Dickinson State University - Prairie Smoke Yearbook (Dickinson, ND)

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75 VEARS OF CHANGE Seventy-five years ago only grama grass, grey sage, and buckbrush met the dust- filled eyes of the trailer as he rode onto the slope behind the bellowing and tired herds of longhorns. Only five years before, the brave Sioux had counted their last coup at the Bighorn, but they too had vanished. Even the lordly beast of the plains, the bison, was in his dying hour, waiting but to leave his bleached bones to leach into the gumbos and the scorias. Only a thin ribbon of newly-laid steel, unrusted from the dews of that summer or the frosts of that winter broke the virgin landscape stretching horizon to horizon, untouched, untamed, .unmanned, unknown. Even then the country was changing. Changing! Changing! A short span of time is 75 years. The mere span of one man's life. Now we must relegate those memorable days and the staunch and stalwart men of that time to memory. These times are only a theme, but it will be a theme that springs into a hearty, surging life and not one that dies slowly and terrifyingly, like the last roll of the last Northern bison herd. The spirit will live on, making, changing, creating, succeeding, even fail- ing only to resucceed. The spirit that coursed in the veins of the gone Sioux warriors and the hardy trail riders (unaccepted as they both were) will reign as long as the word West itself continues to live. Without this spirit possessed by our forebears, this country would have remained as it was: untouched, untamed, unmanned, unloved. We of the Prairie Smoke Staff therefore select The Men of '81 as our theme in tribute to those without whose lives Signal Butte might have remained only a lair for badgers and rattlesnakes. We also do it as a tribute to all those who have followed the pioneers and who have yet to follow them in making this western spirit of determination and this common western heritage not only a memory but a way of life. —9—