Las Vegas Age

Frontier Days
By JACK MITCHELL
(Written Especially for the Boulder Dam Rodeo Association, April 5, 1929)

When night, for its brief space, becomes the conqueror of day
And the vanquished sun retreats unto the West,

In those modern temples built of steel and genius-treated clay
Take forms that Time dismembered with his test.

Where yonder man-made monuments give challenge to the years,
Once stood a brave unconquered palisade:
And sentries paced anon where now a road of steel appears,
And saluted some bedusted cavalcade.

Adown the rocky slope that crowns that purple, sleeping hill
A thousand braves, grim-visaged, came to slay,
And sturdy hearts and steady hands with arms made shrewd to kill
Beat back red hordes and made their Westward way.

My eyes look through the filmy web wove by the loom of Time,
And there upon the Desert's fevered sands,
Encircled tongue to end-gate, sides besmeared with Travel's grime,
An argosy of prairie schooners stands.

Their wealth not golden treasure wrested from the sullen earth.
But tools to build an empire in the West;
And babes to breed a mighty race that proves its kingly worth,
And men whose spirit yielded not the quest-

Gone the sentry who saluted that bedusted cavalcade,
And gone the painted savage to his God.
Gone the brave, careening schooner, and the sturdy palisade
Whose guardians lie nameless 'neath the sod.

Their deeds perhaps imprisoned on some musty record's page;
Their fears and hopes lie silent with their dust,
But as they blazed the trail for us they left a heritage,
And in our hands they placed a sacred trust.

Envoy

In mem'ry, then, of they who bled and died along the way,
These children of the old West carry on:
They point again to Yesterday, and, living in Today
They paint the West as West was in the dawn.