This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER SEVEN A FINISH FIGHT FOR A BIRTHRIGHT TO behold the inroads of autumn upon the foliage of a noble forest; to watch a rose fade and see its withered petals fall to earth; to see a beast in its death throes; to witness the last agony of a fellow-mortal, even though he be a stranger and nothing to you in the world--any of these is a sufficiently saddening incident to a man of average susceptibility. Happily enough, therefore, it has come to few men to witness the final dissolution of a people, even though that people be a savage tribe every page of whose history is dark with deeds of barbarism. Such, however, has been my lot, and the scenes, incidents, and characters of the dread spectacle are as fresh on my mind to-day as if they were of yesterday. In the autumn of '77 I bought my first herd of cattle at Cooper Lake on Laramie Plains, west of the main range of the Rockies. The country lying between the Union Pacific Railway and the Platte was then fairly well stocked and the best ranges occupied. But, up to that time, the North Platte River had stood the dead line between the Sioux and the ranchmen, a dead line never crossed by ranchmen, except in occasional trailing parties in pursuit (and usually a hopeless pursuit) of stolen horses taken by the raiding Sioux. All of the two thirds of Wyoming lying to the north of the North Platte River, all of the two thirds of Montana lying to the east of a line drawn through Bozeman and Fort Benton, all of the two Dakotas west of Fort Pierre and Yankton, and all of the northwest quarter of the State of Nebraska--a vast area of roughly three hundred thousand square miles, greater in extent than all of New England with the States of New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West...