followed suit next day. Yet we liked Great Falls, and the kindred cities of Montana, sharp-edged, clearly focussed little towns, brisk and new, frankly ashamed of their un-Rexalled past, and making plans to build a skyscraper a week--in the future. Miles City and Roundup,--what visions of frontier life they conjured up! And how little they fulfilled these visions! The former used to be and still is the scene of great horse fairs and the center of horse-trading Montana, a fact brought home to us by the manifold horseshoe nails that punctured our tires in this district. But as we saw no chaparraled rough-riders swaggering in the streets of Round-up, so we saw no horses in Miles City. It may be that once or twice yearly these towns revert to old customs, and their streets glow with the color of former years, but otherwise they are more concerned with their future than their past, and are trying as fast as possible to wipe out all traits that distinguish them from every other thriving city. Of this very section we drove through, back in the eighties Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “In its present form stock-raising on the plains is doomed and can hardly outlast the century. The great free ranches with their barbarous, picturesque and curiously fascinating surroundings, mark a primitive stage of existence as surely as do the great tracts of primeval forests, and like the latter must pass away before the onward march of our people; and we who have felt the charm of the life, and have exulted in its abounding vigor and its bold, restless freedom, will not only regret its passing for our own sakes, but must also feel real sorrow that those who come after us are not to see, as we have seen, what is perhaps the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting phase of American existence.”