Indian Racing Reminiscences

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION WHEN I walked through the Omaha Exposition grounds one hot day in September of 1898, on my way to the encampment of the Indian Congress, I found it difficult to realize that only fifty years before, the ground where Omaha now stands had been a camping place for Indians and that only twenty- five years ago, Nebraska, one hundred and fifty miles west of Omaha, had been a country dangerous to pass through, because the home and hunting ground of hostile tribes. All this has been forgotten now except by those who took part in the old life of those times and it was well that by such a gathering as this Indian Congress the past should be recalled and the former wild inhabitants of this fer- tile Western State should be seen by the newcomers who have succeeded them. To one who reflected upon the contrasts here af- forded by the conjunction of the two races, the pres- ence of the red man was full of suggestion. In its display of science and art, of invention, machinery and product, the Exposition stood for the bounding present it marked the swelling tide of the progress of an expanding people it exemplified the attainments of centuries of development.