once barren land, a vast region unsettled and without law, there
now came pouring up the great herds of cattle from the South, in charge
of men wild as the horned kine they drove. Here was another great wild
land that drew, as a magnet, wild men from all parts of the country.

This last home of the bad man, the old cattle range, is covered by a
passage from an earlier work:[B]

"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 ridge 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, 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.

"This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry. The
Long Trail now 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. The
thrust was always to the north. Chips and flakes of the great
Southwestern herd began to be seen in the no