more than
adventurers. No one seems to have taken a lesson from the Indian and the
buffalo. The reports of Fremont long since had called attention to the
nourishing quality of those grasses of the high country, but the day of
the cowboy had not yet dawned. There is a somewhat feeble story which
runs to the effect that in 1866 one of the great wagon-trains, caught by
the early snows of winter, was obliged to abandon its oxen on the range.
It was supposed that, of course, the oxen must perish during the winter.
But next spring the owners were surprised to find that the oxen, so far
from perishing, had flourished very much--indeed, were fat and in good
condition. So runs the story which is often repeated. It may be true,
but to accredit to this incident the beginnings of the cattle industry
in the Indian country would surely be going too far. The truth is that
the cow industry was not a Saxon discovery. It was a Latin enterprise,
flourishing in Mexico long before the first of these miners and
adventurers came on the range.

Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the
explorations of Pike, but more through the commerce of the prairies--the
old wagon trade from the Missouri River to the Spanish cities of Sante
Fe and Chihuahua. Now the cow business, south of the Rio Grande,
was already well differentiated and developed at the time the first
adventurers from the United States went into Texas and began to crowd
their Latin neighbors for more room. There it was that our Saxon
frontiersmen first discovered the cattle industry. But these
southern and northern riflemen--ruthless and savage, yet strangely
statesmanlike--though they might betimes drive away the owners of the
herds, troubled little about the herds themselves. There was a certain
fascination to these rude strangers in the slow and easeful civilization
of Old Spain which they encountered in the land below them. Little
by little, and then largely and yet more largely, the warriors of San
Jacinto reached out and began to claim lands for themselves--leagues
and uncounted leagues of land, which had, however, no market value. Well
within the memory of the present generation large tracts of good land
were bought in Texas for six cents an acre; some was bought for half
that price in a time not much earlier. Today much of that land is
producing wealth; but land then was worthless--and so were cows.

This civilization of the Southwest, of the new Republi