The History of the Old American West – 4 Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Emerson Hough
those of the coast range. A cow of the hot and low country might not weigh more than five or six hundred pounds, whereas if driven north and allowed to range on the sun-cured short grasses, the buffalo grass, the gramma grass or the mesquite grass, the weight might increase fairly by one third. It was the simplest thing in the world to gain this increased value by driving the cattle from the lower to the upper ranges of the great State — always subject to the consent or to the enterprise of the savage tribes which then occupied that region.
This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry. The Long Trail thus received a gradual but unmistakable extension, always to the north, and along the line of the intermingling of the products of the Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations. Sometimes these fatter cattle were driven back and sold in Old Mexico, but there was no real market there. The thrust was always to the north. Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen in the Northern States. As early as 1857 Texas cattle were driven to Illinois. In 1861 Louisiana was tried as an outlet without success. In 1867 a venturous drover took a herd across the Indian Nations, bound for California, and only abandoned the project because the plains Indians were then very bad in the country to the north. In 1869 several herds were driven from Texas to Nevada. These were side trails of the main cattle road. It seemed clear that a great population in the North needed the cheap beef of Texas, and the main question appeared to be one of transportation. No proper means for this offered. At Rockport and one or two other harborless towns on the Texas coast it was sought to establish canneries for the product of the range, but all these projects failed. A rapacious steamship line undertook to build up a carrying trade between Texas and New Orleans or Mobile, but this also failed. The civil war stopped almost all plans to market the range cattle, and the close of that war found the vast grazing lands of Texas covered fairly with millions of cattle which had no actual or determinate value. They were sorted and branded and herded after a fashion, but neither they nor their increase could be converted into anything but more cattle. The cry for a market became imperative.
Meantime the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the upper West. The Indians were being driven from the plains. A solid army was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout, and plainsman. The railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. They carried the market with them. The market halted, much nearer, though still some hundreds of miles to the north of the great herd. The Long Trail tapped no more at the door of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, but leaped north again definitely, this time springing across the Red River and up to the railroads, along sharp and well-defined channels deepened in the year of 1866 alone by the hoofs of more than a quarter of a million cattle. In 1871, only five years later, over six hundred thousand cattle crossed the Red River for the Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend, "Dodge" flared out into a swift and sometime evil blossoming. The coming of the markets did not make more fortunes than it lost for the Southern cattle owners, for the advent of the long-horned herds was bitterly contested in many sections of the North, but in spite of all a new industry was swiftly and surely established. Thus the men of the North first came to hear of the Long Trail and the men who made it, though really it had begun long ago and had been foreordained to grow.
By this time,1867 and 1868,the northern portions of the region immediately to the east of the Rocky Mountains had been sufficiently cleared of their wild inhabitants to admit a gradual though precarious settlement. It had been learned yet again that the buffalo grass and the sweet waters of the far North would fatten a range broadhorn to a stature far beyond any it could attain on the southern range. The Long Trail pushed rapidly still further to the north, where there still remained "free grass" and a new market. The territorial ranges needed many thousands of cattle for their stocking, and this demand took a large part of the Texas drive which came to Abilene, Great Bend, and Fort Dodge. Moreover, the Government was now feeding thousands of its new red wards, and these Indians needed thousands of beeves for rations, which were driven from the southern range to the upper army posts and reservations. Between this Government demand and that of the territorial stock ranges there was occupation for the men who made the saddle their home. The Long Trail, which long ago had found the black corn lands of Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and mesa and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming. Cheyenne and Laranaie became common words now, and drovers spoke as wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had mentioned those of the Bed Kiver or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had found the last of the five great transcontinental lines, far in the British provinces, where in spite of a long season of ice and snow the uttermost edges of the great herd might survive, in a certain per cent at least, each year in an almost unassisted struggle for existence, under conditions different enough, it would seem, from those obtaining at the opposite extreme of the wild road way over which they came. The Long Trail of the cattle range was done. By magic the cattle industry had spread over the entire West. To-day many men think of that industry as belonging only to the Southwest, and many would consider that it was transferred to the North. Really it was not transferred but extended, and the trail of the old drive marks the line of that extension. To-day the Long Trail is replaced by other trails, product of the swift development of the West, and it remains as the connection, now for the most part historical only, between two phases of an industry which, in spite of differences of climate and condition, retain a similarity in all essential features. When the last steer of the first herd was driven into the corral at the Ultima Thule of the range, it was the pony of the American cowboy which squatted and wheeled under the spur and burst down the straggling street of the little frontier town. Before that time, and since that time, it was and has been the same pony, the same man, who have travelled the range, guarding and guiding the wild herds, from the romantic up to the commonplace days of the West. The American cowboy and the American cattle industry have been and are one and inseparable. The story of one is the story of the other.
CHAPTER II
THE RANCH IN THE SOUTH
Description of the Western cattle industry, whether in regard to its features, its characters, or its environments, must be largely a matter of generalization. The cattle country itself covers a third of the entire territory of the United States. We have sought roughly to divide it into the two sections of the North and South, but it would trouble one to say where even a broad and indefinite line should be drawn which should act as a fair boundary between the two. Should we place that boundary, loosely speaking, somewhere at the central or southern line of the State of Kansas, we shall have established a demarcation at best arbitrary and in many ways inconclusive and inaccurate. Even if we presume that this indefinite line be sufficiently accurate, we shall have left, for our Southern ranch region, a domain many times larger than the entire territory of Great Britain, with a few of her choice provinces thrown into the bargain.
Over so large a region there must prevail some divergence of people and things; and in turn we must remember that all these people and things, more especially as they pertain to the story of the cattle man, have in late years been subject to much change. It would be very natural for any one who had but a partial acquaintance, or one limited to a few sections of so large a region, to consider as incorrect any specialized description which did not tally with his own observation in his own locality. Still more inaccurate might such an observer consider a description which covered accurately twenty years ago a section which he first sees to-day, in the last quarter of the century. For instance, a citizen of the type our friend the cowpuncher is wont to term a "pilgrim," might go to-day to some railroad point in the vast State of Texas, expecting to find there in full swing the rude ways of the past. He might expect to see the ranchman an uncouth personage, clad in the border garb once pictured in lurid literature or still more lurid drama, his speech full of strange oaths, his home a dugout or a shanty. Much surprised might this stranger be to discover his ranchman a comfortable individual, of well-cut business dress, guiltless of obvious weaponry, and plain and simple in speech. Still more surprised he might be to learn that this ranchman does not live upon his ranch at all, but in the town or city, perhaps many miles therefrom. The ranchman may have an office in the bank, and may be chief stockholder in that