CHAPTER I

      THE LONG TRAIL

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      It lies like a long rope thrown idly on the ground, abandoned by the hand that used it. Its strands are unbraided and have fallen apart, lying loose and forgotten upon the sandy soil. The wind is blowing dust across these disconnected threads, and the grasses are seeking to cover them, and the waters have in places washed them quite away. The frayed ends are disappearing. Soon the entire cord will have disappeared. The Long Trail of the cattle range will then be but a memory.

      The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two thousand miles along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away across the hard table-lands or the well-flowered prairies. It traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, even Illinois; and as far north as the British possessions. Even to-day you may trace plainly its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle range. It is distinct across Texas, and multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many intermingling paths still scar the iron surface of the Neutral Strip, and the plows have not buried all the old furrows in the plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain visible in the mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons banding the hillsides to-day along the valley of the Stillwater, and along the Yellowstone and toward the source of the Missouri. The hoof marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the coulees and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the long cold you may see, even to-day if you like, the shadow of that unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle range. History has no other like it.

      The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a day. Over the Eed River of the South, a stream even to-day perhaps known but vaguely in the minds of many inhabitants of the country, there appeared, almost without warning, vast processions of strange horned kine — processions of enormous wealth, owned by kings who paid no tribute, and guarded by men who never knew a master. Whither these were bound, what had conjured them forth, whence they came, were questions in the minds of the majority of the population of the North and East to whom the phenomenon appeared as the product of a day. The answer to these questions lay deep in the laws of civilization, and extended far back into that civilization's history. The Long Trail was finished in a day. It was begun more than a century before that day, and came forward along the very appointed ways of time.

      Senor Jose Montero, let us say, lived long ago, far down in the sunny land of Mexico. The mountains rose up blue beyond the hacienda, and before it the valleys lay wide and pleasant. Life here was very calm, alike for the haciendado and the barefoot peons who made a servile army about him. There was a little grain, there were a few fruits, and there were herds of cattle. Yes, there were the cattle, and there they had always been, longer than Jose Montero or his father could remember. It might be that they had always been there, though to be sure there was talk of one Cor-tez. The cattle might have come from another land, at another time. Quien sabe? In the splendid savagery of that land and time it made small difference when or whence they came. There they were, these cattle, lean of flank, broad of horn, clean-limbed, muscular, active, fierce, simply wild animals that knew no care save the hand of force. They produced food, and above all they produced hide and leather.

      The sons of Jose Montero moved slowly north in course of years, and edged into the Indian country lying above the Rio Grande. The priests went with them, to teach them the management of los Indios reducidos. The horses and the herds of cattle went slowly north with their owners. Thus, far down in the vague Southwest, at some distant time, in some distant portion of old, mysterious Mexico, there fell into line the hoof prints which made the first faint beginnings of the Long Trail, merely the path of a half-nomadic movement along the line of the least resistance.

      The descendants of Jose Montero's sons spread out over the warm country on both sides of the Rio Grande, and they grew and their herds grew. Many years of peace and quiet passed, broken only by such troubles as were caused by the Indians, with whom the sons of Montero fared for the most part understandingly. But one day, more than three quarters of a century ago, there appeared in that country men of fierce-bearded faces, many of blue eyes, and all of size and courage. There was war, long years of bitter, relentless, unrecorded war, a war of pillage and assassination, of theft and ambush. The fierce strangers from the North would not be driven back. They increased, they became more formidable. At times they even crossed the Rio Grande and drove away herds to their ranches to the north, these being little less than fortresses or barricades, their life one of armed but undaunted solicitude. In turn the sons of Montero made raids and sallies, and killed men and captured women, and drove away herds. The Long Trail began to deepen and extend. It received then, as it did later, a baptism of human blood such as no other pathway of the continent has known.

      The nomadic and the warlike days passed, and there ensued a more quiet and pastoral time. The fierce strangers, perhaps reticent in regard to the methods by which they had obtained what they liked, now held that which they chose to call their own. It was the beginning of a feudalism of the range, a baronry rude enough, but a glorious one, albeit it began, like all feudalism, in large-handed theft and generous murdering. The flocks of these strong men, carelessly interlapping, increased and multiplied amazingly. They were hardly looked upon as wealth. The people could not eat a tithe of the beef, they could not use a hundredth of the leather. Over hundreds and hundreds of miles of ownerless grass lands, by the rapid waters of the mountains, by the slow streams of the plains or the long and dark lagoons of the low coast country, the herds of tens grew into droves of hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands.

      Texas had become a republic and a State before a certain obvious and useful phenomenon in the economics of Nature had been generally recognised. Yet at some time and under some condition of observation it had been discovered that the short gray grass of the northern plains of Texas, which the buffalo loved so well, would rear cattle to a much greater size than