For a number of years I spent most of my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman.

The wild country in which we dwelt and across which we wandered was in the far west; and there were of course many features in which the life of a cattleman on the Great Plains and among the Rockies differed from that led by a backwoodsman in the Alleghany forests a century before.

Yet the points of resemblance were far more numerous and striking.

We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of the Little Missouri and among the wooded, precipitous foot-hills of the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years previously built their log-cabins beside the Kentucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies.

The men who have shared in the fast vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier life of the past.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, _May_, 1889 FOREWORD.
In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright from the western world.