Topic 50 
HITTING THE BACK TRAIL

I HAVE no desire to return to the scenes of my ranching days.  It's all changed — and I don't want to see it."

I had asked the Colonel if he ever longed to retrace his steps through the ranch country he had known as a young man.

"It is a mistake, I think, for one to hit the back trail after many years have passed.  One finds things changed, the old picture is destroyed, the romance gone.  I was back in the old country once.  I saw only a little of it, but that was enough.  Why there was a store down where we had the clash with the Indians!
"The place is all settled now.  The folks there are largely of foreign stock, good people and good citizens, who lead most matter-of-fact lives.  It is best that it should be so, but I don't wish to see the place again.  I’d rather try and remember it as it was.

" Change, of course, is the rule of all new countries.  I imagine that thirty or forty years from now the jungle I hunted over in Africa may be quite settled and as safe as Upper Harlem.  This will not be true of the Amazon.  A great many years must elapse before that country is little more than a poorly charted wilderness.  It is not attractive to the white man."Africa, on the other hand, is.  For that reason, it will be comparatively developed when the Amazon country is still raw.

"I shall revisit neither place.  I have done my bit.  Those who come after me must do theirs.  Anyway, I've no desire to hit the back trail.  As a rule, it's not profitable."