The natural features of the country combine the beauties
of prairie and of mountain scenery. There are valleys so wide that the
farther side melts into the horizon, and uplands so vast as to suggest
the unbroken prairie. Nearer the mountains the valleys dip deep and ever
deeper till they narrow into canyons through which mountain torrents
pour their blue-gray waters from glaciers that lie glistening between
the white peaks far away. Here are the great ranges on which feed herds
of cattle and horses. Here are the homes of the ranchmen, in whose wild,
free, lonely existence there mingles much of the tragedy and comedy, the
humor and pathos, that go to make up the romance of life. Among them are
to be found the most enterprising, the most daring, of the peoples of
the old lands. The broken, the outcast, the disappointed, these too
have found their way to the ranches among the Foothills. A country it is
whose sunlit hills and shaded valleys reflect themselves in the lives
of its people; for nowhere are the contrasts of light and shade more
vividly seen than in the homes of the ranchmen of the Albertas.
The experiences of my life have confirmed in me the orthodox conviction
that Providence sends his rain upon the evil as upon the good; else I
should never have set my eyes upon the Foothill country, nor touched its
strangely fascinating life, nor come to know and love the most striking
man of all that group of striking men of the Foothill country--the dear
old Pilot, as we came to call him long afterwards.
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