RECONSTRUCTION
The day of the Indian terror had passed. No longer did the name of
Little Crow carry stampede in its wake. The battles of Big Mound, of
White Stone Hill, and of the Bad Lands had been fought, had become mere
history; dim already to the newcomer as Lexington or Bull Run. Still in
the memory, to be sure, was the half-invited massacre of Custer at the
Little Big Horn; but the savage genius of Sitting Bull, of Crazy Horse,
and of Gall, who had made the last great encounter bloodily unique in
the conflict of the red man and the white, was never to be duplicated.
Rightly or wrongly deprived of what they had once called their own,
driven back, back on the crest of the ever-increasing wave of
settlement, facing the alternative of annihilation or of submergence in
that flood, the Sioux had halted like a wild thing at bay, with their
backs to the last stronghold, the richest plot of earth on the face of
the globe, the Black Hills country, and as a cornered animal ever
fights, had battled ferociously for a lost supremacy. But, robbers
themselves, holding the land on the insecure title of might alone,
fighting to the end, they had at last succumbed to the inevitable: the
all-conquering invasion of the dominant Anglo-Saxon. Here and there a
name stood out: "Scarlet Point," "Strikes-the-Ree," "Little Crow,"
"Sitting Bull," "Crazy Horse," "Spotted Tail," "Red Cloud," "Gall,"
"John Grass," names that in multiple impressed but by their fantastic
suggestion; but their original pulse-accelerating meaning had long since
passed. Now and then a prairie mother, driven to desperation, might
incite temporary rectitude in the breast of an incorrigible by a
harrowing reference to one or to another; yet to the incoming swarms of
land-hungry settlers they were mere supplanted play actors, fit heroes
for fiction, for romance perhaps; but like the bison to be kept in small
herds safe in the pasture of a reservation, preserved as a relic of a
species doomed to extinction.
A thing at which to marvel was the growth of the eastern border of
Dakota Territory in this, the time of the great boom. History can
scarcely find its parallel. In the space of a decade the census leaped
from two-score thousand to nearly a half million. New towns sprang up
like fungi in a night. Railroads reached out like the tentacles of an
octopus, where a generation before the buffalo had tramped its tortuous
trail. Prosperous farms came into being in the meadows where the
antelope had pastured. Artesian wells, waterworks, electric lights,
street railways, colleges, all the adjuncts of a higher civilisation,
blossomed forth under the magic wand of Eastern capital. Doomed to
reaction, as an advancing pendulum is doomed to retrace its cycle, was
this premature evolution; but temporarily, as a springtime freshet
bears onward the driftwood in its path, it carried its predecessor, the
unconventional, fighting, wild-loving adventurer, before. On it went, on
and on until at last, fairly blocking its path, was the big, muddy,
dawdling Missouri. Then for the first time it halted; halted in a pause
that was to last for a generation. But it had fulfilled its mission.
High and dry on the western side of the barrier, imbued as when they had
settled to the east, with the restless spirit of the frontier,
unsubdued, unchanged, it cast its burden. There, as they had done
before, the newcomers immediately took root, and, after the passage of a
year, were all but unconscious of the migration. Over their heads was
the same blue prairie sky. Around them, treeless, trackless, was the
same rolling, illimitable prairie land. In but one essential were
conditions changed; yet that one was epoch-making. Heretofore,
surrounded by a common, an alien danger, compelled at a second's warning
to band together for life itself, all men were brothers. Now, with the
passing of the red peril, with eradication of necessity for any manner
of restraint, an abandon of licence, of recklessness, born of the wild
life, of overflowing animal vitality insufficiently employed, swept the
land like a contagion. Unique in the history of man's development was
this the era of the cowboy, as fantastic now as the era of the red
peril, its predecessor; yet vital, bizarre, throbbing, unconsciously
human, as no other period has ever been, as in all probability none
will ever be again. Generous, spendthrift, murderous when crossed,
chivalrous, fearless, profane, yet fundamentally religious, inebriate,
wilful and docile by turns, ceaselessly active, eternally discontented,
seeking they knew not what, they were their own evil genius; as
certainly as nature surrounded them with Heaven, they supplied their own
Hell and, impartial, chose from each to weave the web of their lives.
Of this period, life of this life, was Colonel William Landor; colonel
no longer, plain Bill, from the river to the Hills, husband these ten
years now, but not father, Cattle King of an uncontested range. Of this
life likewise, bred in it, saturated in it, was a dark young woman, his
adopted daughter, two years past her majority, Elizabeth Rowland Landor
by name. Of it most vitally of all, born of it, rooted in it through
unknown centuries of ancestral domicile, was a copper-brown young man,
destitute as a boy of twelve of a trace of beard, black as a prairie
crow of hair and eyes, deep-lunged like a race-track thoroughbred, wiry
as a mustang, garbed as a white man, but bearing the liquid name of a
Teton Sioux, "Ma-wa-cha-sa, the lost pappoose," yet known wherever the
Santee Massacre and the tale of his appearance was known, as "How"
Landor. Of this period, last of all, was the great B.B.--Buffalo
Butte--ranch, giant among the giants, whose brand was familiar as his
own name to every cowboy west of the Missouri, whose hospitable ranch
house, twenty-odd miles from the vest pocket metropolis of Coyote
Centre, which in turn, to quote Landor himself, was "a hundred miles
from nowhere," was the Mecca of every traveller whom chance drew into
this wild, of every curious tenderfoot seeking a glimpse of the reverse
side of the coin of life, of every desperate "one lunger," who, with
gambler instinct, staked his all on prairie sun and prairie air.