CHAPTER III

      THE RANCH IN THE NORTH

       Table of Contents

      It was in the North that there was first established what one would think an obvious principle, though it was one which the Texas rancher was slow to recognise — namely, that a fatted animal is worth more in the market than a lean one. On the range of the Southwest a cow was a cow, a "beef "—any animal over four years of age —was a beef, no matter what the individual differences. Far into the days of the cattle trade all Texas cattle were sold by the head and not by weight. The Northern rancher was the one to end this practice. He did not drive to market the sweepings of his range. Moreover, he saw that the beef-producing qualities of the old long-horned Texas breed could be much improved by the admixture of more approved blood. The cattle of England met the cattle of Spain, to the ultimate overcoming of the Southern type. In less than five years after the first Texas cattle came upon the territorial ranges, the latter were sending better cattle to Texas, over the very trail that had brought the first stock from the lower range. To-day the centre of the beef cattle trade is on the Northern range, and it is some portion of that range which the average Northern man has in mind when he speaks of the "cattle country."

      Yet it is a vast country, this Northern cattle range. The edge of the Dakota grass lands would make a little state. The basin of the Big Horn alone is as large as any two New England States. There are mountain parks in Colorado which would hold a principality, and the plains of Wyoming are wider than are many European kingdoms. The ranch in the North may be a dugout, well to the east in cold Dakota, where some hardy soul has determined to try the experiment of bringing at least a portion of his cattle through the bitter winter. It may be a cabin in the wild region of the Bad Lands, that Titanic playground of creative evil spirits, where the red scoria buttes and banks, peak after peak, and minaret and tower and high cathedral, all in parti-coloured clays, are burned out of the earth to endure and mock the dreams of man the architect. The ranch may be a hut in some high mountain valley, where the bold summits of the white-topped mountains sweep about in the wild beauty of the Snowy Range. Again, it may be a sod house, built on some wide bleak plain, where the wind never is still, and where the white alkali cuts and sears the unseasoned skin. It is somewhere upon that vast, high, hard, and untilled table-land which runs from the Gulf coast to the British possessions, upon the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains.

      This is a land of little rain and of infrequent water courses, but a land where cattle can live the year through without the aid of man, summer and winter, upon the short gray grass which grows in abundance all over the former range of the buffalo. This upper portion of the great plateau is dry enough to be classified as belonging to the arid lands, but is nevertheless watered much better than the southern range. The streams are larger and more frequent, and are not so apt to go entirely dry in the droughty season of summer. The snows are heavier in winter, and the rainfall of the spring months is relatively more abundant, so that the grasses are much better nourished and are not burned out so cruelly as in the South. Under such conditions the cattle of the plains were found to grow far more bulky than in the Southern country. Moreover, the upper part of what is now the northern range was still open and unsettled at a time when a great body of population was pressing up to the edge of these plains, looking for new country and new grazing grounds, and only waiting for the Army to clear away the hostile Indians sufficiently to make the region safe for occupancy. Indeed, long before the Indians had been removed, and before the range was anything better than a dangerous Indian hunting ground, the adventurous ranchmen had been all over it, and were living there, scattered about here and there, and already engaged in the early and cruder stages of their calling. After the years of 1868 and 1869 the Northern country was occupied, as if by magic, by the herds of the enterprising ranchers who saw the rapid wealth that was to be accumulated under the conditions of the trade in a new and favourable region. Cattle bought at a few dollars per head, delivered on the range free of freight charge, raised "on air," and free air at that, attended by a few men to many hundred head of cattle, and sold in a few years at prices four or five times the first cost per head—surely it was no wonder that at once an enormous industry sprang up, one that attracted the interest of conservative capital in this country, and invited floods of capital not so wise from other lands. Enthusiastic at the prospect of early wealth, and enamoured of the manly and independent life that offered, very many young men of the Eastern States, some with money and financial resources, some with only hope and a branding iron, plunged into the cattle business of the upper ranges. Many of these made money, and all of them brought energy and a certain amount of new intelligence to their chosen calling. The Southern rancher perhaps grew up in the trade, knowing no other, whereas sometimes the Northern rancher was a new man, who learned the business later in life. None the less the cattle industry received a tremendous impetus in a very brief time, old men and new studying the requirements of the new countries opened, and uniting in perfecting the operations of the range in every possible respect of system and detail.

      Already there was upon the range an instructor, a guide, and a practical leader, waiting to take charge of every phase of the cattle business. The cowpuncher appeared upon the Northern plains as rapidly and mysteriously as the thousands of cattle. It were bootless to ask whence he came. From the earlier Southern regions originally, no doubt, but not in all his numbers. He drifted in upon these upper ranges from every corner of the globe. There was always upon the "Western frontier a press of hardy young men, born and inured to the rude conditions of the life beyond the line of the towns, and the natural fitness and natural longings of these led them readily into the free outdoor life of this peculiar calling. Some would-be ranch owners, failing in their undertakings, settled back into the occupation of the cowboy. Wild and hardy young men from other countries came in, attracted by the loadstone of freedom and adventure, ever potent upon hot-headed youth.

      The range riders had odd timber among them, men rude and unlettered, and men of culture and ability. Quite a noticeable feature of the new cattle country was the influx of young men of good family who became infatuated with the cowboy's life and followed it for a time, perhaps never to forsake the plains again. In the late '70's and early '80's one might often see strange company in the great cattle yards at Kansas City, where the train loads of Western cattle came in charge of the men who had had them in care upon the range. Among groups of these men, often rough looking and roughly clad, and sitting sometimes on the ground in the shade of the cattle cars, one might perhaps hear in progress a conversation which he would rather have expected to hear in an Eastern drawing room. It was no unusual thing to see men clad in regulation cowpuncher garb reading a copy of the latest monthly magazine or a volume of the classics. This may have been reversion to early habit, and such men may or may not have remained in the calling.

      Certainly the man aspiring to the title of cowboy needed to have stern stuff in him. He must be equal to the level of the rude conditions of the life, or he was soon forced out of the society of the craft. In one way or another the ranks of the cowpunchers were filled. Yet the type remained singularly fixed. The young man from Iowa or New York or Virginia who went on the range to learn the business, taught the hardy men who made his predecessors there very little of the ways of Iowa or New York or Virginia. It was he who experienced