A Hill-Top Adventure

BULLETS whistled about my ears as I leapt from my horse on Cutknife Hill. The Indians had us neatly ringed in, as once they used to trap the buffalo. Puffs of smoke rose from the gully on our left, from the gully on our right, from the creek-bed in our rear, from the ridge beyond the gully on each hand. Man after man fell, killed or wounded. The friend who had shared his supper with me, the night before, lay dead, a bullet through his head. The next bullet might go through mine. For five long hours the painted braves kept up the zip-zip-zip, shooting us down like rabbits. It was my first adventure in the West,—and the last of its kind the West will ever know.

That little war of 1885 was the Great Divide of Western History. It marked an end and a beginning. The rising on the Saskatchewan was the last volcanic outbreak of the fire primeval, the savage spirit of the old Wild West. With the suppression of that rising, the fire was quenched for ever. The old times ended; our own new times began.

Standing on the Great Divide of the Rocky Mountains we see, looking back, the long road we have travelled up from the Atlantic, and then, looking forward, the long road stretching down to the Pacific. So, looking back from the Great Divide of Western History, we see a moving picture of romance, of wonderful discovery, of long-drawn struggle against fearful odds; a picture brightened with heroic deeds, though darkened now and then by clouds of crime. Life Full of Adventure Then, looking forward, we see the moving picture of our modern West, the inrushing flood of humanity, these forty years of peace and safety, of swift transformation from a hunter’s wilderness to a land of a million homes, of marvellous, though unsatisfying, progress.

This picture too is crowded with adventure, of many kinds. People are constantly having adventures without knowing it. They pass through life and think it dull because they have a dull habit of not looking at the thousand points of interest as they pass.

When the first Indian landed in empty America, far back in the mysterious past, that was a great adventure. And when the last family of European newcomers stepped off the train this very morning, after a journey of 6,000 miles by sea and land, that was just as big an adventure to them. When a boy has learned to shoot, and hunts down a coyote, he feels that he has had an adventure; but when he merely hunts up a stray cow in the brush of the back pasture, on his pony, that too is an adventure, and tests his power of observation and discovery as well as horsemanship.

Yes, and every spring when the farmer tests his grain for germination, and fans the last weed seed out of it, and treats it with formalin for smut, and carefully cleans his drill, he is preparing for a yearly adventure, as truly as the fur-hunter centuries ago when he patched his canoe and packed his belongings for a journey of months and years through an unknown land.

For me, it is an adventure to sit down and write this book, as truly as when I saddled up and rode out of Battleford on my way to Cutknife Hill. A hard adventure, too; harder work than rounding up cattle, or clearing brush, or pitching hay, or stooking heavy wheat, or anything else The West is Vast and Various I have ever done on the farm. But there is great pleasure in doing hard things, as every true Westerner knows by experience.

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A moving picture of the West is what you ask from me: a moving picture in words that help you to see in imagination events as if they were happening under your eyes. You want me to tell the story of our Western home, and how it came to be ours,—yours and mine. You want me to conjure up a picture of the West as it was and as it is.

“The West as it was” may have a more thrilling interest to some of my distant readers than “the West as it is”; but among Westerners themselves the glimpses of modern life in the later chapters of this book will have an interest keen enough, for it is their own life. The questions touched by me, or by the men and women whose words I give, are questions that Westerners have daily to face and often to wrestle with.

The West is so vast, so full of contrast, so rich in variety of scene, of climate, of industry and of people, that no one book can describe it all as it is. To do that would need a library, with picture gallery attached. I can only do my best, with two hundred pages of print and pictures, to paint in true colors on the smallest scale the country that I love.

The West as it is to be,—the West as it will be when we have all done our best for its prosperity,—ah, that I must leave for you to imagine and create.

THE OLD TIMES