rd 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 today 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 Red River of the South, a stream even today 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.... 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 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. It was the beginning of a
feudalism of the range, a barony 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. This was really the dawning of the American
cattle ind