It Was a Land of Vast Silent Spaces

Theodore Roosevelt wrote nostalgically in his autobiography of life in the Dakota Territory where he ran his cattle ranches.  Although Roosevelt, writing this in 1913, after his Presidency and entering the twilight years of his life, may have been longing for the good ol' days of his youth, a surprising degree of what he wrote then still rings true today.

"It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Remington's drawings, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher.  That land of the West has gone now, 'gone, gone with lost Atlantis,' gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories.  It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman.  It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death.  In that land we led a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle.  We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up.  In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burnt our faces.  There were monotonous days, as we guided the trail cattle or the beef herds, hour after hour, at the slowest of walks; and minutes or hours teeming with excitement as we stopped stampedes or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or brimmed with running ice.  We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living."