NO "scare-heads" in big city papers,

No "puffs" in Department reports,

No pictures by "special staff artists"

Of assaults on impregnable forts;

We are far from the war-vexed Potomac,

Our fights are too small to make news;

We are merely Dakota militia,

Patrolling the frontier for Sioux.

Three hundred-odd "empire builders,"

Gathered in from three hundred-odd claims,

Far scattered across the wide prairies

From Pierre to the mouth of the James.

Perhaps they seemed little or nothing,

Our losses, our toil, and our pain,

The rush of the war ponies, tearing

Through cornfields and yellowing grain;

The whoop of the hostile at midnight,

The glare of the flaming log shacks,

A beacon of hate and destruction

As we fled, with the foe at our backs;

Our women and young driven, weeping,

Exhausted, half-naked, afraid,

To the refugee huts of Vermillion

Or the sun-smitten Yankton stockade.

Small things to a Nation embattled,

But great to the pioneer band

Who are blazing the roads of the future

Through the wastes of a wilderness land.

We plod past the desolate coulÉes

In the sweltering afternoon heat.

While the far ridges shine in a waving blue line

Where the earth and the brazen sky meet.

No sound save the hoofs of the column

As they swish through the dry prairie grass,

No life anywhere save a hawk, high in air,

Gazing down as we wearily pass.

There is never a foe we may grapple

In the heat of a steel-clashing fray.

For the quarry we hunt is a shadow in front

That flits, and comes never to bay;

A feather of smoke to the zenith,

The print of a hoof in the sod,

A shot from the grass where the far flankers pass

Sending one more poor comrade to God.

Would we rest when the day's work is over

And the stars twinkle out in the sky?

There is double patrol round the lean water-hole

And the picketed horses hard by.

Breast-down in the rain-rutted gully.

With muskets clutched close in our hands,

The hours of night drag their heavy-winged flight

Like Eternity's slow falling sands.

While the Great Dipper, pinned to the Pole Star,

Swings low in the dome of the North

And, faint through the dark, sounds the prairie wolf's bark

Or a snake from the weeds rustles forth.

And the darkness that chokes like a vapor

Is thronged with the visions which come

Of children and wife and the dear things of life

That peopled the lost cabin home.

Till the East flushes red with the morning

And the dawn-wind springs fresh o'er the plain,

And the reveille's note from the bugle's clear throat

Calls us up to our labors again.

We were not in the fight at Antietam,

We never have seen Wilson's Creek,

We were guiding our trains over Iowa's plains

While the shells at Manassas fell thick,

But we're waging a war for a new land

As the East wages war for the old,

That the mountains and plains of the red man's domains

May be brought to Columbia's fold,

And though only a squad of militia

That the armies back East never knew,

We are playing a game which is largely the same

With the truculent, turbulent Sioux.

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