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The love for the plains and mountains implainted in his heart when as a mounted messenger boy he rode from slow moving cattle train to train, carrying messages, rode the lonely stretches of the long overland trail on the swift pony express, hunted, trapped, scouted and guided, is there yet. He was yet in his teens when in '67 or '68 he killed the hundreds of buffalo to feed the thousands of men who were building the Kansas Pacific Railroad. Here he earned the name, now known the world over, "Buffalo Bill." THen later as a scout and guide for military expeditions seeking hostile Indians, he learned all the then vast unsettled region lying between the Gulf and the Yellowstone, the Missouri and the mountains. On this great stage the picuresque part he played from mounted messenger to skillful scouting, and the killing of "Yellow Hand" in a most dramatic hand-to-hand encounter on "War Bonnet Creek," with the armies of friend and foe for an audience, gained him the attention and friendship of such men as Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, Custer and Miles, who gave to him a love and respect he has held until death has, one by one, stayed the hands they ever after held out to him in friend and fellowship. General Miles alone remains of this galaxy of great Indian fighters of the past century, and only a year ago he was Col. Cody's guest on a hunt for big game in the Big Horn Basin.

"Red Cloud," "Spotted Tail" and "Sitting Bull" were the foes against whose skill as scout, plainsman and warrior Col. Cody was pitted in the seventies. In the two decades following, the sons of these stubborn old red men have followed their father's old foe all over the civilized world, and under his object-lesson tutelage have been taught the futility of the few, in savage warfare, waged against the many, in civilized warfare (if warfare is civilized). There is not a doubt but the lessons taugth to the Indians Col. Cody carries with him, and by them taught to those at home, has done as much to avert hostilities, and more, than has fear of the handful of soldiers at frontier posts.

The Buffalo are gone, the elk and antelope are rarely seen. Those yet in freedom are carefully protected by stringent game laws. But the horses and cattle roam over the hills and through the valleys, once the home of the game, and of these Col. Cody owns large herds. The settler's cabin and the stockman's ranch houses and corrals are featues o flandscapes where once the cone-shaped tepees stood. But the air that fills men's lungs with health, their brains with noble thoughts, and their veins with new life, still remains, and a sunshine that floods with glory hill and dale, forest and field, mound and mountain, still comes shimmering down through an atomosphere so pure, so sweet and so bracing, that it intoxicates when poor, weak, cramped, damp, decayed, smoke-shirvelled lungs from lower altitudes are distended by it. Then there are the grand corn and alfalfa fields of the Platte, the timothy meadows, the potato fields, and the golden grain fields in the Big Horn Basin, the Souts' Rest Ranch, 8,000 acres, the Carter Ranch, 26,000 acres under fence, the home of 1,000 horses. Rock Creek Ranch, the summer home of the horses, and T. E. Ranch (TE the