Show I ALEXANDER MAJORS 1 Tho announcement of the death of Alexander Majors Is a reminder that I the frontier hag passed away There I was no longer any place for the old man The savage had retired to rcscr vatlons the gray wolf had gone to the I deeper fastnesses of the sullen hills the buffalo had disappeared He had received re-ceived more than one notice that the world had passed hjm by and still hi remained a good many years living by day on tho memories that filled his brain and at night dreaming of a post J I which now seems ancient history to all the present generation of Americans There are still left In the West a I good many old prospectors old chaps that can glvo tho date of the birth of I every mining camp from Gold Bluff to Cripple Creek can tell their part In II I each and recall all the stirring scenes I which made up the life and death of so I many districts But the pathfinders are few Alexander Majors was one of the last His dream was not to find across some Impossible divide a height wherein slumbered a fortune His was a practical mind He was the transportation trans-portation John the Baptist crying In the wilderness the coming of the greater than the oxteam the swifter than the Pony Express He was In person the forerunner of the locomotive his thought was to make swifter nnd more effective communication across that region re-gion of his country which lacked people peo-ple and enterprise that mighty waste I which was given up to savage beasts and still more savage men He had the same thought that Benton and Gllpln I had only he sought to put It In practical prac-tical form Fremont made a worldwide world-wide fame by crossing the continent but only a few knew that Majors pushed his ox teams over the same trail Ho was emphatically a frontier man and while he has borne his part manfully since the locomotive made his old occupation profitless there was always about him a look as though he was not quite reconciled to the change which had come since he exhausted the energies of his youth In taking away from the thoughts of men the sense of the awful distance that separated sepa-rated the settlements on the west of the continent from those on the East For quite thirty years he followed that Idea and when thirty years ago the locomotives rubbed noses at Promontory Promon-tory announcing that the hills had been cloven the valleys exalted and a smooth path Irontracked had been made from sea to sea while he knew that the old things had passed away he still lingered and watched Until he saw his country the foremost among the nations and knew that there were no more new trails to bo blamed within her old boundaries He was here last year and said he was never in better health We hope that the machinery of his body ran down without pain and that it stopped merely as the clock does because the spring of life within had quite relaxed and there was no power to rewind It We hope that some time some brain that is filled with the knowledge of what the old West was and of the part which Alexander Majors played In its redemption will write the story of his life and do It so well that ft will give him an enduring place In the literature of the country as a type of that great old race which biased tho trails in the West and took from the wilderness that sense of vastness vast-ness and loneliness from which men In thought recoiled so long A brave strong farsighted true and great man was Alex Majors |