It was
a bit of the early world, as yet beyond the limit of the young nation's
energies, the earth as man knew it when his eye was focused for far
horizons, when his soul did not shrink before vast solitudes.
Against this sweeping background the Indian loomed, ruler of a kingdom
whose borders faded into the sky. He stood, a blanketed figure,
watching the flight of birds across the blue; he rode, a painted
savage, where the cloud shadows blotted the plain, and the smoke of his
lodge rose over the curve of the earth. Here tribe had fought with
tribe, old scores had been wiped out till the grass was damp with
blood, wars of extermination had raged. Here the migrating villages
made a moving streak of color like a bright patch on a map where there
were no boundaries, no mountains, and but one gleaming thread of water.
In the quietness of evening the pointed tops of the tepees showed dark
against the sky, the blur of smoke tarnishing the glow in the West.
When the darkness came the stars shone on this spot of life in the
wilderness, circled with the howling of wolves.
The buffalo, driven from the East by the white man's advance and from
the West by the red man's pursuit, had congregated in these pasture
lands.
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