IN THE WILD WEST

While a member of the Legislature, he responds to the call of the wilderness and goes buffalo hunting on the Plains. —A tenderfoot who amazes the plainsmen by his hardihood. — He sees the Wild West in the golden age of its romance. - A vast empire of fenceless pastures. The cowboy, the picturesque child of the great cattle country. A typical cow town. - The young New Yorker falls in love with the desert and buys a ranch.

NATURE ever has been the favorite teacher of Theodore Roosevelt. Although he is a university graduate, although books always have been his constant companions, he has learned the greatest lessons of life, as Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, and most of the leaders of the nation learned them, from his contact with men and with the world in the rude school of experience.

"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."

He had learned to know the birds and trees and flowers of Long Island in his boyhood and he had

delighted in the wilder life of the Adirondacks and of the Maine woods. In the strength of his manhood, he longed for hardier exploits. He had been enthralled by James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Series. Deerslayer, with his long rifle, Jasper, Hurry Harry, Ishmael Bush, with his seven stalwart sons, were to him like personal friends. "I have bunked with them," he has said, "and eaten with them. They were mighty men and they did the work of their day and opened the way for ours."

After leaving college, he joined the Meadowbrook Hunt Club and became a gallant rider to hounds. But the call of the wilderness came to him louder and louder. He wanted the real thing and could not be content with the fashionable imitation. The people of his mother's blood had battled with the southern wilds all the way down to the jungles of Florida. His younger brother, Elliott, had been on a great buffalo hunt in Texas and later had come back from India with the most distracting tales of his tiger hunting.

Finally, between legislative sessions, Theodore surrendered to his impulses and started for the Wild West. He left the train in North Dakota at

the little town of Medora. It was typical of that frontier. There were a few wretched shanties for the settlers and a number of low log buildings for the United States troops, who were there to guard the railroad builders from the Indians. On every side of this rude hamlet, the bare clay buttes, the term which the French pioneers had given to the big hills of that country, rose sheer several hundred feet from the level of the village and made the place seem all the more desolate.

The young visitor from the East sought out two hunters and told them that he wished to go buffalo hunting with them. They were not sure about him. The average Eastern tenderfoot never cared for more than a little buckboard ride over the country to see some of its natural wonders. They doubted if this one knew just what he was bargaining for. Hunting the buffalo then was no fancy pastime, for the lordly bison was fast vanishing, and to hunt him required long trips away from human habitation. One of the guides has recalled that there was something in the "set of his jaw" which assured him that the stranger meant business. But could he stand it? "He was a slender young