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,