"The Forgotten Land" by Henry Herbert Knibbs (from The Popular Magazine, February 7, 1917; never reprinted to my knowledge)
We can't recall that we have ever published a story like this in the Popular. It is a staggering thing -- the kind of yarn you'll talk about to your friends. You know the type of story Knibbs writes -- Western, with a good deal of sympathy for man and his four-footed companion. There is the Westerner here, but he is placed in a setting so far removed from anything that Knibbs has ever given us that it took out breath away. Knibbs is a poet as well as a novelist; and as we read, we had a vision of 'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling.' It is prophetic, but we have known prophets who have guessed wrong, and we fancy Knibbs is wrong -- at any rate we hope so.
-- editor's introduction to "The Forgotten Land"; in that issue's Table of Contents, the story is called strange and unusual, "quite the strangest so far."
Knibbs (1874-1945) never worked as a cowboy (he suffered from a lifelong respiratory ailment) but he was a popular author of western short stories, but he was a popular author of western short stories, novels, and poems. The FictionMags Index lists over 140 of his stories, novels, and serials published over a 28-year period, as well as over 160 published poems. He published thirteen novels and six collections of poetry; his tales were adapted for seven films. He stopped writing, embarrassed, because in one of his Saturday Evening Post he had a horse with a gestation period of nine months; a horse has a gestation period of eleven months -- something he knew full well -- and not only was he ridiculed by his peers, he was never able to sell another story.
Long before science fiction ever gelled as its own genre, tales of the fantastic were often published in popular magazines as "strange" stories, a practice that continued until the middle or late 1920s. Such stories carried their own cachet and were eagerly devoured by some readers.
America has been invaded, and conquered. As far as he knew, Jack Hanley, the lone watcher of the Grey Grouse power station, might be the only American left. The enemy had just taken the station at the bottom of the mountain, although the crew out up a good fight. The sound of war birds filled the air. Hanley had four freight cars of supplies the had been abandoned earlier at his station. He was able to destroy them by plunging them off a 4000-foot cliff. Then he saddled his horse, Candy, and took off into the wilderness, heading toward Canada, dynamiting his trail behind him. He had only a few supplies and the American flag he had taken from the power station with him -- he was not going to gift his country's flag to the enemy. Now he had to find a way to survive with little supplies and even less ammunition. After nearly being killed when he was spotted by a war bird, Hanley found a cave where he and Candy could shelter for the winter. He improvised traps for game and was severely wounded by a bear who had forced his to use almost all of his ammunition. Both he and his horse were weak and hungry.
He had not seen evidence of another person the entire winter, but now, with springtime here, he found moccasin tracks. They led to a mountain lake with a thin wisp of smoke rising above it. A girl was being beaten by a huge Indian. Hanley had a few bullets left and fired at the Indian, Mooswa, killing him. The girl, whose name was Bess, had been given to the Indian for protection by her father because Mooswa had promised to hide her in the deep woods away from the invaders and the plague that they had brought with them. Yea, there was a plague and it wiped out the invaders and any remaining Americans.
Hanley, ever the gentleman and possibly the last American male alive, treated Bess with respect. He decided that his place, as an American, was back in America where white folks came from, rather than in the woods of Canada populated by Indians. (Casual racism was big in 1917 -- did I mention that the invaders were "yellow men"?) He gave Bess the choice of going back to America with him. He was her protector so she felt that he was basically her "husband," so she agreed to go with him. (Casual sexism was also big in 1917.)
Fifty years later some Northern Indians came across a falling apart ranch house. There on the cot was the body of an old man who had placed an American flag over his legs before he died. He could have been the last of the vanished white men. Outside the house was a grass-covered grave in the shade of a wall. The Indians knew this had to be the final resting place of a woman.
Here's the link to the February 7, 1917 issue of Popular Magazine, which also contains stories by well-known authors of the time Francis Lynde, Holman Day, Bertrand W. Sinclair, and William S. McNutt, as well as serials by B. M. Bower, Henry C. Rowland, and Roman Doubleday:
https://archive.org/details/the-popular-magazine-v-043-n-04-1917-02-07/mode/1up
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