When the West Was Young

by Frederick R. Bechdolt

That Individual was usually taken most acutely with his ailment on a warm May morning, one of those mornings when the lawless youths of the village decided to play hooky in the afternoon and test the temperature of the swimming-hole. On such a morning he was to be found somewhere near the center of the school-room, this being the point most remote from the distraction of open windows and hence selected for him by the teacher. He was seated at a small desk whose top was deeply scored by carven initials and monograms of rude design, all inked in to give them the boldness of touch necessary when one would have his art impress the beholder. An open book lay on that desk-top but the eyes of the Individual were not focused on its pages.

He was gazing––aslant so that the teacher would not detect him at it––through one of those remote open windows. And he was not seeing the roofs of the little town or the alluring line of low wooded bluffs across the river. He was seeing swarms of Indians mounted bare-back on swift ponies.

Swarms and swarms of them, stripped to the waist, befeathered, trousered in tightly fitting buckskin, they were defying all the laws of gravitation by the manner in which every one clung by a single heel to his mustang, allowing his body to droop alongside in a negligently graceful attitude. These savages were circling round 250 and round a stage-coach. And on the top of that stage-coach, with his trusty rifle at his shoulder––while the driver beside him died a painful death,––sat the Individual himself. None other. And he was certainly playing havoc with those redskins.

We need not undergo the weary ordeal of waiting with him while the clock’s slothful hands creep around the dial. We may skip the interval––as he would do ever so gladly if he only could––and see him that night as he climbs from his bedroom window, crawls down the woodshed roof, and drops from the low eaves to make his way across the vacant lot next door and thence––out West.

As far perhaps as the next town, which lies seven miles or so away; where he is overhauled and ignominiously dragged back to civilization.

That Individual––the only one of them all who did not attain the consummation of his hopes, the only one who had to stay at home––is the sole member of the foregoing list who acknowledged his true motives. For he asserted loudly, and with lamentations, that the spirit of adventure was blazing within him; he wanted to go out West to fight Indians and desperadoes.

Resisting the temptation to indulge in dissertation concerning the beneficial effects of the dime-novel on the morale of successive younger generations, we return to the men who said that they went beyond the Mississippi to gain money. Like the schoolboy they were hot with the lust for adventure. The men of action wanted to risk their lives, and the men of wealth wanted to risk their dollars.

Which does not imply that the latter element were 251 anxious to lose those dollars any more than it implies that the former expected to lose their lives. But both were eager for the hazard.

Like the schoolboy all of them dreamed dreams and saw visions. And the dreams were realized; the visions became actualities. Few of them justified their excuse of money-making; many came out of the adventure poorer in this world’s goods than when they went into it. But every man of them had the time of his life and lived out his days with a wealth of memories more precious than gold; memories of a man’s part in a great rough drama.

The Winning of the West, that drama has been called. Perhaps no act in the play attained the heights which were reached by the last one before the coming of the railroad, the one with which this story has to deal, wherein bold men allied themselves on different sides to get the contract of carrying the mails by stage-coaches on schedule time across the wilderness.