.

The Cowboy.
The Great West, vast and rude, brought forth men also vast and rude.

We pass today over parts of that matchless region, and we see the red hills and ragged mountain-fronts cut and crushed into huge indefinite shapes, to which even a small imagination may give a human or more than human form.

It would almost seem that the same great hand which chiseled out these monumental forms had also laid its fingers upon the people of this region and fashioned them rude and ironlike, in harmony with the stern faces set about them.
Of all the babes of that primeval mother, the West, the cowboy was perhaps her dearest because he was her last.

Some of her children lived for centuries; this one for not a triple decade before he began to be old.