Harsh the The and Yet in certain moods a man cares less for even the loveliest bird songs than for the wilder, harsher, stronger sounds of the wilderness; the guttural booming and clucking of the prairie fowl and the great sage fowl in spring; the honking of gangs of wild geese, as they fly in rapid wedges; the bark of an eagle, wheeling in the shadow of stormscarred cliffs; or the far-off clanging of many sandhill cranes, soaring high overhead in circles which cross and recross at an incredible altitude. Wilder yet, and stranger, are the cries of the great four-footed beasts: the rhythmic pealing of a bull-elk's challenge; and that most sinister and mournful sound, ever fraught with foreboding of murder and rapine, the long-drawn baying of the gray wolf. The Wilderness Hunter. Indeed, save to the trained ear, most mere bird songs are not very noticeable. The the Birds ordinary wilderness dweller, whether hunter or cowboy, scarcely heeds them; and in fact knows but little of the smaller birds. If a bird has some conspicuous peculiarity of look or habit he will notice its existence; but not otherwise. He knows a good deal about magpies, whiskey jacks, or water ousels; but nothing whatever concerning the thrushes, finches, and warblers.-Ibid. O strange New World that yit wast never young, Oh, my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he 'T wixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea, Bestrong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines, By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs. LOWELL. Life on the Frontier and on the Plains UT on the frontier, and generally among BUT The man those who spend their lives in, or on the Frontiersborders of, the wilderness, life is reduced to its elemental conditions. The passions and emotions of these grim hunters of the mountains, and wild rough-riders of the plains, are simpler and stronger than those of people dwelling in more complicated states of society. As soon as the communities become settled and begin to grow with any rapidity, the American instinct for law asserts itself; but in the earlier stages each individual is obliged to be a law to himself and to guard his rights with a strong hand. The Wilderness Hunter. Frontier They hold strongly by certain rude virtues, and on the other hand they quite fail Despera to recognize even as shortcomings not a few traits that obtain scant mercy in older does not all Bad Frontier does not The communities. Many of the desperadoes, the man-killers, and road-agents have good sides to their characters. Often they are people who, in certain stages of civilization, do, or have done, good work, but who, when these stages have passed, find themselves surrounded by conditions which accentuate their worst qualities, and make their best qualities useless. The average desperado, for instance, has, after all, much the same standard of morals that the Norman nobles had in the days of the battle of Hastings, and, ethically and morally, he is decidedly in advance of the vikings, who were the ancestors of these same nobles-and to whom, by the way, he himself could doubtless trace a portion of his blood.-Ibid. ' The influence of the wild country upon the Frontiers- man is almost as great as the effect of the the Wilder- man upon the country. The frontiersman man and ness destroys the wilderness, and yet its destruction means his own. He passes away before the coming of the very civilization whose advance guard he has been. Nevertheless, much of his blood remains, and his striking characteristics have great weight in shaping the development of the land. The varying peculiarities of the different groups of men |