Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Wild Life on the Plains and Horrors of Indian Warfare: With a Graphic Account of His Last Fight on the Little Big Horn, as Told by His Wily Foe Sitting Bull; Also Sketches and Anecdotes of the Most Renowned Guides, Scouts and Plainsmen of the West; General Crook and the Apaches
It is but a few years ago that every schoolboy, supposed to possess the rudi ments of a knowledge of the geography of the United States, could give the boundaries and a general description of the Great American Desert. Asto the boundary the knowledge seemed to be quite explicit: on the north bounded by the Upper Missouri, on the east by the Lower Missouri and Mississippi, on the south by Texas, and on the west by the Rocky Mountains. The boundaries on the northwest and south remained undisturbed, while on the east civiliza' tion, propelled and directed by Yankee enterprise, adopted the motto, West ward the star of empire takes its way. Countless throngs of emigrants crossed the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, selecting homes in the rich and fertile territories lying beyond. Each year this tide of emigration, strength ened and increased by the ?ow from foreign shores, advanced toward the set ting sun, slowly but surely narrowing the preconceived limits of the Great American Desert, and correspondingly enlarging the limits of civilization. At last the geographical myth was dispelled. It was gradually discerned that the Great American Desert did not exist, that it had no abiding place, but that within its supposed limits, and instead of what had been regarded as a sterile and unfruitful tract of land, incapable of sustaining either man or beast, there existed the fairest and richest portion of the national domain, blessed with a climate pure, bracing, and healthful, while its undeveloped soil rivalled if it did not surpass the most productive portions of the Eastern, Middle, or Southern States.
Discarding the name Great American Desert, this immense tract of coun try, with its eastern boundary moved back by civilization to a distance of nearly three hundred miles west of the Missouri river, is now known as The Plains, and by this more appropriate title it shall be called when reference to it is necessary. The Indian tribes which have caused the Government most anxiety and whose depredations have been most serious against our frontier settle ments and prominent lines of travel across the Plains, infest that portion of the Plains bounded on the north by the valley of the Platte river and its tributa ries, on the east by a line running north and south between the 97th and 98th meridians, on the south by the valley of the Arkansas river, and west by the Rocky Mountains - although by treaty stipulations almost every tribe with which the Government has recently been at war is particularly debarred from entering or occupying any portion of this tract of country.
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